A Dallas motorcycle cop was killed in action the other day while escorting the Hillary motorcade. The funeral is today in Plano and they are expecting 4000 people including Hillary herself.

Today while on my way to work I was surprisingly pulled over by a motorcycle cop as I was trying to get onto the highway. Turned out that he was stopping all traffic from entering. I rolled down my window and asked who was coming through, assuming that it was political. He said the body of that cop.

A few minutes later off in the distance I saw a motorcade of cycles surrounding a solitary pristine white hearse. As they rolled by, my blocker took off after and we were set free. I resumed my course and ended up following very closely to the white hearse along my route, watching as every onramp was set free as I passed.

I am glad that the city respects officers killed in action like this. I have no problems being late for work today to show a little respect for a fallen protector.

Stuff like this makes you pause to think about things and perhaps at least appreciate the moment. When I heard of the officers death on the news, I never expected it to have any effect on my life. But it now certainly has.

The other day when I had Robin out I noticed that I could not see any remnant of her previous surgery and mean nasty chest infection. Her hair has covered any scar and shes as perky as a possum! It was touch and go there for awhile while she was being nursed back to health and I am simply amazed at the end result.

Below I am posting two photo moments. One is taken today which is all clean and wonderful looking and the second set is one I have never posted before. It is of her open puss filled stinky chest wound. It was really bad for awhile which is why I am amazed that it has healed so well now. We had to leave it open to allow the drugs to heal the infection before closing it up. It got really nasty and scary for a bit but I followed the vets directions, gave her baths, gave her meds and worked with her until we could sew it up.

Kudos to Robin for being a trooper! She's of a healthy disposition and weight now and eating well.

I know that I am crazy because of the things that make me ecstatic and giddy. Today it is realizing that both of my possums are choosing to poo and pee in their litter box instead of the cage floor or elsewhere. Can we say "potty trained!"

It is probably just the fact of having ground below them over an open grate as to why they choose the box, but it is still amazing. I can scoop it out easy and the cage is cleaner for it.

YAY!

I recently purchased a huge double macaw cage second hand which is now named Cagezilla. It was such a good deal that I figured I would see how it worked out for my possums. It has a removable partition in the middle which allows me to socialize the possums for mating or to keep them separate and safe while still having the other nearby within view and smell. It took me many hours of spray washing, scrubbing, sanitizing, cleaning, scrubbing, spray washing to get the thing clean. Someone had kept large birds in it and never cleaned it, AND THEN they kept monkeys in it. Filthy doesnt describe the mess that came off of this thing. And to boot, I found a dead and dessicated mouse in it as well. No kidding.






In the photos you can see a size comparison between Cagezilla and the Exel cage that I have the sugars in. Cagezilla is the size of about five Exel tower cages.

The possums now have a LOT more room to move around and I need to find some large branches and such to fill it out with for climbing. The only thing I would change now is that the 1" bar spacing is just too big. They cant escape, but you can easily see that it is harder for them to move around on the floor grate. So some busy climbing limbs will be very welcome.

A night or two ago I was up around 1:00am or such and noticed a lot of barking coming from the office. I went to check it out figuring that all of the cages were barking at each other and that was not the case. Three sugars from the Sugar Shack colony were packed into a single exercise wheel and were singing together. It was the oddest thing to see and rather unexpected. Watching them bark randomly together it almost appeared as if I was watching a whac-a-mole game in operation.



So far I have yet to ever see a pattern from who barks, when they bark and how they bark. It truly does appear random. Some times some cages bark and some times some cages dont. There really does not seem to be a main barking cage or any specific members that bark.

Robin's suture area on her chest appears to be healing well. It is clean and dry with nothing to report. She weighed in at 1.54 pounds which means she is holding her weight now. Her antibiotics are being sprinkled on her food now and we havent done any syringe feedings or meds in many days.

Phil has been nippy lately and we all know that I love a good handling challenge. I was working with him today while wearing gloves. I figure that the more I handle him the more he will get used to it and become tame. At some point I took him outside and while I was holding him I swear that he looked up at the treetops above and began to cry. It was probably just the cool dry wind causing it, but for a moment it really seemed that he remembered trees and freedom and shed tears over it.

