I want my utopia to be known for its secrecy from Andorrmonoswazithocypusinganauarmenibrumarino city, and its ability to expand and defeat the massive army of Andorrmonoswazithocypusinganauarmenibrumarino city so quickly. Here’s a the website to my utopia so you can find out what this is about. Sorry I don’t have a link, but I have no idea how to make one, so just copy and paste the web site.

The best kinds of comments for helping create communities are probably things like constructive criticism, but not just like “improve on this part of your project” But like a lot of people have said, create a link to someone else’s project which was really good, or give details on a part you really liked so they know that you didn’t just skim it.

The Life…Or So It May Seem……Of A Gecko

 by Chris with the title by Rachel because Chris was too lazy to make one

This is actually based on the lives of my pet geckos with an appearance by my cat and my other pets later on in the story. And by later on I mean whenever the day comes that I feel like writing more, if that day ever comes…

CHAPTER 1
Geico the gecko was hungry again. His small body was pressed against he glass, his huge eyes staring forward into Snowflake’s cage. He saw the last cricket of the week, a small, frail cricket perched on the rock. Snowflake, the bigger gecko was staring up at it. His lazy eyes rolled upward and focused on the insect’s thorax. This is how he spent every day of his life, a comfortable, monotonous existence inside a small cage. But it was better than being in a cage half the size shared with about 5 other albino geckos like himself. At least he was healthy. The cricket was starting to move away now, drawn to the battered carcass of another cricket like himself. Snowflake lifted his head and the cricket disappeared. His jaws flexed, and the insect began to be digested. Eventually Geico became bored with watching the larger, more muscular leopard gecko wipe the entrails of the insect off his lips with his long tongue. Geico was not a leopard gecko. He lived his life in the metabolic fast lane. For a reptile. He looked into the cage to his left. The tiny day gecko was basking as usual, its tiny body not covering a fourth of the small rock. Geico wondered if his friends would be classified as liquids. The little panther gecko at least made the most of his life in a cage, playing with his toys, hunting like an active predator, not spending all day basking in his heat lamp and eating waxworms, the #1 greatest snack known to geckos, like Snowflake does all day. Oh well. Then out of the corner of his eye he saw something reaching into the cage next to his. He saw a huge peach colored object suddenly expanding, and 7 mineral dusted crickets fell from the sky into the seemingly empty cage. Feeding time. The chubby leopard gecko who took residence in the old cage crawled out from under the paper towel bedding in his terrarium. The cage was old and slightly cracked at the top. The screen cover was being held together by tape. It had once belonged to a snake, a two foot long corn snake, then when the snake got a huge new cage in February, the cage was stored in the garage. It was used to house an injured starling in April, then it belonged to Geico. Then in November, Verdi arrived and took over the old cage. Geico was moved into one that was smaller, but it had its own heat lamp. When Verdi died from some sort of sickness later that month, the cage was stored on that same shelf on which she died. Later in the year, the cage had secretly been taken out in the late night. Then it had been returned in the morning, Sunny inside. He stared above the cage, at a photograph of three geckos. One was Snowflake, the large one on the far right. The middle one was him, a small brown creature with elegant white spots adorning his back. Then to the left of him was an even smaller gecko, one that was green and blue, with orange spots splattered over his green back. He remembered a moment when his little friend Verdi was still alive. It was the first day Verdi was there at Geico’s house, or, the house of the human who kept him as a pet. Verdi was calming down from the long trip home from downtown Denver. The crickets in her cage were staggering around or hopping to their various dark hiding places. A plant in the cage moved, and a tiny green gecko with bright red spots all over its body dropped out, her large eyes scanning the ground for any potential victims. There was no way that anyone could have thought that this miniscule creature, perhaps an inch long, could take on a cricket half her size. Then Geico saw what was sure to change his view of his tiny friend. Verdi spotted one instantly. Her eyes swiveled in their sockets and focused so hard that it looked like she was going to burn a hole in the soon to be disemboweled body. The little insect noticed. But too late. Verdi struck, her head plowing into the floor of the cage, yanking the cricket