Niko the American Eskimo Dog and Guinness the German Spitz practice playing dead trick. This trick was super easy to teach them. Both have interesting acting skills. Also look at that huge luxurious bed Niko has! We got it from Costco

We went to the Big E this year and saw lots of awesome things, including a chick hatchery and this box of baby chicks! They are so cute and colorful. I always want to take pocketfuls of them home, lookit the little wings, their fuzzy heads!!!

Zookeeper with Kevin James was filmed here and they were promoting it all over the zoo. These are some photos and video from our 2011 visit to Franklin Park Zoo in MA. Was there just in time for the lion to wake up for one minute, roar and then go back to sleep. It was so cool! Lots of great animals, including a baby gorilla making funny faces, lemur in a bucket, jaguar hacking a hairball, and a scary butterfly sanctuary.

Saw these cutie baby hamsters at Petco so I took a video of them.

Roborovskis (Phodopus roborovskii) or desert hamster is the smallest of all hamsters, averaging under an inch (2 cm) at birth, and (rarely) three inches (7.5 cm) during adulthood. Distinguishing characteristics of the Roborovskis are eyebrow-like white spots, and the lack of any dorsal stripe (found on the other members of the Phodopus genus). The average lifespan for the Roborovski hamster is three (3) years, though this is dependent on living conditions (extremes being four years in captivity and two in the wild). Although claimed to be hypoallergenic, Roborovski hamsters have been associated with the development of asthma in previously asymptomatic owners.

Guinness the german spitz uses LaDiDa on my iPhone to sing a song for us all. He looks just like a cute puppy but he is actually around 4 years old! I got the idea after watching Mishka the talking husky singing using an iPad.

I took a video of my dog playing with his new plushie octopus toy. Guinness loves to play on his back and he loves to shake it violently! He can act vicious but he is only playing.

I tried some speeding up and some slowmotion parts, edited in Adobe After Effects.

Background music from www.danosongs.com

This is how I made them. First make the hard-boiled eggs. I’ve always been confused how exactly you are supposed to hard-boil an egg, different people have their own opinions on how to do it. In my recent experience this has worked perfectly:

Hardboiled Eggs
1. Fill pot with water, enough to cover the eggs when they are submerged.
2. With the eggs in it, bring the pot to a boil.
3. Cover pot and turn off heat, let stand for 10 minutes.
4. Put the eggs in cold water. I’ve read that this step is important, not just for cooling down the eggs but the cold will help make it easier to peel the shell off afterwards.

Now after you have your boiled eggs, we need to put cracks all around the shell. You can do this by tapping the egg with a spoon or whatever way you’d like. Maybe rolling it around on a hard surface, the idea is just to put a bunch of cracks into the shell.

Then I used food coloring gel, mixed with water in cups to dye the eggs. The food coloring gel is not great, but it was what I had lying around the house. You may be able to find better food coloring.

I left each egg in the dye cups for about 10 minutes.. I wanted to leave them much longer but I was too impatient! So I took one out and peeled off the shell, and it looked pretty cool. I repeated this step until all my eggs were done. The many different colored marbled eggs looked great together.

I’ve been putting them sliced up, on a piece of sour dough toast with some light miracle whip and salt&pepper. Easy breakfast, YUM!

My boys Guinness and Niko performing their whisper trick