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Fish Stories 03-01-05 Here's the latest from the fish front. The good news is that I can't remember what's happened with my fish since the last time I updated, so you won't be hearing any of that. A funny little aside story... and a message to every one with pets- read the labels kids. That's right... read the labels. I was running low on food for my betta... which I haven't bought another food thing for like a year, I'm still on my first one left from Batli (bless his soul). Anyways I go to buy more. I can't find the kind I already have, but then I do. But it's not stocked in the same place, which I thought was odd. Until of course I realized it's considered a treat, and not actually betta food. Soooo I've been feeding three bettas now all strictly treat food. I am a terrible, terrible person. I cannot overemphasize this point. I will have to answer for this some day. I've switched my current betta over to actual food, and I think I'll throw the treat food away. I don't think they're VERY different, but what the heck do I know, I can't even read a label. In my own defense, its written in a very poorly displayed small font on the front of the thing, and while the back label does mention its treat-properties, who reads back labels? Well, I do, now. I feel horrible. They shouldn't let people like me have pets... even if they are just fish. JUST fish... pshaw. There's no such thing as JUST a fish. I wonder if they've come up with a name for me, my poor bettas? Sarah the Candy-coated Killer. She SPOILS her victims to DEATH! 08-02-04 Everything seems pretty okay, for a change. I bought a Pleco-something... whatever, a cleaner fish. I'm debating whether to call him Newman, Harvey Keitel, Plecosaurus Rex, or possibly Yoshi. I'm leaning towards Yoshi, but it's a tough call. I may want to save Yoshi for my next betta, but I may also want to call the next betta Go-go to continue the legacy of Oren Ishii. It's what Oren Ishii would've wanted. I'm terrible at naming things. 07-08-04 This should give you a good idea of what my most recent fish story is about.  Oren Ishii was acting very strangely this morning. I just realized I gave my boy fish a girls name. Oops. Anyhow, Oren was acting really weird, swimming all around in circles looking real pissed off. I just thought, bettas sure are temperamental, but that's cool. I realized eventually though that there was water around Oren's little bowl, water I certainly didn't spill. His bowl seemed to be leaking! How wise of Oren to find a way of informing me! At this point if I was someone smart I would've transferred Oren into another bowl without moving his or even touching it. But I am not someone smart. I think "Gee what's all this now?" and go and pick up his bowl to investigate. The bottom of the flipping thing drops off, water flies everywhere along with rocks, a plant, and alas I find Oren flipping around in a puddle on the floor. Well luckily my mom was standing right there when it happened, and I yelled at her to get a cup of water. Her fast actiion may have saved little Oren some brain damage. He seems to have survived the ordeal without any scratches (although there may be all sorts of mental trauma in his little fish brain, who knows). But his bowl, wow it sure did break. I cleaned his little habitat the day before, so I can only assume I did something to aggravate the delicate structure that eventually let to it's destruction. What, I have no idea. I gave Oren a good stern lecture about not breaking his bowls, just for good measure. Lesson learned though, if you ever think your fish tank is leaking, move your fish out of it, then investigate. Beats the hell out of scooping fish up off the floor, and I don't think they really like that either. Poor guy. He's tough though... took it like a soldier. Bettas are tough as hell. I guess another lesson learned is that while a bowl might be pretty, thin glass is going to be a lot more fragile than thick glass, and while that may not seem like much water when it's in the bowl, it's a helluva lot of water to clean up. So go for thickness before beauty when bowl shopping. 04-11-04 I'm due a quarter-annual update I think. Here goes. Let me start off by saying that my fish tank population is really best represented with a chart.
