Thanks to all who sent b-day wishes last week, I really appreciate it!

I just spent some time adding the rest of the 2010 BP babies to the site and also putting up another Trim the Fat Sale, being offered to my customers/readers first. I'm out of room and need to move some holdbacks up for next year, help! Okay, getting some funds back from the $5K in plastic I just spent won't hurt either :)

Been working on racks non-stop (literally put 15 hours on them last weekend and about 16 hours the weekend before). Our 'stash' is about dried up so we're busy making more for the show season starting this weekend in Shepherdsville. Looking forward to getting back on the road!

I apologize if anybody was looking for me at the Indy show last weekend. It snuck up way too fast and we didn't have anything/everything ready so we decided to pass on it.

Hope to see you all soon!

Phew, baseball season is finally done. We have a party for each of the teams left but we're in the home stretch for sure.

As promised, I have put the available 2010 ball pythons online in the Available section. I'm also still working on the new layout for the Projects section. Hope to have that done in a few weeks.

Well, I warned you I'd get busy this season and I wasn't lying. For the past 2-3 months we've been doing the 'baseball thing' for at least 4 nights a week. It wasn't rare for us to go M-F and then two games on Saturday. Helping with two teams is more than a handful!

The 2010 hatchlings have arrived. We have 3 clutches of ball pythons hatched and almost ready to go. I'll be getting those on the site here soon. The sand boas and rosy boas have been breeding like crazy and I have several female hognose about ready to drop.

The past few years have been a real 'kick in the nuts' as they say so I did everything I could to make 2010 a great year for us and it's looking like I may have failed. I bred 22 ball python girls and had a total of 10 clutches. Out of those, I had two go bad, including a het red axanthic x het red axanthic clutch and a HUGE pastel clutch. I've already had two litters of infertile hognose eggs to boot. I'm also banking on some young males to do some VERY cool stuff on the sand boa front and when you bank on young males, you're often left disappointed.

On the plus side, we did hit some bumblebees and lemon blasts this year. As many of you know, I've been trying to produce blasts for several years without success and I finally got one. But just so God keeps me humble, he gave me 4 normals to go along with it and made it a boy :) At this point, I'll take what I can get.

The rack business is going well. In what free time I have, I've been trying to crank out racks for orders. 3 weekends ago we went up to Gurnee, IL and dropped a load off for a couple of good customers of mine (thanks Wally & Sean!), this past weekend we rode over to St. Louis to do the same, and this weekend we're heading down to Shepherdsville to do it again. Shows will kick in for us in July once baseball season is done and I can get a nice big round of racks ready to go.

I'm also working on a site redesign for the Projects/Collection area, it was pretty cluttered and we've added tons of projects since the last update. I've had several people tell me about how graphic intense my website is so I started looking into it and found the reasoning. All of my little pictures (like the lemon blast above) are actually big pictures. I'm going through and creating thumbnail versions of each one and referencing them in the documents and then making them 'clickable' for larger versions. That should help matters a bunch, especially on pages like this one that has a lot of pictures.

I'll get the website updated soon so you can all check out the 2010 babies. Until then, hope everybody is well!

Hello everybody! The rosies and hognose have come out of brumation and are getting warmed and fattened up, everybody did well during the winter. I have a few BP clutches that are pretty close, probably just a few weeks away from the first clutch, should be an interesting year. Looks like the BP baby count will be down again, I only feel eggs in 5 out of 14 girls so far but the year's still young, we'll have to wait and see.

Not much going on other than that, basketball season is winding down and we'll pick up on baseball. I'm going to try to coach two teams this year since the little one is now playing. I've already told the family that each has to pull their own weight if there's any way for us to make it through this year.

Rack sales are doing pretty well, had a few big orders that have kept me busy at that.

We went to the February NARBC show in Tinley Park to drop some orders off and walk around, how incredibly weird. All in all, it was probably half or less than half the size it usually was and it was easier than pie to get in. I hope they did okay but it looked dead on Sunday. Picked up a few crested geckos but that was it, just came home with supplies other than that.

Alright, going to do some updates to the site real quick then jump off. Hopefully the next update will be with some pictures of BP eggs! Until then...

