Almost exactly 11 years ago on January 30, 2014, I messaged a guy on Reddit about some fish he needed to re-home. My parents and I stopped by the Air Force base to meet him, and I brought home two corydoras and five tetras. A couple of the tetras died fairly quickly, if I remember correctly, but some of the others lasted a while. None of them lasted the 11 years of mostly neglect that the cory catfish survived. There have been a couple other tankmates, including a female betta that would eat out of my hand and let me pet it. Several snails have passed through the tank. They seemed to thrive through the neglect as I spent less and less time at home, and then made the move with us to the new house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then tonight, as I dropped some food into the tank and added some water to satisfy the gurgling filter, I noticed a baby. The tank was too dark and covered in algae to really see, but my eyes didn’t deceive me. At least one little cory fry was swimming around, along with both of the adults. I never had any inkling that they might be a breeding pair, but at some point, conditions must have been right. I’m afraid to even try and clean up the tank, for fear of damaging the ecosystem. It may just continue forever as it is in the guest room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rest of my day was incredibly boring by comparison. I was a little bit late leaving the house, just after Summer. I tried to catch up to her, but caught some slow traffic coming into Morrilton. There was no way I’d make up the time before she got off the interstate in Conway. I made it to work and was surprised to see Randy there before me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People were mostly out of the office, and I worked on SCCM as my Vine ticker scrolled. Lunch time came and nobody else was interested. Everyone else left the office, so I took a late lunch and went to Cici’s by myself since they had a $4.99 deal. They were absolutely packed, almost entirely with old geriatrics – slow ones, at that. It mostly looked like poverty, and a couple people had crocheted hats that reminded me of the pigeon lady from Home Alone<\/em>. One particularly ignorant old woman kept yelling loudly at one of the hispanics working, and asked multiple times where she came from before she lived here. In the end, I had a good salad and tried not to overdo it. I felt pretty good afterward, and it was actually rewarding to have paid less than I would have anywhere else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The afternoon was pretty lonely since Maggie and Randy didn’t make it back until near quitting time. I made it to the end and got home to run the dogs. It wasn’t frigid out, so we had a good time. At one point, I stopped momentarily at the basin and Muad’Dib immediately peed on my Onewheel. I couldn’t believe it, because he’s normally pretty good about that stuff. I don’t know what prompted him to do such a thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From there, we made it to my parents’ house where Dad met us in the road again. I rinsed the Onewheel off under the faucet outside, and then we made it home. The girls ate some leftover pasta, I cleaned up what Summer didn’t finish, and then I took out a bunch of recycling before all of the excitement happened with the fish tank. I messaged the guy on Reddit just to let him know, so it’ll be interesting if I hear back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fishy<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Almost exactly 11 years ago on January 30, 2014, I messaged a guy on Reddit about some fish he needed to re-home. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,43,50,96,36,95,42,27],"class_list":["post-8387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-anxiety","tag-aquarium","tag-deals","tag-dog","tag-food","tag-onewheel","tag-pets","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8387"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8391,"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8387\/revisions\/8391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallopingcow.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}