On a lighter note, here's a picture of me with my fish. Don't I look happy?  02-05-04 Time for another fish update. I've finally named The Unnamed One (something else I mean, that was technically a name but I'm not going to call it his name, more like a title he wore for a while). If you saw the movie Kill Bill, you should recognize the name Oren Ishii (pronounced o-ren-ee-shee-ee). I took quite a liking to both that character (played by Lucy Liu) and the name, thusly my fish was named such. So that's out of the way. I still don't have a picture, because I still suck. If I was in charge at Petsmart, I would take a polaroid picture of everyone that bought a fish with their fish, like how people do with babies. Maybe I could start a company taking polaroids in the parking lot out front? I'd probably need some kind of license. And a polaroid camera with film. I would charge $3/pic I think, that's a good deal. Anyway, my fish are all still living since my last update, I have the same amount I had then. That's good. But my gimp fish seems to be having social problems. His little tail is a bit torn, so I suspect someone is picking on him. I think gang warfare is the cause, and I am mostly to blame. I have 4 danio's and only two guppies. Guppies are schooly fish, so they like having a lot of friends around them. Without a lot of friends, I think they are unhappy. I realize now that by there being 4 danios and only 2 guppies, I've created an imbalance and made the guppies a minority, and it makes sense that there would be tension. Fish are so racist, it's really shameful. So I'm going to just have to buy two more guppies to even out the numbers, or introduce another race into the mix. That way, the guppies could team up with the new guys hopefully, and then they wouldn't be in the minority any more. I'm really building my world conquering skills here, what a diplomat I'm going to be some day. 12-27-03 Well it's been about 5 months since I last posted. See, I killed all my fish I was so excited about, and really, it's taken me this long to talk about. Here's the story... I was cleaning my fish's tank, about mid September. I had just got home from vacation and their tank was a real disgrace, so I decided to move them all into another tank so I could clean theirs. No problems so far. One of the guppies I had bought had had babies, which was neat. There were a lot of them, like 8 or something, and they were really really tiny. It was pretty neat. So anyways I managed to move everyone into another tank without anything bad happening, so that was cool. Then I cleaned their tank. But then I had to leave to go do something, so I ended up leaving their tank only half full of water, and leaving the fish in their temporary tank. This wouldn't have been a problem, had I remembered that I had turned their heater on full blast to warm up their water quick because it was really cold. So anyways I got home many many hours later that fateful day, only to find all of my fish bouncing around and floating at all strange angles. The memory of it is extremely painful for me, never been a mass murderer before y'know. Yep, I killed oh, I think something like 12 or 13 fish counting all the poor, innocent babies. A real holocaust. Well I was destroyed. It was a terrible, terrible thing to have to have on my conscience. I cleared out some dead bodies, but left the tank as it was. A few days later I think it was though, I realized that there was something moving in the death tank. One baby had miraculously survived the extreme heat somehow. It was rather astounding. Well I was ecstatic. A lone survivor of the fish holocaust of 2003. So I filled up the original tank I had had all the fish in, and very very carefully I stuck the baby in that tank. He was still really tiny, like a finger nail clipping. But he was alive, and I was real happy. I named him Superman and swore I'd take the best care of him I possibly could. Now it's a few months later and I still feel really bad about killing all my fish. It's still hard to talk about, and it brings a tear to my eye to think about how they must've suffered in their last hours. But the baby is still alive. I think he is a little retarded though, because his growth seems to be stunted, and he has a really hard time swimming. He's pretty gimpy. I can only assume it's because of the frying incident. I imagine he is also rather psychologically traumatized from the whole thing, he probably had to turn off his mind in order to survive. Poor little guy. He's tough now though. He sleeps in a little rock cave, and comes out to eat. I guess swimming is tiring for him, because it looks like a lot of work for him. It makes me sad to see my Superman struggle, but it also reminds me that having pets is a really big responsibility that I suck at. But I have to be responsible, or lives will be lost, so I think it's made me more responsible. Some day when my fish are all grown, I'll be ready to have a test tank of real babies. I hope that I will learn from all my fish mistakes so that my child will be able to survive under my care, and perhaps will grow up and become a productive member of society under my guidance. By taking extra good care of the gimp fish Superman, I think it's allowed me to feel worthy of being his protector and provider. I hope the same will be true with the kids I have, hopefully with a very minimal amount of failed tries and bad batches. Here are some pictures of all the fish I have currently. I have two bettas now, Batli and the Unnamed One (whom I haven't though of a name for yet). I only have a picture of Batli. Indy and Echo are long gone, many batches of pet fishes ago. I think Platys are seriously wussy fish, but it could just be living with me. Now I have 2 Zebra Danios, the stripey kind, a gold mystery snail, a yellow guppy, and a slightly slow-in-the-head black guppy. I did have 3 Zebra Danios, but one died for no apparent reason so now I only have two. I need to buy another one... they're schooly fish so they're happy in groups of 3 or more. That's my story. I hope that people can learn from my mistakes as I have, so that in the future there will be no more pet fish suffering.