After this event, he got fussy and/or something startled him and he bit me. Not expecting this, my default reaction was to yank my hand away from his mouth. In doing so, I ended up hurting him pretty bad. Apparently his k9 tooth was caught in the glove and when I yanked away, it came along for the ride. The end result was a gory snap, a very bloody mouth with a k9 pointing horizontal, a big mess and a very mean possum that I now had to deal with. I rushed him to the vet and it is good that I did. His tooth did not come out, it was still firmly embedded in his jaw. My fear was that I broke his jaw and it turned out that one side was fractured enough that it turned the tooth and the jaw sideways.

The vet was able to reset the bone and said that it was a good thing that it was only a fracture and not a complete break. Because of this we were able to avoid having the jaw wired and the tooth should survive the healing intact.

Vet told me to add calcium to the diet because it appears as if he has brittle bones. So because of this, I have decided to lessen up on taming Phil and just get everyone healthy so we can try to mate. If it comes to be, I will work hard to tame the offspring and not worry so much about the parents.

I feel really bad about what happened with Phil and I guess all I can do is keep it as a lesson learned in going forward. Not all exotics are destined to be kept as pets.

My goal is to learn as much as possible about the South American Four Eyed Philander Possum and to determine if it is capable and worthy of being kept as an exotic pet.

When I was given the Sugar Shack colony, two females were pregnant. The offspring were two females and two males. Here it is four months later and we finally got the last two baby boys neutered yesterday. I now have no intact males.

This makes 8 of my neuterings that were done by the folks at Animal Clinic of Farmers Branch, 14021 Denton Dr, Dallas, TX 75234, 972-247-2221. The neuters were $55 each, and as usual, they left the testicle sack intact which I very much like as it is easy to tell who is a male and the recovery seems simple and easy.

I kept each boy separate and left them in their collars until late in the evening. Once out of their collars they immediately go to messing with their surgery area by pulling, biting and such, but in the end, it turns into simple grooming and then they tire and fall asleep. I left the overhead light on all night again to keep them docile and sleeping and this morning I put them back in with the colony and all seems well.

Robin spent today at the vet again to get her final surgery. The surgery site was closed tight and looks so much better than it did a few days ago. The scar will go across all of her chest. The infection is gone, no puss or smell and she is as perky as a possum. I'll be keeping her on antibiotics for a week and we will try to get some better foods into her in this time.

She came to me weighing 2.2 lbs and three weeks later she now weighs 1.6 lbs. I still believe that she can lose a little more weight so we'll be designing her diet to that effect once she is healed and active; 1.6 could be a steady weight for her though. We do need to burn a little more fat from the tail and see how that changes things.

Her pouch is under my thumb in the photos.






The boy's tail is rather chapped due to this dry cold spell we are having here. I have read that below 40% humidity causes this problem and can lead to open sores on the tail. I have begun to apply petroleum jelly and may consider using a humidifier around my animals in the future. My guess is that a sealed nestbox will be a good compromise to help this issue as their own body heat and moisture will keep the nestbox rather humid while sleeping.

Well here it is 9 days after her surgery, a few additional visits to the vet, some more injections and oral antibiotics, scheduled forced feedings, ... and today Robin ate something on her own for the first time! I have noticed that she has been getting stronger and more antsy while tube feeding and today we manged to get a few syringe feedings into her when she had enough. I decided to try a quarter of hard boiled egg and SHE ATE IT! HOORAY!

I dont yet know if this means that she will eat more on her own, time will tell.

Her open chest is no longer pussing nor does it smell so I believe that the infection is under control. So perhaps Tuesday we can close her up and let her finally heal correctly.

Robin getting her bath


Robin getting dried off


Robin being force fed



And here's a photo of Phil who is waiting for Robin to get healthy.

The smell from the rotting tissue has gotten worse so I took her back today to see the vet who did the surgery. All along the scar was infected and covered rather profusely in puss. When there is an infection present, you cannot seal up or remove necrotic tissue, so you have to clear up the infection first. So she got a shot of Baytril and is now on an even stronger oral antibiotic powder called Tylosin. I asked them to clean the puss from her wounds and the smell is much better for now. I am going to try to bathe her once a day in an epsom salt solution myself.

