- I'm just teasing it to open its mouth,
and I'm hoping that it'll eat on it's own.
(upbeat music playing)
Hey good morning everybody.
It's so good to see your smiling faces, 23 hours.
That's right, 23 hours until the truck arrives
with The Reptarium habitats.
Stewart's coming in tonight.
We've got a couple other people coming today,
so it's gonna be an absolutely exciting day.
I am in the incubator, just to see a few babies hatch.
Look at these beautiful monkeys here.
Oh my gosh.
Of course this is actually a dragonfly to a pinstripe.
But this animal, in particular,
is one that I thought was really interesting.
Of course it looks like it's just a fire pinstripe,
but that isn't a normal fire pinstripe at all.
There is something going on, because of course,
this is a fire pinstripe here.
You can certainly see the difference between
those two animals right there.
I'm not really sure what's going on,
but it's absolutely awesome.
And then this is that clutch that I caught the other day
that was a blue-eyed leucistic,
which was a lesser het russo,
straight to a super enchi pin.
So you can see that all of these guys are enchis.
This one here is absolutely gorgeous.
Of course this is a het russo enchi pinstripe,
oh doggy, that thing is gorgeous.
But look at how clean that animal is right there.
That of course is a het russo enchi, hoo doggy.
I tell ya what, these things are gorgeous.
Look at this animal right here, oh my God
these things are crazy.
Got one little baby left to hatch, still in the egg.
Then the final clutch that is basically all out
is this, oh my God, take a look at the big clutch
this is, oh my gosh, here of course
this is a little banana ball python right here.
Oh my gosh, that thing looks absolutely crazy.
Look at this right here, this is pretty cool.
This is actually a banana pewter ball python
so it's a cinnamon, it's a pastel
and it is a banana, oh my gosh that thing is good.
Take a look at that right here.
That is just a pewter ball python.
Oh my gosh, and then of course I got
cinnamon ball pythons here.
We have another pewter in a pastel banana there.
The interesting thing is look at how many animals
are in here, we've got pewter, pewter,
we've got cinnamon, cinnamon, cinnamon
and we don't have any cinnamon bananas
which is really weird.
We only have three bananas in the whole clutch.
We have a normal banana, a pastel banana,
and a banana pewter but no cinny bananas
so that's kind of weird but nevertheless
that is a lot of beautiful babies.
Regardless guys, like I said,
we have 23 hours, we have a lot of things to do,
it is gonna be a crazy day but I cannot be more excited
and I probably won't sleep tonight.
There's always that point in every project
when the reality hits you like, oh my gosh.
This is actually happening.
Now don't get me wrong, I've been working on this
for months and months and months
but finally it feels like, wow,
we are installing the zoo tomorrow.
And honestly, that changes my life in a lot of ways.
I haven't had a place where people
can literally come and visit me
and see my animals unless they set up a tour in advance
so this is pretty awesome and I'm excited
and it's something I've wanted to do my whole life
and I can't wait for all those kids
to come in and see their faces get lit up with excitement
when they see these animals.
So many emotions going through me
and I'm gonna take you guys on the emotional roller coaster.
The truth is when you get into projects like this,
there's gonna be a hundred things that go wrong
between today and tomorrow and tomorrow
and the end of this spill,
but we just have to deal with them.
So, fingers crossed, take a deep breath, 22 hours.
Today's gonna be a lot of working next door,
coming over here, some people are coming in,
we have Hunter, we have Steve over there,
and of course we have Mike still hangin' out.
Gotta get some snake time in and just kind of
have some fun today.
I think we're also gonna shoot
a little bit of vlog stuff for Mike.
I'll put a link in the description.
In the meantime, we just need to spend
some time with the animals
because I'm gonna be totally honest with you,
over the next three or four days
I'm probably gonna hardly ever see an animal
'cause it's gonna be so much work
but you know I'm gonna take a break every now and then
and pop over here just to keep my sanity.
In the meantime, you guys having fun with Daisy?
- Yeah.
She's such a gorgeous girl, I just can't--
- Again today is gonna be a wild day
because there's all kinds of stuff going on.
You can see right over here
my forklifts have arrived.
Actually just one forklift.
We wanted to have one forklift so that we could
get 'em off of the truck because some of these enclosures
are like 12 hundred pounds!
So there's no way we're gonna lift 'em off.
So we got a forklift that's delivered here.
That's one more step closer to The Reptarium gettin' here.
Oh and by the way, if I haven't mentioned,
15 hours from now.
Here we go guys, I've got-- (laughs)
Oh my gosh, I'm gonna go to attack Eric.
(screams)
Eric, jump on!