7-16-03 I caught myself playing God recently. See, one of my guppies was being mopey. Who knows what the hell fish are sad about... I mean this guy has a pretty cool tank, all the latest technology, he shares it with a swinging bachelor and his attractive girlfriend, it's like a show on NBC. I don't know what a guppy has to be sad about, but my guppy was sad. So I'm thinking okay he must be sick. I don't know what the hell fish get sick with... they just get sick. Anyways, so I have some fishy antibiotics. But I was thinking about how the antibiotics cost $6, but the fish only cost me $2. So I was wondering if it'd be better to just let that one die and buy another one and save the antibiotics for a more expensive fish. Then I realized I'm a really bad person, and that I was playing God with the fragile lives I am supposed to be here to protect. Shame on me. But anyhow he seems to be feeling better now so I guess he wasn't sick after all, just a little mopey. I didn't have to use expensive antibiotics on him, but I swore that cost would never be a factor again in saving the lives of my precious fish. Unless they need heart transplants or something... gotta be reasonable. 7-6-03 I bought Batman Jet Li (I can't decide) a necklace out of a 50 cent machine. It's on a black string and has a dragon medallion that's fake thick silver. I think it's actually pretty cool for fifty cents. Anyhow, I tied the string around the top of his fishbowl and hung the emblem thingy down on the side. It looked pretty cool... and I like being able to pretend my fish is in the Yakuza or something. Batman swam around like he does for a while, and I kinda forgot about it. Then I looked over at him, and he had his fighting gear all poofed out and he was pacing around up at the side of the bowl where the necklace was hanging. Apparently he was really pissed about that. My fish is tough as hell. Ya-ku-za The word yakuza means 8-9-3. Ya means 8, ku 9, za 3. it comes from Japans counterpart to Black Jack, Oicho- Kabu. The generally difference between the both cardgames are that in Oicho- Kabu the cards rate shall be 19 instead of 21. As you see, the sum of 8, 9 and 3, is 20, which is without any worth in Oicho-Kabu. It's from there the name, yakuza, comes from, they without worth for the society. This donīt mean that they are for no use for the society, it means that the members are people that somehow not fits in to the society, societies misfits. 7-2-03 I bought a betta. Bettas are lots of fun. They're really pretty... and you just throw em in a tiny little bowl and they're happy. They don't need filters or bubble makers or heaters or anything. They're like dolphins, they can surface and get air. They won't catch tuna in midair however. But they do make little bubbles, which is kind of a neat attraction. The really neat thing about them though is that they're all tough. Mine, who is nameless of course, is a real punk. I put my finger to his little tank yesterday, and he flared out all this mean fighting-gill kind of stuff, and acted like he wanted to fight me. A real wise guy. It's great when he does it... cuz it's hard to imagine where he's stowing all this parachute-y fighting fluff. Then he just tucks it all back away when he's not pissed any more, kind of like the Incredible Hulk. They're really easy to piss off too. But right now he's just chasing his tail. Silly silly fish. I don't really have any pictures yet because I am not cool, but I'll have a video camera of my mom's schools' soon. Then the world will get to see my little Batman. I'm considering naming him Batman. But if he's going to keep chasing his tail all around and looking like a dumb fish, I may have to consider a name less associated with intelligence. 6-27-03 I was going to kick this off with a reminiscent tale of all my past fish experiences, starting with the fat kid across the street that overfed my mom's fish till they all exploded when I was a kid, to the more recent demise of the majority of the fish I purchased about a month ago. I was going to explain it all, but I thought I could do a better job of it by chart.  | ||||||||||
