Thursday, August 23, 2007

Quick Things

1. I just saw WendyB.'s post on her new tortoise locket, which is gorgeous. As I began to leave her a lengthy story involving a turtle of my youth (as she did in the description), I realized that one of the reasons I have a blog is so as not to manipulate other people's comments section.
Here's her necklace:

And here's my story, which ends sadly:
I had some kind of hick friends as a child (9? 10?) as I lived in an entirely unsophisticated upstate NY town. Said hick friends had a cousin who used to catch snapping turtles in a pond on their farm. (Yep, farm.) Anyhow, my bleeding heart mother and I felt so bad for these poor things (kept in a big bucket! baby turtles!) that we took one home and I promptly named him Snapper. The ingenuity, it began young.
Snapper hated living in his little aquarium, no matter how many fake palm trees or rocks I decorated with. He used to climb out often and we would hear his little nails tap-tap-tapping around on the hardwood floors. After we got a higher walled aquarium, I recall that he would pile things in one corner and produce a makeshift ladder with which to escape. I just want to say that I was a great turtle-mama, and I think Snapper just had some psychiatric problems. (Not unlike many of our animals including but not limited to both a deaf cat and dog.)

Anyhow, we had a renovated Victorian house at the time with some heavy duty stairs and Snapper managed to make it down them twice. TWICE. I found him both times, much to the deaf dog's chagrin.
Sadly, the third time was Snapper's downfall. We searched and searched but could not locate the little guy. I was convinced that he had escaped successfully and was now living in a turtle resort. Two years later, we found his little fossilized body under my bed while I was changing bedrooms. It haunts me to this day.
R.I.P, Snapper.

2. My mom just told me about this really cool piece of jewelry she saw on Antiques Roadshow. Here's the link to the video:
Video
I'm afraid I might not describe it well enough, but it is very much worth looking at. Three words: Diamond encrusted dragonfly.

3 comments:

WendyB said...

Oh my God. What a story! RIP, Snapper. You should have stuck with your loving mother instead of going off to explore the wide and dangerous world. Don't snapping turtles eventually get huge and dangerous?!

In Yr Fshn said...

Ha! So they say. He was actually getting pretty big by the time he made his last journey and was also starting to bite harder, but not hard enough to where my little 10 year old brain would think, "Hmmm. This might be a problem someday soon..."
I'll just admit that all around the whole thing probably wasn't a great idea.

WendyB said...

Well, it was a "learning experience"! Now you don't go around picking up snapping turtles! Lesson learned.