off its feet and banging its head on the cold, hard floor. Her tiny teeth clamped down on the cricket’s leg like a vice. Pain shot through the cricket’s leg, triggering an explosion of pain in the tiny nerve bundle in the head cavity of the insect, a pathetic, mediocre substitute for a brain compared to Verdi’s larger control tower for her more advanced nervous system. The bleeding cricket kicked, and shot form the gecko’s mouth and hit the hard, sharp rocks of the water bowl headfirst, lay stunned for a second, then began to drag its wounded body away, its leg hanging by a thread of breaking tendon. Verdi once again spotted movement in the rock. Her huge blue eyes locked on the cricket, dragging itself up her basking rock rock. The cricket tried to use its remaining legs to shuffle up the steep edge of the rock, leaving a trail of ultraviolet blood behind it like some wounded alien from Star Trek. Verdi’s acute peripheral vision focused on the cricket’s body. She sprinted toward the cricket, her legs pumping insanely. The cricket emit a chirp of fright. Verdi took the cricket in her mouth and shook it, like a terrier shaking a rat. The cricket felt a loss of sense in the abdomen. The tiny green killer began to bludgeon the head of the suffering creature on the hard, unforgiving ground. Then the shaking began once more. The head of the cricket made short contact with the rock, a conveniently placed, unnecessarily sharp rock edge plunging deep into the skull like structure that was at one time a head. Then Verdi opened her mouth and the cricket fell on its neck at Verdi’s feet, dying painfully. The cricket rotated its head, snapping more vital tendons connected to organs. The insect twitched at what felt like a lung being pulled from its inside. He stared into the heat lamp, to see what had become of the once intact body. Instead he saw a blurred image of what looked like a huge purple cavern falling onto his battered thorax. The stalagmites and stalagtites of this purple cavern stabbed his body, and with another explosion of pain his frontmost right leg was wrenched from its socket. Then he fell from the gecko’s mouth again, only to see the neck cocked back, a hot pink tongue washing its entrails from the gecko’s lips. The final attack came in slow motion. The gecko’s head plunged forward, hitting the cricket with nearly deadly effect. The teeth dug into the ripped open entrails that were seeping out of the exoskeleton of the cricket. The cricket cringed as its remaining antenna picked up the sickening SPLAT of insides hitting the glass side of the cage, propelled out the back of its abdomen from the ferocity of the gecko’s bite. The gecko’s jaws crunched down, tightening its death grip on the scarred, dented carcass of the cricket. She held her jaws, getting tighter all the time, as if to prolong the cricket’s suffering. 30 long, harsh seconds elapsed while the cricket slowly took its last breaths through the blood clogged pores it its bleeding sides. Finally, when she was sure that it was dead, she threw back her head, using gravity to swallow its remaining body parts. One of its legs, amazingly still intact, fell from Verdi’s mouth and landed on the ground. Some tan colored, gelatinous liquid began to seep out. Another cricket was gone, its dismembered body slithering down the throat of the little gecko. Another victim dragged chirping in pain down the gecko’s foaming gullet, to meet its end in the gecko’s stomach cavity. Although it seemed like an eternity for the attack to end, it took a mere 40 seconds, but it would normally take only 20, with all the steps of killing the cricket, had it not been for the cricket’s short escape, its short trip toward the light at the end of the tunnel, only to be pulled back down to the crushing blackness of to the stomach of the gecko. Verdi, however was not satisfied. She was still hungry. Geico watched this grim process repeated 3 times more. 3 more victims dragged chirping to their acidic tomb in the belly of the tiny green murderer. These memories were the only things he had to remember Verdi by. Although lots of them were pretty grim and depressing like this last flashback, there were a few happy moments that the two friends shared. And Snowflake, although he couldn’t see into the cage, could remember when they had about 7 pictures taken together, and he could look at the photos above him, although he had no idea what they were, the creature in the picture reminded him of Verdi. As Geico became bored again, he returned to the cool, moist retreat under his rock shelter, his stomach full of broken up cricket parts. His chubby tail, round and healthy like it should be, served as a blubbery pillow to rest his head. He was not a fat gecko, but was actually really skinny, but his tail was a fat storage area for him, so he could survive for about 3 weeks without food. The calcium sand beneath him was rough against his scales, but didn’t bother him.

