I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Never mind all this telescope shit, Jon — what about your damn snake collection? Tell us something new about that!”

Well, all right then.

Here’s our new — and fricking heavy — cage unit. This has been planned for years, and was ordered months ago. Little Ray’s built it; custom cage construction is one of their side gigs.

Once the paint fumes dissipate a bit, and we install the locks on the sliding glass doors, the unit’s new tenants will be as follows: one boa constrictor, two black pine snakes, and two bullsnakes, all of whom could stand bigger digs than they currently have. Once they’re in their new cages, other snakes will move into their old digs, and so on, and so on, so that even the small snakes who’ve outgrown their small cages will get an upgrade. All part of the plan I made a couple of years ago. It’ll probably take the rest of the month to get everybody moved, though.

And then there’s this, also from Little Ray’s:

We don’t buy very many snakes nowadays, but we made an exception for this young male Cape Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer vertebralis), born earlier this year. We have an older female that we bought last year, and have foolish breeding plans for the two of them. (Foolish in that expecting any success in snake breeding, given our luck lately, is rather foolhardy.)