Loaches.
I've written a lot lately, but nothing much good for posting. I have a lot floating around in my head just now. Frustration, tension, hope - all that sort of stuff. I wrote a long post today about it being summer and all that, and I'm just not up for making it public. Don't worry, no one's missing much.My birthday kind of sucked. It was kind of okay too. My family had cake for me, which was very nice. Other than that, I got a big disappointment. Honestly, the two things sort of balanced out. My family is awesome like that.
My favorite birthday present was my least planned one. Jasmin's fish got sick a couple of weeks ago. We're pretty sure that they had ick, or however you spell that fish disease. We treated them for ick and they seemed to be responding, but Fat-Fat the Goldfish took a sharp downturn last Thursday. Her scales started falling off and, initially, we thought some of the other fish were picking her apart because of stress from the ick.
By Saturday, she'd developed a bilowy sort of substance around her jelly spot on her head. Her tail was falling apart, and she wasn't recovering despite the fact that we'd isolated her. We had been keeping up PimaFix for the ick, but it wasn't getting rid of the infection. We assumed that since there was cottony stuff, it had to be a fungal problem. But on Sunday, I was reading that there's a certain kind of bacterial infection that will cause that symptom, too. So we bought some MelaFix and Fat-Fat's taken a turn for the better. At least she's eating now, and swimming around, instead of looking all depressed in the corner by herself.
In the meantime, we decided that the loaches would have to be separated from all the other fish. They had brought the ick in with them, and they'd been the ones picking on Fat-Fat. The Fishman offered to a small trade for the loaches (basically, to take them off our hands since he couldn't resell loaches that he knew were aggressive), but he was out of town for the weekend. The loaches were in a tiny fishbowl and were going nuts. They kept jumping out and almost getting themselves killed.
Solution? Happy birthday Sarie, enjoy your brand new fish tank! Jasmin and Matt picked it out. Jasmin picked out a pink tank, and Matt insisted lining it with pink rocks. They picked out a few plants, and gave me a spare house for the fishies to hide in. I bought them a bubble wall today, too. My loaches rock.
I'm trying to pick out names for them. There are four; two pink, two blue. I thought about making them Marx Brothers, but I wasn't sure that was vicious enough. These are, after all, mean fish: they picked on poor Fat-Fat when she started getting sick, they brought in a serious fishy illness. Tough fish names would be good, sickness names would be good too. Maybe I can name them after the four horsemen of the apocolypse; there's a enough violence and death to go around in that.
I'm sleepy. Like, mad sleepy. I'm going to go wish my loachies good night, maybe read them a little bedtime story, and pass the heck out.
posted by Sarie @
10:53 PM
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