Rachel deserves a blog post.

My Alter Ego, Rachel, was so thoughtful and made a whole post for me on her blog (http://nutshellinmaine.blogspot.com/) and so I believe she deserves to have her own post on my blog!

Dear Rachel,
I had the best three-day weekend with you these past few days. I really miss not hanging out with you for long periods of time. I'm so freaking excited that I'll see you tomorrow at chorus. Even though we'll only see each other for a little while, I'm excited.
         I love love love your hair skillz and I'm going to need them with my new due (Is that how you spell like, hair due? I'm not sure...) Oh, you need to tell me what to say at girls chorus related to hair. However, I don't think I'm going to girls chorus this week, oh well.
             By the way, I love you. <3
                               As always,
                                      Moira

History, of course!

Although I don't find History my favorite subject this year, this particular paper caught my interest for some reason. I recently found out that I got an A on it. I've been thinking for a while that I should post something that proves there's more to my life than my pets. And so, here is a paper that I recently wrote on the the First Punic War. I hope you enjoy!

(Yes, it's very long. But who knows, if you read the whole thing you might learn something new)

                                               Summary of the First Punic War

            The first Punic war was fought primarily between Syracuse, Rome, and Carthage; although a group of Italian mercenaries were the cause of the war, they did not participate for very long. This war was fought on the island of Sicily which at that time was divided into three. One third of the island belonged to Carthage, one third to Italian mercenaries and one third belonged to Syracuse. Also, a large portion of this war was fought by the Naval units.

            In 288 BC a group of Italian mercenaries took over Messana, which was one of the three parts of Sicily, which at that time was being ruled by Syracuse. After they had bitterly conquered Messana, without showing mercy they continued to raid the rest of the island of Sicily. By 265 BC the raiding had gone so far that Heiro II, the leader of Syracuse, decided to fight against the mercenaries and reclaim his lost land. Heiro II led an army into Messana and quickly injured the army, making it necessary for the mercenaries to find help. And so the Mercenaries asked Carthage for an alliance, and their immediate help. Along with asking Carthage, the Mercenaries asked Rome for an alliance and help. When Rome first heard that the mercenaries from Messana needed their help, they refused. Rome knew of the harsh way that the mercenaries took over Messana, and did not think that it was honorable for them to help such people. And so, Rome replied that they would not help. Carthage on the other hand agreed to the request and sent their army to Messana right away. This, however, worried the Romans. They feared that Carthage would gain dominance over all of Sicily. And so, Rome took back their first answer, and sent troops to help Messana. This was the beginning of the first Punic war.

 By the time Romans got to the island the Carthaginians had already taken over Messana completely. Now, instead of doing what they said they would do, fight Syracuse, the Roman leader insisted on meeting with the Carthaginian leader. Hanno, the Carthaginian leader, agreed to the meeting because technically the Romans and Carthaginians were on the same side. At least, that’s what they thought. Needless to say, the meeting did not go according to plan and Hanno ended up being threatened with death unless he left the island. After losing their leader the Carthage army did not want to give up, instead they went and asked to join the Syracuse army. Because Heiro II still had such a desire to overtake and regain Messana, he agreed to the joining of Carthage and his own troops. Because of their new larger size, the Carthaginians and Syracuse sent one navy and one army into Messana in hopes of defeating the enemy. Unfortunately they were crushed by the Romans and did not regain Messana. This small defeat for Rome made the Roman leaders believe that they were indeed the strongest army in the battle, which led to disaster.

Because Rome believed they were the strongest they quickly sent two armies out into Sicily. They were now attempting to gain the entire island of Sicily. In the beginning they defeated many cities and towns in Carthage. Once they had conquered almost all the cities and towns of Carthage, they started to put all of their forces on Syracuse alone. This worried Heiro II, the leader of Syracuse, tremendously. He decided the best chance for survival of his cities was to ally himself to Rome. He did so, making Carthage a very weak force. At this point the Romans had conquered two-thirds of Sicily: The Syracuse third, and the Italian third.  Now their only goal was to gain Carthage, the last third. And so they attacked Carthage, and almost defeated them. They took residents and sold them as slaves, and they conquered several of the towns of Carthage. However, Carthage would not give up, and insisted that they move the battle to the open sea. Carthage was known for their incredible seamanship.

