Royal Easter Show

I got to say, Caramel is one of the most creative animals here at the Sunny Zoo, and by that I mean she is always coming up with crazy ideas that get her (and sometimes the rest of us too) in trouble, especially when she gets her other two triplets involved, and then we all get scolded by the human employees, who are very kind about wiping our butts and all, and who took me in when I was captured by some other human child and fed watermelons instead of insects as geckos like me prefer to eat, so I would really rather not stress them out if I didn't have to.

But this time Caramel's idea of buying a double-decker bus is fantastic, and even I love it, because it's so much fun to crawl up and down all the seat legs and check out every single one of the pockets, not all of which have been cleaned out and Knobby found a nest of cockroaches in them that he ate all by himself without sharing a single one with me OR the frogs, so we have sworn not to share anything with him next time either, so he left in a huff to go upstairs of the bus, which is just fine because the frogs and I don't want him down here either!

So everyone has been exploring both levels of the bus, and taking turns turning the wheel as far as it would go and pressing the horn and shifting the gears here and there until one of the neighbours appeared and complained to Mr Keeper that we were making too much noise and could we keep it down because the constant honking was killing her nerves, which I reckon must be particularly fragile in the first place because she also complained last time when we had a fun yelling match with a visiting cockatoo (Chocolate's friend) that lasted two hours, and would have gone on longer if she hadn't come and made Mrs Keeper send the cockatoo away.

While we are enjoying ourselves running up and down and over and under our new double-decker bus, which we are calling Tsim Sa Tsui because apparently that's what it's always been called and we don't want to confuse the old chap, Mr Keeper comes out holding a sheet of paper and waving it around and calls to us, "What's this E-mail from the Royal Easter Show about?  It's addressed to me, and seems to be in answer to some application I sent, but I don't know anything about it!"

I know immediately what must have happened, but I'm not going to say anything because firstly it's none of my business and secondly it's always fun to see the human employees a little flustered so long as I'm not the one in trouble, and anyway it's up to Banana to own up to what she has done, since I'm 99 percent sure she would be the one who has done it, and the other 1 percent I think could be Cutie because he knows a secret way into the house, but then Cutie is the guinea pig Alpha and probably doesn't have to resort to using Mr Keeper's E-mail without permission because he would have just asked.

And I am right because here's Banana coming up to look at the sheet of paper Mr Keeper is waving around, and she is reading it, and if a snake could smile I reckon her invisible lips must be turning up because her whole body is twitching in excitement, and yes now she's jumping about in that way she has of curling up her whole body and then throwing herself outwards, which is actually kind of scary to watch because you wonder if she might accidentally slap you in the face with her tail, as she just did in poor Brownie's face.

​"Err, that was me, Mr Keeper," Banana is confessing to her crime and we are all curious to hear exactly what she has done this time, "As you know, the Royal Easter Show is coming up, and I just thought... I wondered.... if maybe I could enter the beauty pageant section.  So I borrowed your E-mail to send in my application form and a couple of photos."

"Beauty pageant??" I feel kind of sorry for Mr Keeper, who is always the last to know when we animals get the whim to do something but since he's our human employee, he has to cover our backs and come to think of it, that's why Cutie said we must hire some human to manage our house, because we get into so much trouble by ourselves, and now he has to deal with this Easter Show business right after Caramel just got him to buy a bus, "There's no beauty pageant in the Easter Show, it says the Frogs and Reptiles Show here, Banana!"

Banana is nodding her head madly and still dancing about in a slithery sort of way, "That's it!  Didn't you know that the Frogs and Reptiles Show is the reptiles beauty pageant of the Easter Show?  I got in!  I got into the finals!  I'm going to the Easter Show!"

It seems that Banana has always wanted to enter the Easter Show beauty pageant, but last year she wasn't old enough and anyway her old owner would never have bothered to enter her, so this year she's lucky to be living with us and Mr Keeper's family, so she's able to use Mr Keeper's computer and E-mail account at night when he goes to bed to enter herself into the Frogs and Reptiles Show, and we're all very excited for her and promise her that we will cover the $35 entry fee she needs to pay through our zoo account, because if she wins we can receive all sorts of goodies like a large new enclosure (which I would really love) and various accessories like new hides and decorative plants (which I would really love) and heat lamps and UV lamps (which I don't need but Knobby does so I would really love them so he can't have them), and all in all it will be so cool to say our python friend is a beauty queen!

Mr Keeper goes off to deal with the business side of the E-mail, but warns Banana that if she needs to use his account again she really must ask him first, because he would like to know about these things before they happen instead of being the last to know!
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