Happy New Year to all! I hope everybody had a great holiday season. We hosted both Xmas and New Year's Eve so a lot of time was spent making food and cleaning house before and after. It's been about 8 years since we've hosted Xmas and we thoroughly enjoyed. The kids got spoiled rotten as usual but that's what Xmas is about isn't it?

Sorry for the delay in posting. This is our dead time of year isn't it??? :) I know it is, just spending some time with the family, been playing quite a bit of racquetball (no, I'm not good at it, but I do sweat a lot).

I got back into an old hobby recently, RC cars. I had been contemplating it but then I drove my friend Bradon's car back on our golf trip and I was hooked. It was kind of an Xmas present from me to me :) My buddy Josh got one as well so we've been running them together. Unfortunately it got cold fast so running time has been minimal. He also got a larger scale truck so his literally just runs over mine. It's not the size that matters though right? :)

The rosies and hognose are all 'chilling out'. We put them down in November and will pull them out in February. I'm excited to produce some albino hogs this year. The ball pythons are breeding pretty well. I'm quite excited about our potential for the coming year. Ideally we could produce pastels, spiders, mojaves, cinnys, pinstripes, het red axanthics, axanthics, ghosts, bumblebees, pewters, super cinnys, lemon blasts, super pastels, killer bees, and pewter bees. We might have some stuff with the genetic stripe gene as well, I got myself an 'almost' breeder pair that I'm trying to work with. Anyways, could be quite a lineup if things go well. As years in the past have taught me, I'm not counting my babies until they hatch, we've been pretty well aligned the past few years and just didn't produce what we should have.

For those that haven't heard, there's a special Tinley Park show in February next month. We're not setting up (I have nothing but sand boas avaiable and it'd be hard to pay for the costs with just those) but I am going to be there and dropping off some racks. The same for the St. Louis show in March. If anybody needs anything, holler at me and I'll bring it!

Alright, for those that have been yelling at me for an update, there you have it, there's an update .

Until next time, hope everybody is doing well!

8/25 is the last update, are you serious??? Wow, I knew I was busy with racks and such but I didn't realize it had been that long. Sorry for those few faithful followers that we do have.

Well, as I said, I spent the better part of a month working in the shop almost every night after work and then most weekend when we weren't doing shows. We ended up taking a whoppin 28 racks with us to Tinley. We're coming back with 11 of them but 5 never got to see the show floor because we ran ourselves out of room.

Ah, Tinley Park 2009. Had a great time. We moved a TON of rosies and a decent amount of sand boas and ball pythons. Saturday was INCREDIBLY slow for the rack business but we made up for it on Sunday. Rob and his wife Beth joined us for the show and it was great to have their help. Rob is a very hard worker and just has a knack behind the table, not to mention is awesome with snakes. The show was busy for us though, I never made it halfway around the show floor. We also totally forgot to take pics of the setup until we were tearing down! We did get to spend some time with our friends down in KY, Richard, Aleshia from MA, and Heather from CA. It was awesome hanging with you all, let's do it again next year!

Richard, Misha, Brett, Me, Alicia, Pete, Beth, Heather, Rob, Wes, and Sarah at Rock Bottom; The Gang tearin down; The group managing to smile when it's all over

I also got to spend some time with Scott Miller who's a fantastic guy. I spent some time snapping some pics of some of his animals, hopefully he doesn't mind if I post a few of my favorites here :) I also picked up some GREAT stuff from him. One project I'm going to keep secret for a while, it's the most exciting thing I've ever had a chance to work with!

The new 'splash' Kenyans offered from the Bell's (we had our eyes on this girl but Scott got her first...bastard!); the infamous stripe anery (I'm black & white with jealousy!!!)

We have a show in KY this weekend and then I really don't know what. I wanted to be done but we still have 60 or so sand and rosy boas that need to go, a handful of hognose, and about a dozen balls.

Alright, I need to head out and get the boys something to eat and hit the airport tonight for some shipments. Hope everybody is well and look forward to talking soon!

Hope everybody is doing well. A lot has happened since the last update.