(laughing)
So again, this forklift is definitely
gonna help us tremendous amount tomorrow
because some of these cages are pretty heavy
and again, coming off a big semi-truck,
it's gonna be really hard to lift 'em down.
Once they're on the ground we're gonna have to lift them
through the window which I'm gonna cover
here in a little bit about we're building a ramp
that basically will work and really help out.
My gosh, it's getting close guys.
I am definitely freaking out
and just from an emotional standpoint,
I gotta be honest with you,
stress level's about as high as is normally for me.
Normally I take things in stride,
today I'm like, oh my God.
(horn beeps)
Now that I have my high low, I'm gonna take a quick break
and update you guys on a couple things really quick.
These are those mangrove eggs,
remember I was tellin' ya, I was a little bit
stressed out 'cause they were like 60 something days in
and not hatching?
Well guess what?
I talked to Steve and the place that Steve works at
has actually hatched mangroves before
and believe it or not, these little monkeys here
incubating at 82 degrees which is where we have 'em,
take about 120 to 130 days to hatch.
Now to put that in perspective,
most colubrids hatch in about 60 days
so these guys here, mangrove snakes,
take twice as long to hatch.
That is crazy to me.
But I feel so relieved because I was looking at these eggs
and I go they look so good why are they not hatching?
And I was almost considering cutting 'em
to see if there's anything inside.
Thank gosh I didn't, I should of done more research
and this just goes to show you
no matter how long you've been working with animals,
you are not an expert because there's always things
that come up that go like, oh my God,
this is totally different than what I thought.
But anyways, before I get back here
I do have to assist feed Cookies and Cream.
And so like I mentioned, I had actually
been assist feeding Cookies and Creams mouse tails
and this past weekend Laurie took a frozen thawed pinkie
and put it in the left head's mouth
that I always say eats, lets just
call her Cream from now on.
Apparently it ate, so this will be the second
time that we did it so I'm gonna just put it in.
I'm gonna go ahead and put a GoPro in here
and shut the cage.
We may catch it eating, we may not.
I'm not really 100% sure but I'm not gonna take any risk
so I'm gonna be very gentle with this
but I'm pretty excited that it apparently seems to be eating
so essentially what I'm doing is really gently
I'm kinda just teasing it to open it's mouth
and I'm hoping that it'll eat on its own.
You can see it kinda bites on it
and then I'm hoping it takes it down.
I'm just gonna go ahead and put it in its cage.
Put the GoPro in here, shut the cage.
Again, I don't know if the footage
is gonna be worth anything but I'm gonna try my best
and then we're hopefully gonna come back
in an hour or so and hopefully Cream will have eaten.
Apparently they make 'em crazy in Canada.
- They do.
- Mike asked if he could go in with RJ
'cause RJ's still there.
I said, "Of course you can."
So have at it and my boy Hunter over here,
he's goin' in next.
Watch out for Bowser.
(laughing)
Mikey wait.
- You're a big boy.
(laughing)
- [Host] Good job Mike.
- That was awesome!
- [Host] There he is, how cool is that?
- Can you get a picture, Steve?
Alright buddy, I'll leave you alone.
Dang that's crazy, it's like you're
literally in with a dinosaur.
- So I guess part of keeping big snakes
is the fact that they do get dirty
from time to time.
We just cleaned Lucy like two days ago
and she definitely destroyed her cage
so we're gonna take her out because feeding day
is just a couple days away
and I don't want her to be in a dirty cage ever, right?
Lucy, you smell, but we're gonna put her in this water
just like we did last time, she loved it
and it'll kinda clean her off a little bit too.
There you go sweetheart.
Ah, that's awesome.
She's so happy.
Wow, that's amazing.
Come on girl.
Ah, you're such a good girl.
She's always in a good mood when she's in the water.
That's the time you can do almost anything to her.
It's just so crazy how much she loves the water.
I mean, Kelsey, I think that we found
the way to really deal with Lucy.
- Oh yes, just makes her totally placid.
- Totally, I mean she is like a different snake
when she's in water, I absolutely love it.
Let's go ahead and check on Cookies and Cream
and see if she's eaten.
Ah, they didn't eat.
(upbeat music)
I don't know, I tried actually three different times.
I don't wanna stress them out anymore,
so I'm gonna go ahead and just call it.
Maybe the technique that Laurie used
was the better technique, I'm not 100% sure
so I think I'm just gonna give it a day,
have Laurie try again because obviously I failed
on this one, oh man please Cookies and Cream.
I was so excited to see them eat again,
so oh well, I've gotta get next door
and get some work done.
Back over at The Reptarium, T minus 13 hours
before the truck arrives.
Seems like everything is on point,
I've been checking up with everything,
the trucking company, the window company,
the high low is here.
Everyone that's showing up seems to be checking in
saying they're gonna show up
so I have two more projects that I have to do here.
