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Em and I went to the ever-amazing East Bay Vivarium a couple of weekends ago, to adopt a new cockroach. Em was brave enough to come inside with me - if only for the first couple of minutes. She eventually she got creeped out, and had to go wait outside until I was done. Wuss. As for me, I just thought it would be tough to pick out a new pet roach, but it didn’t work out that way at all. At first glance, all the roaches were simply *gone*. When I inquired, a staffer explained. They mostly breed roaches as food for the *other* critters they sell (alas), and someone had unwittingly picked out the top breeding roaches as snacks for hungry reptiles, thereby decimating the in-store roach population pretty much overnight. Seeing my crestfallen look, said staffer told me he would go check in the back room, and see if there were any young males that could be spared. He came back a couple of minutes later with… OTKA!

Here’s one of our first pictures of Otka, sitting in my hand after we brought him home (click the thumbnail for a full-size, 110 kB image):

He’s much smaller than Karl was, and completely black. We expect that he will grow quite a bit - probably to around Karl’s adult size. That means he’ll be molting, which is cool, since Karl was a mature adult when we met him, and so we’ve not yet seen a cockroach molt. It’ll also be interesting to see his color change from solid black to the lovely black-and-brown pattern of an adult. I’ll post more pictures once some visible changes have taken place.

As for Otka’s name, it was, like Otka himself, chosen for us. Karl was named after a blue-eyed porcupine pufferfish who had lived (and died) at a place called 826 Valencia, here in San Francisco. Since then, the folks at 826 Valencia have acquired a *new* blue-eyed porcupine pufferfish, and have named her Otka. We decided that we would just keep following their lead, and so our new roach is named Otka as well. They’re not actually sure that Otka (the fish) is female, but they’re going with that until they determine otherwise. Likewise, we’re not as sure of Otka’s gender as we were of Karl’s, since Otka is still so young, which makes it harder to tell. We’re certainly *hoping* that our Otka is male - or at the very least, NOT PREGNANT. We want *one* pet roach (at a time), not dozens.

Anyhow, Otka is safe in his new home, and seems to be settling in. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello - he’s a little shy, but we’re trying to get him used to being around people while he’s still a youngster…

It’s been nearly a month since my last long post - time for another. As usual, my lame excuse for not posting is all the travelling I’ve been doing. Not that I posted more often back when I wasn’t travelling as much. Whatever - the good thing about waiting a month is that more things have happened since the last post, so you have more to write about. That assumes you actually *remember* what you wanted to write about by the time you sit down to do it - not one of my strong suits.

Right now, I’m in a rather sweet hotel in Surf City, USA - literally. The seaside town of Huntington Beach, CA, located in the County of Orange. I’m down here for the week working for a client, and this is one of the nicer places to do it. After work today, I walked along the beach, and then strolled out onto the Huntington Beach Pier to watch the surfers and the sunset. Once the sun was gone, I snarfed some dee-licious ribs at Smokin’ Mo’s BBQ, then a grande decaf at Starbuck’s, and then walked back to the hotel. My room has a balcony with an ocean view - did I mention this pad was sweet? I just wish Em were here…

I’ve got a few things I’ve been meaning to blog about, but haven’t gotten around to - in other words, my “backblog“. But at least a couple of those things are worthy of their own posts, so that’s what they’ll get. Soon. In the meantime, I just had a *nice* travel day, and so for once I came back to my hotel room and actually felt like posting. So I’m posting.