On a disappointing note, we lost Big Momma shortly after my last post. For those that didn't get a chance to meet her, she was our 17 year old Kenyan sand boa. She produced over 200 babies for us and more importantly, she turned thousands of kids and adults alike into 'reptile people'. Losing her was a huge disappointment for our family.

On a positive note, we've had boas rolling out of our ears. We had a total of 3 Mexican rosy litters, a San Felipe litter, an albino Whitewater rosy litter, a 20-baby litter of anery Kenyans and then something we're very excited about....we had a 33-baby litter of het anery stripes! That is an important litter for multiple reasons. First, 33 is one of the largest litters of sand boas to date and second, these will be the first stripe het anery babies to be offered for sale anywhere! I will certainly be holding back 2.2 or so but will offering the rest as soon as they get a few meals in them.

The racks have been selling VERY well. We had great shows in St. Louis and Kentucky and have pre-orders for the next several shows.

Anyways, I'm still working on pictures of the available hognose, anerys, and rosies and should have them up this week.

What a schmuck I am. It's been the quiet part of our year and I still can't keep the website updated. We ended up having an extended baseball season with the All-Star team and then the past 3 weeks I've been entirely consumed by racks. Early July I realized that we start the show season hard in August and I only had a handful of racks. So, we got a huge order of plastic and almost every day I've been out working on racks and should just barely meet my deadline of next weekend.

Apologies to those that were expecting us at the Wisconsin show this weekend. Not only did I not have the product or pre-sales, but this was Dave Matthews weekend, there was no way I could have made it there. Brett and I went on Friday night then Misha and I went last night (one of our only date nights of the year). Anyways, it was a good time both nights. If nobody has seen DMB in concert and likes their music, you MUST see them live.

News from this side...we FINALLY had a litter of boas, a liter of Mexican rosy boas. We also hatched out two more crested geckos (bringing the total to 4). We also have hognose hatched/hatching. Two seperate litters, about 12 total.

We're hitting shows hard this month so we hope to see a lot of you. We'll be doing St. Louis, Shepherdsville, and Indianapolis all within 4 weeks.

Until then or the next update!

I had to share the news...some of you don't know it, but we're closet crested gecko lovers. We started getting a small collection last year for fun and now we're up to 10, two breeding colonies and then some that Kyle keeps in his room (some of the prettiest ones we have actually) until they're old enough.

Anyways, we have 9 eggs on the ground and we got our first clutch to hatch. The first baby came out last night and the 2nd one I caught coming out of it's egg tonight. Although the female is just a plain dalmation and the dad is an insane mosaic, the babies (as of now) are just a deep, deep red.

We went to the Shepherdsville show yesterday to drop off some racks, enjoyed the visit with everybody down there and went and had some Ichiban sushi/hibachi, the absolute BEST place to eat sushi anywhere.

I think I forgot to mention two of our new acquistions...one reptile related and one totally not :)

We lost Malcom, our dog of 16 years, about 3 months ago and then one of our cats a few weeks later. After a few weeks of grieving, we searched out a Beagador and found the perfect one in Terre Haute. We made the drive to visit a few months ago and picked her up the next weekend. She's been great. If you don't put your stuff up, she'll chew it up in a heartbeat but other than a few accidents in that arena, she's been great. The albino hognose is something I've wanted for a long while and got at a great price. I have a few PH albinos to breed it too.

Alright, off to bed I go...hope to catch everybody in Evansville, IN this weekend!

Just wanted to pass on an update real quick. Clutch #3 hatched, looks like we got 5 out of 8 pastels. Clutch #4 is hatching right now, this is the 4 eggs from pastel x pastel. One of those got wet and went south QUICK and one had about 1/3 nippled. Looks like we have a pastel dead in the egg, a normal, and a SUPER! Wow, got lucky on that one.

Took an impromptu trip to St. Louis yesterday. Had no intentions of going but had several customers interested in racks and it all came together at the last minute. Thanks to everybody who got racks from us and thanks to Brett for keeping me awake on the way to and from.

We're making a stop in Shepherdsville next weekend (although we'll doubtfully setup).

Until next time!