Once on the sea Carthage had the clear advantage of seamanship and superiorly built ships. During this short comeback of Carthage, they conquered many of the coastal cities, around the perimeter of Sicily. However, their good fortunes did not last long. Rome knew at once that in order for them to win this battle they would need better ships, as theirs were getting easily thrashed by the Carthaginians. As luck would have it the Romans stumbled upon an intact Carthaginian ship that had been abandoned. They found this ship on the Italian coast of Sicily. There is no real evidence in history saying why exactly that ship had been left there. Rome realized its wonderful luck and began building ships of her own, using the Carthaginian ship as a model. They built hundreds of these ships, and took them to sea. Once again at battle, the Romans still lost a majority of the fights in which they engaged. However, because of this they were able to realize their errors and fix them. The Romans realized they needed to train their seamen. They did this. Realizing that they could take advantage of their land fighting skills if they could board the enemy ships, they devised a type of plan to budge between the ships. A successful venture, this resulted in the capture of 130 Carthaginian ships in 260 BC.

Rome’s success at winning battles continued throughout the next several years, during which Rome was able to conquer many cities, including some in Africa.  The battles continued for so long that ultimately Rome and Carthage were losing a lot of money. At the end, Carthage was forced to step back and let the Romans win the long war. As victors Rome made Syracuse sign a document stating that they would remain firm allies.

As for the toll that this war took, it was not a light one on anyone. More than 400 ships were lost by each side. Carthage was believed to have lost more than 100,000 men, whereas Rome only about 50,000.

            The first Punic war was an arrangement of battles between many cities including Carthage, Rome, Syracuse and Italian mercenaries, and at the end even Africa was pulled into the fighting. This war was fought both on land, where Rome had the advantage, and on sea, where Carthage had the advantage. It was a long, drawn out war that ended finally with Rome as victorious. 

If you've made it this far, congratulations! I really hope you did like it, or at least didn't hate it. 

As always,

     ~Moira

Part two leopard gecko breeding!

Before you start reading this post you need to know that I'm writing it on my phone. Although I'll be as careful as I can be, auto correct can have a mind of its own, and punctuation can be lacking. Also I am insanely tired and cannot think straight even if I try, so this post may end up... Interesting.

As you know from my earlier post, this weekend was the planned get-get-together for the geckos, and so far everything has gone according to plan.

Although before everything started I read that geckos almost always mate when no one is around (it's like how a horse won't give birth when people are in the barn, kind of thing) but we, the owner of the female and I, actually got to witness them. I thought that was pretty amazing. Because we got to see them there's a lot more hope that everything will go well from here on out, and less doubt that nothing will happen.

Okay I'm going to do a brief (that is, 'Moira brief') paragraph on how to start the process of gecko breeding.

If your female is between two and eight or so you'll have better luck. Your male needs to between one and three although older might be okay, I've only ever heard of breeding young males. Mating season is from February to late July or early August. Once it's breeding season all you need to do is put your male gecko into your female gecko's tank. Don't put your female into your male's tank, males are very territorial. If you are lucky, like we were, they will mate right away. No matter what happens right away you should leave the male in there for several hours. Five would be very ideal. After that, no matter what you've seen or haven't seen, take the male out and put him in his own space. This is for two reasons; first to give the female some time to relax, and second, to keep them interested in each other the next time you put the male back in. I suggest leaving the male out over night, then putting him back in with the female in the morning. You can do it the other way around though, because they are nocturnal that would be fine too. This on-off pattern should go on for about four days. By the end of those for days you can be pretty confident that if anything was meant to happen, it would have happened already.


That's all for this post! Although, I think it's a must that I add: I'm so excited about the possibility of babies!


As always,
~Moira

Part One Leopard Gecko Breeding!

                                                                          Part 1

This post is a part one, of a hopefully many-part post. This weekend I am breeding my male leopard gecko with a female gecko who my friend owns. In this many-part post I am going to bring you through all the amazing parts of developing eggs, incubating the eggs, and finally hatching the little creatures.

Anthony (My leo, pictured above) is about two years old. He is a tangerine/carrot tail color morph. Yeah that's a mouth full. Basically he is one good looking reptile. In the picture you can see his bright yellow body color, his tail has some bright orange, some dark purple, and white. Also, for the first several days after a shed, his head has a bright green look. 

The female is also a very good looking gecko. Although I don't know exactly what kind of color morph she is I know she has a beautiful purple look on her tail, and a darker body color. We are hoping to get 4-6 beautiful baby geckos. 

On this blog I am hoping to keep you updated on how everything is going. Like I said above, they will hopefully breed this weekend and if they do in about three months the babies should hatch. The process between now and then however, is incredible. 

I wont explain everything right now, I have to save some things to say in my next posts. 

As always,

        ~Moira

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough of Course!

If you are like me, and prefer the dough of chocolate chip cookies to the baked cookie, but you get frowned upon when you eat raw cookie dough, I believe I have a solution for you sad state of life! 