Since she will not eat, we are feeding her by syringe a mixture of items including puppy milk replacer, Nutri-Cal, Carnivore Care, Ensure and anything else that I can get down her throat. She is with energy now, climbing her cage walls and such, so I hope all of this will enable her to heal.

I am using an old canvas purse as her sleeping area/pouch and I am using paper towels to soak up any puss and blood that seeps out.

My four eyed opossum Robin is having a bad week. Since her surgery a week ago, she has eaten nothing. She has been drinking but eating absolutely nothing. I took her back to the vet and it turns out that her surgical site is infected and smells horribly, so we came home with one oral antibiotic; a suspension of SMZ, whatever that is, to be given twice daily. I do not yet have instructions to bathe the smelly wound or anything additional like that. We were able to force feed her some puppy milk replacer before we went to the vet and we gave her some more afterwards along with the antibiotic. I also have some vanilla ensure I am going to try and we are trying to locate something called Nutripet or Nutrigel which is a gel form nutrient and energy supplement that you can force into their mouth and it wont spill out.

I weighed Robin today. She was originally at 2.something pounds and is now weighing in at 1.88. So her surgery removed some of that worthless fat; hooray! More to go.

Robin went in for surgery this morning. It went well and she was awake and calm when I picked her up. I took a few photos of her but decided to not disturb her to get stitch photos. I can get those later.

Dr said that she ended up with an L shaped stitching after removing the fatty deposits and extra tissue, so that will be interesting to see. I am going to leave her alone for a few days to heal.

She received pain injection and should be good to go in a few days. I do not have an e-collar on her.

I took a few photos of her as she got her first doses of water. She literally drank for over ten minutes. You can see that she still has loose skin around the neck. The vet said that it was too difficult and risky to go up there, but the main area has been cleared and will no longer interfere with her walking, climbing and getting into her pouch.






Her tail is very much larger than the boys which tells me that we still have a lot of fat to burn on her. I will keep this in mind in future feedings and she will also burn some weight faster as I plan on exercising her in a room, tent, ball, larger cage with climbing branches and an exercise wheel if I can manage to make one around 18".

I took the female four eyed possum in for her first vet visit today.
I asked the techs up front for a name for her, and seeing that the boy is named Phil the Philander, they suggested Robin which is the name of Dr Phil's wife. So we now have Phil and Robin for better or worse.

We gassed her in order to inspect her entire body easily. I watched as she became nauseous and threw up a few times when going down.

Body inspection was good. We counted FIVE nipples in the pouch. Fecal float came out clean. Skin scrape determined that she has a very rare mite that opossums get, so we chose a topical dosage of Revolution Selamectin; half on her and half left for Phil.

Vet said that she is healthy other than the reason I took her in. It appears as if this girl had been very obese in her past. Possums round out like any animal will but they also start depositing fatty tissue elsewhere which is the bad here. She has these loose pockets of dangly hanging skin on her chest that have a soft fatty deposit in them called a lipoma. As she is losing weight, they are actually interfering with her being able to walk, so we are having her back in tomorrow morning for surgery; basically a tummy tuck.

I havent been with this vet before and was very happy with the friendly nature and general candor of her and the staff. They were all very interested in learning about the South American Four Eyed Possum. I gave them a crash course on marsupial genitalia and other neat stuff and we talked about all sorts of things while inspecting Robin.

I am anxious to get Robin back to health so I can start to work on her taming.

A philander possum has a range that extends from Northeastern Mexico to Southeatern Brazil. Within this range, it may be found from Brazil's Atlantic coast westward into Peru and Argentenia, as well as throughout Central America.

The common name is derived from this opossum's grey coat and the single white spots which are located directly above each eye, providing it with an appearance of four eyes.


The body length is 250-350 mm, and the tail reaches to about the same length. Males may be slightly larger than females, although much overlap in size is present. Females have five to nine mammae contained within a pouch.

The coloration of the short, straight hair is gray dorsally and off-white to yellow ventrally. The tail is furred with the same gray coloration for 50-60 mm from the base. The tip of the tail is naked and becomes paler in color towards its end.