Yes, I'm alive! Just been hibernating a bit...actually baseball has been killing us, almost done!

'09 babies have arrived. I have several 100% VPI axanthic and true VPI axanthic ball pythons available now on the Available page. More babies (pastels) should be hatching this week.

As I've said, we cut back quite a bit this year and it really shows. We also just didn't hit the numbers we should have hit. As a prime example, I bred 5 adult female pastels (3 to the pintstripe, 2 to the spider, and one to the pastel). Out of those, I got one wimpy clutch out of the pastel/pastel breeding and I'll be lucky to have 3 of the eggs hatch. Nothing else...just going to be a little short of what I expected. Just a fair warning to those that were expecting a big variety of thing this year...we should have some neat stuff coming though, including some good stuff with the stripe Kenyans.

I'm just sitting here listening to the long awaited Dave Matthews Band album that came out on Tuesday. For those that don't know, if I have a bigger passion than reptiles, it's DMB! Below is a link to the album on Amazon, please support the band by buying the album and supporting their tour this summer. If you've never been to a DMB show,there's nothing else like it.

Other than baseball and getting racks built for the show season, there's not much going on (nor is there room). Looking forward to getting the show season started and looking forward to getting some boa babies on the ground.

Alright, I'm hitting the sack, I've put seveal hours tonight into taking and editing pictures and getting the site updated. TGIF to everybody tomorrow!

Hey all...just wanted to let everybody know that we're alive and well, just still enjoying the 'break' that winter/spring gives us. Baseball season is in full effect which is taking up 3 days a week.

I'm predicting a smaller year than normal but should have some interesting stuff. I only batted about 50% on my ball pythons (a bit disappointing) but I have 3 clutches cooking already (two axanthic and one pastel) and expect about 5 more. That's still several shy of our normal. The rosies and hognose are out of brumation, they're chunked up and started breeding. Sand boas are breeding well, should have some interesting stripe combinations available this year.

We're 'visiting' shows, dropping off racks as needed but haven't sent anything up for '09 yet. I've put a few select dates on the front page. We'll add more when we have some babies on the ground.

Hey all, hope everybody is having a good 2009. Finally getting an update in. We've had a whole lot of little things going on but nothing too major. Just a few notes about changes/updates to the website and to the business itself:

- For those not in the loop, Sterilite has discontinued their old ClearView product line which is what my racks (and several competitors) were based on. Yes it sucks, those tubs were awesome...BUT, it's not the end of the world. They came out with a new line called ClearView Latch. The 15 and 32-quart tubs have almost the identical dimensions and can fit in to any of the racks I've made the past 4 years (some of the ones older than that are going to be a tight fit). The 6-quart tubs are about 1/4" taller and do NOT work. The other 6-quart tubs at Target will work but are a bit tight. Home Depot also sells a 6-quart tub from Best Plastics that fits perfectly.
As for moving forward, we'll be using the new 15 and 32-quart tubs and using the other 6-quart tub from Target (think it's called the Glacier series, it's part #1642).

- Our rack prices are going up. This is not a raise because I'm full of myself, it's a necessary raise. The cost of each sheet of plastic has gone up over $20/each since my prices were last raised. Tubs have gone up about 25% and even things like power cords have gone up a lot. I'm jumping $25 on every rack for right now. We may have to jump the larger ones more at some point, we'll see how it works out.

- I've updated the website with the remaining '08 rosies and ball pythons. Sorry for being such a slacka$$ on that. I have also done an overhaul on our rack page to better break down our product lines.

- We're out of 2008 sand boas altogether. We should have plenty more in '09.

Think that's it for now. I have taken a ton of ball python breeding pictures but haven't gone through them and posted them yet. Just to give you some insight on what we're doing, we have the following breeding:

Pinstripe x Pastel (x3)
Spider x Pastel (x2)
Pastel x Pastel
Pinstripe x Normal
Mojave x Normal
Ghost x Het Ghost
Axanthic x Het Axanthic (x2)
Pastel x Normal (x2)
Spider x Normal

That's a lot smaller group than we've had the last several years, we cut our stock back quite a bit plus we had several pastel girls that were ready to go this year so cut back some normals.