When you have the strong desire for cookie dough that I know we all get at some point in our lives, just follow my instructions:

Step One: Find your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Step Two: Follow the instructions on the recipe BUT! don't add the eggs. The consumption of raw eggs would be the reason for your getting-frowned-upon. Therefore adding them would be daft on our part wouldn't it? So instead of adding eggs, add 1/4 cup of water for each egg that should be present. 

Step Three: After you have finished with your egg-less dough, you can eat however much you want. You will probably not be able to eat all of it, to your own surprise I am sure. But never rear! It will not go to waste. You could try baking it, however I have a strong feeling this would end in a very messy oven, you getting in trouble, and a pile of cookie goo that does not taste good in the slightest. And so, instead of baking your new masterpiece, freeze it! I always press mine into a flat container and run a knife through it so it will be easy to break once it freezes. 

This way, the next time you feel like cookie dough you simply must get a spoon and head to the freezer. 

However! If you feel like the masterpiece you just made tastes too much like raw butter with chocolate chunks, as I do, I have a plan B! Never fear...

Plan B:

What then, is the remedy for too-buttery cookie dough? Well, remove the butter of course! If you now are scared of me, because you think I am mentally insane you can stop reading if you want. But if you do... you'll never know just what I mean when I say remove the butter. If you are confident enough in me, read on.

Okay so removing the butter AND the eggs from a normal chocolate chip cookie recipe is probably a bad idea. But what if we just used a recipe that didn't call for them? Dun dun dun dun!!! I'm going vegan on you.

After you get over the fact that you might be about to actually try to make something that is vegan, you can continue on with my ingenious plan. 

Step One: Find a vegan chocolate chip cookie dough recipe that you have most of the ingredients for. You can go to the library, or just google it. Once you have a recipe, follow it to a tea. Just don't preheat the oven, or grease any pans. This dough will taste very similarly to the dough of a non-vegan recipe, it just wont have that buttery taste. 

Note: The reason I said "find a recipe that you have most of the ingredients" is because there are many very common substitutes. Here I will name them: Instead of what ever kind of milk it says to use, you can use just normal cows milk (this is, unless you want your dough to be actually vegan) and for tapioca flour, you can use corn starch. 

These are my two solutions to the very common issue of not-enough-cookie-dough! 

I hope you've enjoyed!

As always,

      ~Moira Jane!

Theater!

Ready for a pretty horribly written, random post? Here it comes.

I am currently acting in the role of "Ruth" in "Pirates of Penzance", if you don't know what that is, go look it up.

Tomorrow is the first day of a week of all day play practices. Because of that, I can't stop thinking about it, therefore, a blog post is necessary. Before I started writing this post I had no idea what I was going to write about, so I'm just making this up as I go. So just bare with me.

I have been in a handful of theater shows. Here is some shows that I've done:
William Shakespeare's: The Tempest as: Miranda
William Shakespeare's: A midsummer night's dream as :Bottom
Guilbert and Sullivan's: Patience as a maiden, Mikado as a chorus member, Gondoliers as Tessa, and Pirates of Penzance as Ruth.
Broadway's 'Annie' as a maid, and an apple seller
Mitch Tomas's "Sardines and Biscuits as, Simon

Those are the shows that I can think of off the top of my mind, there are more no doubt.
So after that, what is your favorite theater production that you've seen or have been in?

As always,
    ~Moira

Guitar chips!

I have played the guitar for a few years now. The one problem with the guitar is that I am constantly losing my guitar chips, or picks. Then I saw in a 'thinkgeek' catalog a press that you can use to make old credit cards into guitar chips. Because I 1, didn't have the press and 2, didn't have any old credit cards, I forgot about it. But then today I realized I could make them! And so, it goes like this:

Step one:
Find any old 'credit cards', okay I used an old YMCA membership card, and hotel room keys. Any kind of card like this will work.
After you have found an old card of some sort, you'll need a real guitar chip, scissors, and a marker or pen.

Step two: Flip your card over (If you prefer one side to the other, otherwise it doesn't matter) once you have the 'ugly' side up, put your real guitar chip on top of the card, and trace the chip. Sharpie pens work the best.

Step Three: Remove the real guitar chip and cut out the outline you just drew.

This is probably the hardest part, and it isn't even that hard. Depending on the thickness of the card, the cutting may be hard. Just go slow and avoid cutting rough edges. 

You're done! Unless... :) So the card I happened to be using was mostly red, and its almost valentines day, so I couldn't help but make my guitar chip into a heart shaped guitar chip. This is the great part of making your own. You can make them whatever size or shape you want! 

Final product!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! Happy valentines day!

As always,

           ~Moira Jane