    CHAPTER 2

Geico woke up a couple of hours later, his stomach churning smoothly. He liked the feeling. He crawled lethargically out of the burrow. He felt a bit chilly. Snow was lightly falling outside. Fat snowflakes were gently hitting the glass of the window, then melting slowly. Geico was staring at. Never before had he seen snow. He gaped in amazement at the translucent white shapes sliding slowly down the glass. The dark sky outside only darkened the already dark room even more. The only light in the upstairs area in the house came from the laptop playing Survivor “Marquesas” in one room, and the powerful heat lamps beating down on the backs of the geckos. Geico peered out of the cage, staring at the empty blackness of the room he was in. A movement in the corner of the room made the small gecko nervous. A sleek black figure crawled into the darkness out of the great expanse of hallway that seemed to stretch for miles outside the room. Snowflake seemed to notice, too. He didn’t seem to care. He didn’t show the tail twitches and alert nature of a frightened gecko. Geico was about to follow his larger friend’s example and remain calm. Then he fled backwards in fright as a puffy, multicolored creature flew through the air and came to a smooth landing in front of the tank. The creature lifted its head and opened its mouth in a yawn. The smell of gravy and turkey made the geckos’ eyes water. The animal’s eyes, huge and luminous in the dark, were half-closed in a bored, self-centered kind of way. The short, broad muzzle twitched, tired and curious at the same time. Geico stepped forward to see this large, fuzzy animal. Its lips curled into a malevolent smile and it began to bat at the cage with furry paws, claws outstretched. There was a rattle of clawed hands clanking against the glass. Suddenly the door swung open. Light flooded the room. The animal jumped about 3 feet in the air and took a comical landing in a pile of papers and boxes. She tumbled out, covered in string. Her expressive lips were curled into a look of forced cat laughter. She slunk out of the room. She shot Geico a look of anger, a look that said, “I’ll be back”, then her face softened as she looked at Snowflake’s cage into a look of almost love and friendship. Then she looked boredly at Verdi’s cage, barely glancing at it before she scurried down the hall, lovingly batting at the heels of the human. Geico crawled back into the burrow. He didn’t want to be scared out of his mind by the cat again. He heard a clatter above him. He looked outside the burrow at the white sand. It suddenly turned a light gray color. A shadow was passing over him. He had seen this before. His rock was suddenly lifted skyward and sand fell off it onto him. He was blinded by the heat lamp’s light. Then a massive shadow blocked the lamp’s glare. A huge head appeared into view as his eyes adjusted. He could see the faint outline of a hand, the same one that had dumped all the crickets into Verdi’s cage a month and a half ago. The hand opened and grabbed his body. He was lifted up into the air, past the blinding light of the heat lamp, past the shelf on which he lived, up to a face. The most massive face he’d ever seen, but a face he saw regularly through the glass as it scanned his cage weekly. He saw past the thick forest of awesome hair another human entering the room. The first human, the familiar one, moved his head to the right, so the wall of puffy hair blocked his view again. Then the human twirled around and Geico came face to face with the second human. This one had a different face and hair that was longer but less thick and puffish than the first human’s. The second human walked slowly to Verdi’s old cage, the cage that now held Sunny. Her eyes scanned the cage to find her. Upon spotting him, she put on a wide grin and uttered something at him in a soft, admiring way. Sunny hid under his paper towels. Geico struggled furiously but the human didn’t seem to notice. He began to calm down gradually, knowing in the back of his mind that they meant him no harm. The hand softened its grip, then opened. The people began to talk in their native tongue, then the new one laughed at something the other one said. Their language was nothing like the tail wags and squeaks he used back at PetsMart. He understood nothing of what they were saying. He knew, however that they were not a threat, however scary they seemed. They had never hurt him before anyway. Suddenly he felt a cold hand touch his back scales. His instincts screamed at him to jump, and he did. He hit the ground with a thud. He heard a yell and then felt a blast of air as the hand that held him seconds ago came crashing to the ground next to him. He ran. That was he only defense his instincts could come up with at the moment. He finally reached the couch. The humans were not far behind. He ducked and slid under the couch. He could barely make out a noise that sounded like, “nice, Chris”, then heard the more familiar voice yelling, “CRAP!!!” at the decibel level of a plane crash. So the one with the hair the size of my cage is called Chris, Geico found out. He filed this new knowledge away in his memory bank. But now Geico was alone. In the frightening blackness. With no waxworms to eat. (dramatic music)