We're actually taking this window out right here
to actually load the cages in
but of course you know, stepping over this
is gonna be a little bit difficult
so the way we thought we would do it
is we've got this board here,
we're gonna build a stand that goes on this side
and then a stand that goes on the outside.
We're gonna actually put this board
on like this so that that way from the outside
you could set the cage on the board
and then just slide it into here,
pick it up here, and move it in.
It seems like that's probably the best way to go.
So I have to make two kind of like,
stands that go on each side of the windows,
that makes sense, and then put the board
on top once the window's actually removed tomorrow morning.
The only other thing I have to do which is pretty easy,
is put some of this molding down here on this room.
By the way, you can see I built this room out.
This room still is being mudded
and has to be painted and stuff like that
but this is the color we went with
but quite frankly this'll probably be covered with rock,
I think, I'm not 100% sure.
Laurie painted this and it looks absolutely incredible.
I'm so happy with the way this utility room worked out
so, there ya go, two more things.
We're pretty much cleaned up and then it's just
a waiting game.
Pick up Stewart from the airport in about four hours so,
it's gettin' real people, it's gettin' real.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so basically that is finished.
The ramp is over here and again what happens,
you can kinda see, it starts here,
the window will be out so it goes over to here,
this board actually goes across the whole thing.
We could put the cages on that ramp outside
and just slide 'em right through
and then pick 'em up it just kinda saves us
a little bit of work.
Hopefully that's good, so I think that we are done here.
There's nothing else we can do
other than a little cleanup and then guess what guys?
A little more than 12 hours.
Yeah, just in case you guys are wondering,
Red Rooster is still hangin' out with Savvy
and they are still great friends.
Well with that said guys, I am gonna leave the shop
and head home really quick.
I have everything done that I can get done today, heading
I am gonna go pick Stewart up in a few.
Got a few other things to do
but as for now, what's done here is done here
so let's go ahead and get out of here.
Alright guys, like I had mentioned,
I wanna take you guys on an emotional journey,
what I'm feeling and so you kind of really understand
what's going on.
It's about nine o'clock at night
which means we're 11 hours from the truck arriving
tomorrow or in that time frame, we'll see what happens.
The point is, is that it is crazy, you know?
And I know some of you guys are probably clicking off
right now 'cause you're like,
ah this is the boring part of the vlog,
I just wanna talk to you guys, bring you guys along.
I've been thinking about this type of a zoo
since I was a kid, you know,
since I was probably 12 years old
I always thought I'd wanna have something like this.
Really never thought that it was a reality,
that I could ever really do it
and then I went on a journey for many years
doing breeding reptiles which has been fantastic
but the zoo came to mind again a couple years ago
when I really thought that this is what I want to do
and again I've been inspired by so many of the people
like Jay at Prehistorics, Alligator Alley,
Clyde Peeling, Reptillia up in Toronto,
and that's what made me think maybe it's time.
So here we are, 11 hours away from
potentially getting the truck here to start to install
and I'm excited, I'm extremely nervous
because I know there's gonna be a lot of things
that are gonna go wrong and we have to solve them.
There's gonna be a lot of issues
that I wasn't anticipating that
we're gonna have to overcome.
The unknown is difficult.
Not knowing how it's gonna go.
In my head I see the finished product
but I know we still have a long way to go
to get to the finished product.
Hopefully, by the 14th, that finished products will happen
and you guys can come visit me on the 14th
or anytime thereafter.
I've gotta get to the airport in about a half an hour,
40 minutes, go pick up Stewart.
Everyone else comes in in the morning.
Some people have driven in tonight
but they're just getting hotels
and I'll see 'em in the morning.
I still have to come back and edit
and I probably won't sleep tonight.
It's gonna be an early morning.
It's here people, it's here.
I mean, The Reptarium comes to life tomorrow.
By the end of tomorrow, all of the cages
are gonna be inside The Reptarium.
Will the be set up, no, of course not.
But they're gonna be in there
and I wanna bring you guys along on that journey
as much as I possibly can.
Not only seeing how we do it,
but also how I'm feeling.
So I wanna know from you guys,
how do you feel about it?
What do you think?
What do you want me to do?
Thank you guys for all your support and everything.
It means the world to me and this wouldn't have
been possible without you guys supporting me
so I love you, thank you so much.
Alright guys, let's go ahead and end the vlog here
and next time I see you, we're gonna have
cages coming in to The Reptarium.
Have an absolutely amazing night.
Do me a couple favors before we get outta here.
Can you smash the like button?
Turn the post notifications on, you know how it goes.
As I said, make a comment down below.
Be kind to someone and I promise
I will see you guys tomorrow.
(upbeat music)