Tempus F*@it

Five Years.

Veiled Chameleons live five years. Seven if you're really, really good at keeping them alive. That means the little reptile has about 4 years 9 months and 3 weeks left to live.

I was thinking today about how narsty it will be the day we come downstairs and find a psychedically coloured pigeon-sized reptile dead in his cage. I guess finding your Great Dane or the Gas Meter Reader Guy would be worse. I think they say that dead pets teach children valuable lessons about the circle of life. I've never heard them say anything to the adults that have to dispose of them.

I do not know where one puts a dead chameleon. Is that a green bin item? Compostable?

He's three times the size he was when I brought him home a couple weeks ago. Makes sense... he's got a whole arc of a life to fit into that little half-decade space: speedy childhood, a couple months of crotchety adolescence, a diploma in three weeks (welding), middle age for a year, mid-life crisis for an hour and a half (starts dating outside of his subspecies, drives impractical car), a happy retirement perched in the branches.

I'd like him to live to old age, to see the whole show, you know? Yesterday morning he was growing a chunk of crystallized salt out of his nostril- a sign that we've been over-supplementing him with minerals. It isn't a serious problem, and since I noticed it so quickly it's easy to reverse, but it was still the first time I found myself less than perfectly confident that despite our inexperience we could keep the little bugger alive.




I really don't want to kill that chameleon.