The ears are naked as well.

Philander opossum has a slender body and a large head. Its rostrum is fairly long and narrows at the tip. The tail tapers as well, and it is prehensile. The hind limbs are longer and more muscular than the forelimbs.

SOURCE: http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/infor...

We have finally finished the migration of websites to the new servers. Database access should now be faster than it has ever been and we have lots of room to expand.

The ups and batteries are in, servers are all hung and running, tape drive is installed, network links are teamed and trunked, things are migrated and stable and all is well.

The new servers are all Dell data center boxes. Just one of them has 4 cores and 12ghz of processing power. I am still amazed at what we can and will soon be doing with these.

I was finally able to merge JP with the other three boys. I am so happy about that. I tried two new things this time which may have lead to success but I think there could have been even more variables involved.

• I took all four animals into the shower with me and I took a long shower. They stayed up high and dry on the roosts and places I have for the sugars to play, but, the noise and the moisture and such managed to shake them all up a bit and even modify their smells. So they end up being more fixated on me and their situation than they do each other.


• I sprayed the butt of each animal with this tiny spritz bottle of mouthwash in order to alter their own smell and mask the smells of others. The mouthwash is not harmful if they eat it and it is extremely powerful and nulls their sense of smell for a bit.


• I put them together into a tiny cage with a single tiny pouch where they stayed for two nights. In a small cage, they cannot get very far from each other so they are forced to get familiar. In a large cage, the newbie can run away and hide and the others will go into hunt mode and start chasing the newbie to get rid of him. The small pouch forced them to cuddle and normalize scents while sleeping.
  


• After two nights I upgraded them to a medium sized cage with one more nesting spot. And they are all cuddling in the nestbox like I want. It is important that the new cages are neutral as possible, so clean them very well with soap and do what you can to remove the smells of the previous owners. I let mine soak overnight in suds after scrubbing very hard.


• After a week or so in the medium cage I will move them back into the large cage and all should be great!

I think the mouthwash spray and the tiny cage helped to get past their instinct to attack the new male. But it has also been more time since JP's neuter so his scent glands have shrunk more. Also, it has been pretty quiet this week in the cages so I dont think anyone is in heat or such. I think all of these things have aligned to where the boys were able to accept JP.

I kept the mouthwash handy for an additional spray on everyone if it was needed, but it never was. Again, I think the small cage helped keep everyone close so that they were forced to familiarize with each other to the point of no contest.

I can already see a difference in JP after these few days with the group. He has learned to come to the side of the cage for treats and he has no problem competing with the others.

Me so happy!

Here is a phuzzy photo of all four cuddling:


If you want to see what they are up to, here is the misfit webcam.

I cleaned out the mealworms today. The beetle drawer had become overrun by large young, so it was time to move them out. What I do is strain out all of the worms from the worm drawer substrate. This is the old breeding substrate and is the oldest and dirtiest. Then using this empty drawer I prepare a fresh beetle/breeding drawer. I then move all of the beetles one by one out of the old beetle drawer and into the new. This leaves behind all of the young worms and current eggs. Then I dump the strained older worms into the old beetle drawer so it is all worms only in there. The beetles now have a fresh and clean and worm-free place to mate.

We have been working on upgrading the systems that support this website as well as building a platform that can grow to support more. So far we have the racks installed, new servers installed, one UPS without batteries that is powering stuff. I've already relocated our current web servers, a new firewall and mail server back there.

Tonight we ran a thick 10ga 4 wire power cable to the room along with a data line so I can reroute the Internet feed directly there. Tomorrow I will be hooking up the power to 240v and installing a sub breaker panel in the room.

YAY for progress! YAY for DIY geeks!

Here are the two 4 post racks that I got for this project.



Here is the stack of new hardware that we are upgrading to.



And here is the old rats nest which has been located in the office. I will not miss the old noisy stuff.

 

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Kazko
Gender: Male
Occupation:computer geek
Member since: Jan 24, 1997
Posts: 2077 View my pictures!
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I have a colony of 8 in the Sugar Shack, a colony of 5 in the Nut House and a collection of 4 misc males in the Frat House. Favorite Quote
"all we have to fear is Eric's farts" My Bio
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