I Know You Want to Know But
Our new aquarium light arrived. It brightens everything up, as it’s supposed to do, you know, being a light. I’m sure the plants love it. However, I do not. It’s pretty. The top is aluminum, and the legs are clear acrylic. The aluminum gets toasty, so it’s best used somewhere that air can circulate around it freely. Don’t shove it into a hutch cubby or something. Or do. I’m not your mother. The light itself sits at a set height of approximately four inches and reflects strongly off the top of the water as multi-colored, making it difficult to view into the top of the aquarium at all, and it…
A Fresh Chance to Start Right
Okie doles, as my phone likes to auto-correct. There is now another tank in the house. The ten gallon I may or may not have mentioned ordering is now set up on a relatively unstable shelf in our living room. I am not talented when it comes to aquascaping. Perhaps if I had rooms of rocks and sticks available to choose from, I could do something more elaborate. As it is, we have to choose from what’s on the shelf at our tiny aquarium shop and try to visualize the look without the tank to use for sizing things properly. I do believe if I owned a shop, I’d have…
Place Your Bets on the Limits of a Beast’s Appetite
It started with Esme, one little female betta. Now we have Esme, two loaches, four green tetras, four ember tetras, five shrimp, two gold mystery snails, a greenish-purple mystery snail, three purple mystery snails, a baby mystery snail who hitched a ride home on a plant we purchased, an unknown snail who is growing at an astonishing pace who also hitched a ride home on a plant, aaaaaaand 9,320,473,324 pest snails who must have been hiding on the plants we purchased for the plant tank. It’s just overrun with itty bitty snail babies. I can’t say with any certainty, because they’re still a little too small, but they’re looking a…
The Story of the Beast with Those Four Dirty Paws
We often leave our back door open during warmer weather so the dogs can run in and out freely. This has resulted in mud, leaves, wasps, cats, goats, and chickens coming inside. I don’t mind. They’re fun memory-making moments. We close the door at night, of course, because we also have raccoons, skunks, coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, bears, and bobcats. One day last June there was a kerfuffle from cats on the back porch. This usually means Jack (Nickajack) is hanging out, and another male cat has come around. Since Muggabee has been gone for well over a year, Pickwick moved away with the previous owner of the neighboring ranch,…
Her Dirty Paws and Furry Coat
In our farmhouse in Iowa, we had a lot of mice. A lot of them. In fact, whatever you think is a lot, make it a lot of that amount. We could hear chewing in the walls of every room. There was mouse poop everywhere. We would see multiple mice every day. We set up a camera in the kitchen to record them overnight, and you can see three at a time, I believe, in one of the videos. I can’t seem to locate the recordings at the moment. They were everywhere. I love animals, and I did not want to kill these innocent little lives, just going about how…
