What do turtles want for Christmas?

This week I had my last visit with Pam, the turtle rehabber, for the year.  It’s already a slow time of year, and her kids are home from college for the holidays, so she said she most likely won’t have time to do anything new with me, so it’s a natural time to take a break.  That’s fine with me, as I’ve entered into that holiday-rush season myself and I’m working on other things I’d like to be done before the new year.

At this meeting, I was supposed to be taking pictures and getting histories of her non-native turtles to list on adoption sites.  She seems to have asked around, just people she knows, and found people willing to take them in the near future, so doing all that isn’t necessary at the moment.

Instead of doing that, she suggested I help set up her paypal account so she could accept donations online.  However, she decided after some research on how it all works to hold off until her non-profit status is official.  So, nothing to do there.

Finally, I suggested making a wish list to post on her page.  After looking at a variety of options, we decided just to go with Amazon.  Even though they have made it more difficult to add stuff that isn’t sold on Amazon to wish lists (the plugin to just press a button and add it doesn’t work anymore on all browsers, and non-amazon items don’t show price or picture anymore….way to have a monopoly, Amazon), you can still add other stuff.  Just click “add an idea” and paste the link of the website with that product into the box.  After you save, you can add a comment that says the price of the item and anything else you can think of to write that will make people want to buy it.  One thing I did learn in showing her this process of creating a list is that old-style incandescent bulbs make a sufficient amount of heat if close enough to the basking area that you don’t need to buy the super-expensive heat bulbs, though they do burn out faster than the heat ones.  You still need UVB bulbs, of course, but that’s a cost-saving measure that is good to know.  Another thing I learned was that dentist tools and wax carving tools make good surgical instruments for turtles and can be bought online.  At any rate, we added a couple dozen things to the wish list, and she was going to post the link to her rehab page on facebook (which I suggested to use the title of this blog entry as the title of her post and showed her how to share the link to her list), but I haven’t seen the list posted yet.  

Until next time!