Crickets

No--not the sporting event beloved by the British Empire. I'm talking the disgusting insect that infests the desert (as seen above). We have 3 geckos and a turtle (along with the 6 parakeets and the dog) as pets, and crickets are a staple of their diet. We had run out earlier in the week, so on Friday, I had to pick some up.

I was running late so I didn't pick them up on the way home from work, but after a ward activity (which ended up involving a Jello food fight, but we didn't start it. REALLY.), we had just enough time before the pet store closed to pick some up. Because I also had to pick up a birthday present for the following day with Madi, I sent Reagan and Tre' in with instructions to pick up 15 minnows (for the turtle) and 20 crickets (primarily for the lizards).

Imagine my surprise when I got a call from Reagan, just AFTER closing time, asking where I was because she had 200 crickets. 200 crickets? Did I hear wrong? Nope....she got it wrong by a factor of 10. 200 crickets. AAARGH! Oh well, the lizards wouldn't be hungry for a while, right?

WRONG--she got baby crickets instead of the regular large ones we go for, so the actual food content was probably about the same. Fine. We dumped them all in the cage. About 15 minutes later Madi was shrieking as the baby crickets came pouring out of the mesh top of the cage (about 1/8" square mesh holes). Yes, I now have 190 crickets jumping around my house (the lizards ate 10 to begin with). I have just enough time to call the bug guy......

Campaign 2010

We've move into election mode in the Risk house--every summer, we start plotting and planning our strategy and then we run through a variety of different logos with associated themes with focus groups (usually we'll find our focus group in the various friends over during the summer). Once we're good with what it looks like, we'll brand the entire campaign, from posters to the speech he'll give. Oh--and buttons. Did I mention those? This year, we've made over a thousand buttons to hand out at the schools.
Reagan is running for president and Tre' is running for vice-president in their middle school. Madi is running for vice president at her elementary school.
Reagan and Madi both liked the same theme--there have been a lot of discussions at their school between different groups of students (English vs. Spanish, etc.). They wanted to find a way to use all the different languages to say that everyone could like a candidate. We didn't want to limit it to just English and Spanish, so we went through a variety of languages (English, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, and Spanish). To honor Madi and her love for animals, we chose dogs from all the different countries. For the buttons, each button has one of the dogs and the phrase "I like Madi (or Reagan)" in the associated language. (At least I HOPE the button says that. I was relying on the translator that was in Word. As long as it doesn't say "Eat at Joe's", we'll be fine.) You can see their posters above--with the pronunciations for each phrase. We'll see how it works out.