CHAPTER 3

Snowflake crawled out of his hollow log slowly. His stomach barely touched the sand in his cage, weighed down with waxworms from earlier. He stared blankly into Geico’s small tank, then stared through the glass into Sunny’s. He spotted a fat waxworm and gulped it down. He shook off a bit of goop from the worm and returned to looking at the cages. Something was not right. Usually at night Geico was running around his cage, feasting on the abundance of crickets inside his small cage. Snowflake stared harder into Sunny’s again. Sunny was where he always was at feeding time, in the middle of the floor, killing all the crickets in sight. He saw him lunge at a large one, then swallowing down the twitching insect . Something fell off it as Snowflake crawled away. He looked up into the room he was in and saw three people walking in. Two he recognized, one he had only seen a few times before, mostly in the summer and late fall. They crossed the room and crowded around the bed against the wall. The one who was known as Chris got down on his hands and knees and put his face to the ground, looking for Geico, who was still under the large tan colored bed. He pointed at one end of the bed with a large black stick with light at the end. His thumb moved and the light disappeared with a click. The human tossed the stick to the side. It landed with a clatter. Snowflake wondered what they were doing. They lifted up the couch and began to look under. Under the couch was a cornucopia of candy wrappers, orange peels, and peach pits. And curled up atop one of the peach pits was a tiny little brown gecko about 2 inches in length. Geico took one look at the humans and bolted for the next dark little hole. The hands came crashing down again, trying to pin him to the ground. Geico made a leap for what looked like a ragged brown rock. He hit it and three of his legs, he realized, were dangling into a series of long holes in the rock. It was a heat vent. He decided between going into another dark hole and facing three or four angry humans charging at him, each one roughly 4000 times his weight. What choice did he have? He shot headfirst down the hole, narrowly missing some sharp rock things which were actually misplaced screws, and coming to a stop in a pile of very old orange peels. He crawled down the dark tunnel farther, distancing himself from the humans. He crawled for about another hour, occasionally coming to a dead end at a large fan. He wisely backed away when he came to one. He was inside the heating area of the house. He turned another corner to come face to face with another fan. He stepped backwards and rounded another corner. A small light was glowing at the end of the tunnel. He headed toward it, curious and optimistic that it would lead to his cage. He crawled up the tunnel some more and stared hard at the light, deciding where it led. He inched forward some more. There was a slope in front of him and at the top, through several long, thin openings, was the source of the light. As he peered into the room, the light switched off and the room was illuminated by a strange blue glow unlike the first light. It wasn’t something that would light up everything around you, but a faint glow against a pale cream colored wall. He tried to climb up the slope but it was too steep for him. He stepped forward some more. His claws wouldn’t dig into the rock, which was actually metal. Smooth, cold metal. He moved a little closer. Something crunched under his foot. A shiny flat object slid down the slope. The front was slightly wrinkled, good for climbing on. The words on the front said Capri Sun. Strawberry flavored. Although he couldn’t read, he recognized the wrinkles in the surface as a way to get out of the tunnels of the heating system. He gripped the edges of the still sweet smelling sac and began the climb. The sac lurched dangerously. If he fell, three sharp, spiraling screws would gladly await him when he fell. He climbed a little farther up. The sac lurched again, this time losing more of its grip. Now it was beginning to slide. Geico made a leap for another pile of orange peels. Then he realized that they were caught on another screw sticking out of the ground. He reached his leg out to one of the peels, then realized that was a mistake. The sac gave way completely and he found himself falling toward the screws sticking out of the ground.

TO BE CONTINUED….. EVENTUALLY………

If you didn’t figure it out, Geico is in the heating system of the house. He’s not dead, as some people have asked me.

       These are some questions I am answering after seeing the Anne Frank play downtown.
What would it be like having to leave like Anne did? What would you take?

It would be hard. I would bring as much as physically possible. I would bring, for a start, as much food as possible, for example, some oranges, a pack of chips or something, and maybe some capri suns. And maybe some of my pets, like the snake, geckos, cat, mice, and and maybe the fish and shrimp. I would take some small comforting objects, like books and a stuffed animal or something. I would also take my large and very expensive set of golf clubs to hide under my bed in case the Nazis came in the night….

What would it be like if you didn’t have time to pack a suitcase?

It would be even harder. I would grab my backpack, and stuff it full of anything I could find within a couple of minutes. Food, comfort objects, and my longest, hardest golf club, preferably one with a solid metal end. Even something like a paper clip might come in handy eventually.

<(O_o)> <(o_o)> <(O_O)> <(o_O)> <(O_O)> <(^_^)> (>^_^)> <(^_^<)

<(^o^)> <(>_<)> <(^^_^^)> <(^_^)> <(()_())>   d[0_0]b     <[^_^]>    <[^_^<]

<(^_^< __ >^_^)> these two are stuck together and are trying to pull each other apart.

DO NOT READ THIS POST. EVER.

    Sounds Familiar - That was the worst song I’ve ever heard in my life. It persuaded me to kill myself.

Punk Rawk Show - Better than the last one. Actually relatively good.

Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying - That was depressing. I agree with Katy. It does make me want to listen to the first one again. It was pretty horrible. Like the Beatles except bad. Beatles rock. So do geckos.

I only like the 2nd one. The other two were awful.

I just posted this to take up space. And geckos rule.