Racks have been going well considering the time of year. It's usually dead as heck right now but we've been doing okay.

We finally made Reptiles magazine. Not sure if anybody caught it but we're in the ReptiGear section of the March issue.

Alright, I'm off to start updating the site. Until next time!

I know, I know...it's the quiet time of year, I'm supposed to be updating every week. Things should be getting better. We're doing the St. Louis show on 12/28 then we'll be done with shows until the June timeframe. We have the hognose and rosies laid down for a long winter's nap, and a good portion of our '08 offsprings are gone.

The ball breeding season has kicked off with a bang. Only my mojave is failing to do the job. The pinstripe I showed off below is breeding like a machine and has locked up with my two pastel females at least 3 times each already. The axanthic, spider, and ghost are all also doing well. The pastel is doing pretty well, but not quite as much 'gusto' as I'd like. I have 4 1/2 pastel females breeding this year (the 1/2 is one that's only about 1400g), pretty excited about having the chance to produce bumblebees, supers, and lemon blasts all next year.

The rack biz is going VERY well for this time of year. We have had some big orders go out and just some steady business. Thanks to all of you for keeping us going throughout the winter!

Speaking of winter, it's friggin' cold here in Indiana. Bitter, bitter cold. Without windchill it's about 16 degrees outside right now. I don't mind a bit of winter weather but this is silly. 10 minutes outside and your face feels like it's going to crack.

Alright, that's enough of an update for now. I hope everybody has a great holiday season and we look forward to seeing some of you in St. Louis on the 28th.

To all of those faithful followers, I apologize. The past few months I just got in a bit over my head. I've done a poor job of keeping the 'blog' updated as well as keeping my animal selection on the website updated (the rosies for example haven't been updated all year).

The past few weeks have been a blur. We spent almost every night in the shop and almost two entire weekends getting ready for the big Tinley Park show. The show was last weekend and things went well. We took the whole crew: myself, Misha, Brett, and Richard and did we ever need it. There were several times that we couldn't keep up. We ended up selling about 30 animals and 14 racks. Weird thing happened with the racks. We sold almost every small rack that we took but didn't sell a SINGLE big one. How odd. Usually at shows like that, the big racks go much better than the small ones. Anyways, things went well, we all got a long, got some good bonding time in (only the 3rd time this year that Misha and I have had a night alone), and we didn't totally lose our butts.

Here are some of my favorite pics from the show:

The trailer was PACKED, 22 racks plus 4 more in Richards truck; The Jason's Jungle gang: Brett, me, Misha, and Richard; The 'sand boa guys': myself, Scott Miller, Scott Stark, and Chris Smith

The 'setup', we got shorted a table space so we had to make due; everybody working hard during teardown...except me, I was just having fun taking pictures HAHAHA!

It just wouldn't be Tinley if I didn't pick something up. I know I'm supposed to be cutting back but I just LOVE lemon blasts. I have 4 adult pastel females but no pinstripe...so on Sunday we went on the prowl to find a breeder pinstripe and we did just that. We almost sucked it up and bought a blast but it was only an early '08 and I didn't want to take the chances. Here's our new acquisition:

The cutbacks are going very well. I have a few more things I'm still trying to move:

Breeder Yellow Ghost Male - $400
Het Genetic Stripe male - $75
Breeder Female Ball Pythons - $150/each

For those that haven't heard, Sterilite dealt me a swift kick in the nuts. They are discontinuing their ClearView product line that has become the standard in rack systems (taking a bow as I was one of the first, when I got into this, everybody was using Rubbermaids). We're stockpiling everything that we can but I'm envisioning a dead period here in December where I quit making racks and see what the heck they're going to do. They have some replacement tubs that are 'good' but not as good as the ClearView. The worse part is that the sweater box and blanket box tubs (the 15 quart and 32 quart equivalents) aren't the same height so no more sideways rack, it will become just a juvenile rack.

We're off to St. Louis next weekend, armed mostly with big racks :) We'll be bringing balls, rosies, and sand boas as well of course. Hope to see our friends over on the Mississippi then. I'm off to bed, hopefully we'll update here in the next few weeks. Until then....