{"id":1750,"date":"2011-04-19T23:32:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T14:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2011-04-19\/1750"},"modified":"2011-04-19T23:32:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-19T14:32:15","slug":"new-pet-new-ordeals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2011-04-19\/1750","title":{"rendered":"New Pet, New Ordeals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\nNOTE<\/b>: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size.\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Anthony returned home from school yesterday with a little<\/span> pill bug<\/a> he'd found and\ncarried carefully in his hands for the half-hour bus ride. He thought<\/span> it\nwas extremely cute and wanted to keep it as a pet,<\/span> so we put some wet dirt\nand grass into a Tupperware<\/span> dish for the bug's new home.<\/p>\n\n

I am not a bug person, and perhaps even less a “terrestrial\ncrustacean” person, which is what these things apparently are. But a pill<\/span> bug is better at this stage than the puppy he's been asking for, and\nwe want to encourage the responsibility of taking care of another living\ncreature, so we now have a new<\/span> pet bug.<\/p>\n\n

But tragedy struck this evening when he dropped the little guy into the\nsink, and he disappeared down the drain. Anthony didn't cry straight out,\nbut you could tell he was afraid for his new friend, and was really trying\nhard to hold back the tears. It was sweet<\/span> and touching.<\/p>\n\n

I explained that the bug would just wash out to the river and be fine,\nbut we'd not see him again unless I went<\/span> looking in the sink trap. He wanted<\/span> me to look, so I got<\/span> a wrench<\/span> and emptied out everything under the\nsink and removed the trap, to find.... nothing.<\/p>\n\n

There was a horrendous amount of gunk in the pipe from the sink,\nalong with the stopper mechanism, so it's possible that the bug was in there.\nRunning additional water, poking around with an old toothbrush, and peering\nin with a flashlight<\/span> did not locate the bug, though it did help lead to\na much<\/span> cleaner drain. I figured<\/span> that the bug had made its way to the aforementioned river.<\/p>\n\n

Anthony was quite sad, but it was getting late, so he had to start his\nhomework while I soldiered<\/span> on trying to at least clean the drain, after\nabout a dozen<\/span> sprayings with high-pressure water (via the\nthumb-over-the-tap method), the bug plopped down into the bucket under the\nsink. After drying him off and confirming that it was alive, I called<\/span> Anthony over and watched the relief wash over him.<\/p>\n\n

Anthony took the bug back to its home while I put<\/span> the sink\nback together.<\/p>\n\n

The things parents do for their kids....<\/p>\n\n

(Why can't things be like when I was<\/span> young, when all kids were angels and nothing ever went wrong?)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony returned home from school yesterday with a little pill bug he'd found and carried carefully in his hands for the half-hour bus ride. He thought it was extremely cute and wanted to keep it as a pet, so we put some wet dirt and grass into a Tupperware dish for the bug's new home.<\/p>

I am not a bug person, and perhaps even less a \"terrestrial crustacean\" person, which is what these things apparently are. But a pill bug is better at this stage than the puppy he's been asking for, and we want to encourage the responsibility of [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}