A pair of yellow, glowing eyes snap open. The eyes are large, sharp, intelligent, focused yet wandering. The eyes of a gecko. Slowly she moves to another leaf, her toe pads clinging to the moist surface. She peers into the darkness of the forest. A moth floats by just a few inches away from her head. She focuses her eyes on the moth’s wings, her sharp peripheral vision locks on the insect as it flutters by her face. She is one of a subspecies of rare spearpoint leaftail gecko, uroplatus henkeli. As she closes her eyes, her stub of a tail twitches. The moth’s eyes, taking up 50% of its head, rotate from the addicting juice of the lotus blossom to the not so addicting sight of an open mouth clamping down upon its thorax. The gecko sits on her leaf, another moth dissapearing down her throat. Another moth, larger this time, makes the mistake of landing on the same flower that still was vibrating from the impact of the gecko’s jaws. The moth takes in the same sight as its unfortunate neighbor: a large yellow and orange mouth lunging toward its frail body. As the gecko continues to slice the moth up by means of its little yellow teeth, it detects a rumbling sound. The tree is moving in irregular spasms, too strong to be wind. Another gecko, a day gecko, whizzes by the tiny leaf tail. She looks down. An ocelot gecko, a member of the bighead gecko family, kicks up dust as it runs. The vibrations grow stronger. The sound of something or another fills the once quiet air. Like a bee but worse. The sound, so loud and harsh, is total agony to the gecko’s sensitive ears. Then the vibrations come to an abrupt halt. The tree sways once, then begins to fall. The gecko recoils as a colubrid snake barely misses her leg as it plunges onto the darkness below. A crash is heard as the reptile hits the ground violently. Then the tree stops falling for a second. There is a sudden stop as the tree hits another, then keeps going. The gecko emits a squeal as the force of a severed branch knocks her off the leaf. She lets fly a bark when she is falling, falling, falling, into the dark leaf litter. She sees a tiny Brookesia chameleon pass out next to her. Its tiny brain couldn’t take any more stress. She feels a hand clamp around her. She is lifted up to the head of something completely unknown to geckos of that forest. A flat, bearded face gring in delight. Into a bag she goes, sruggling and biting the hand that holds her so tightly. She can’t move. She can barely breathe. And she is hurt. Bruised from the hand that crushed her ribcage, cut from landing on the ground from a 20 foot drop. And the normal aches and pains from living in the wild. Days later, she ends up in a room filled with bright lights and noise and the barks of other geckos, not her species. It drove her insane. She tried to flee, but runs into nothing. Her snout suffers a sharp crack as she hits some invisible force field between her and freedom. Again she backs up and runs at the end of fthe table she is on. But again the psycic wall of energy holds her back. She’s in a cage. In a reptile show. In America. Thousands of miles away from Madagascar.

This is what so many poor geckos experience when they are taken from their habitat. Every day  more and more places like Madagascar are destroyed. And it’s not just geckos that suffer. Chameleons, lemurs, insects like butterflies and hissing cockroaches, frogs, foosas (like in the movie Madagscar) and birds all die every day from deforesting. Every second, half an acre of rainforest is destroyed. That’s 30 acres per minute. And 1200 acres an hour. If you haven’t already seen Aaron’s story you will see this in his too. We need to do something about this. Take lemurs, for example. They are found nowhere else in the world. If you’ve seen the movie Madagascar, look at the lemurs there. Like King Julien, their weird king, and Mort, the tiny, tiny little mouse like animal, is a lemur too. And Maurice, the grumpy, negative little guy. Do you want them all to go extinct?? DO YOU?!!?  And the rest of the wonderful wildlife there. Like geckos.

Rainforests are really important.  They give us oxygen. Lots of oxygen. We can’t survive for more than about 5 minutes without oxygen. And a lot of everyone’s favorite foods come from the rainforest. Like bananas, coffee, peaches, and CHOCOLATE and that sort of thing come from certain plants in the rainforest. And a lot of really cool animals which people like a lot live there. Like butterflies and jaguars and and monkeys and birds and Cetaphorys Ornata and other such things. We really need to do something about this problem. Eventually, if left alone, the rainforests would be obliterated so fast it’s not even funny. And geckos rule.

We need to do something about the rainforests of Madagascar and all the animals in them. If we don’t, they will be destroyed and all the things in them will just be a memory that a lot of people never got the opportunity to experience. There will be no more lemurs, foosas, tenrecs, or wild pigs. No more frogs, toads, snakes, and salamanders. No more agamids, normal lizards, geckos, monitors or chameleons. And no more parrot, hummingbirds, songbirds, or waterbirds. And the beautiful rainforests of Madagascar and the rest of the world will vanish. And they will all be turned into things like badly painted chairs that no one buys and cheap paper towles. Do you want rainforests to turn into badly painted chairs and cheap paper towles? And geckos still rule