My Own Personal Tiny Nature Channel

Just, you know, go ahead and read this whole post in Sir David Attenborough's voice.  For fun. 

This is my aquarium: 

It's a 10-gallon* freshwater planted tank which holds five live plants, two sections of driftwood,  one tiny baby ramshorn snail who I assume hitched a ride on a plant as an egg, and two Blue Velvet/Blue Rili shrimp named Fancy and Pants.  (Guy at the fish shop: "Y'all move out the way so I can sell this nice lady some fancy pants shrimps!" and LO, they were named). 

However, now that I have the MOPPothecary unit done and set up, the small tank looked tiny - and I finally had room to expand into a bigger tank! Hooray!

This is my aquarium on drugs No, wait, THIS is my aquarium: 

Here's the same cast, this time on a 20-gallon stage instead of a 10.  It looks so empty!  It IS a lot of tank for two 1" shrimp, but, after I get some more plants, more shrimp, and some tiny silvery fishes, it'll be teeming with life.

I made the background for it myself - it's a screenshot of the sacred forest from the Miyazaki film Princess Mononoke.  I adjusted the pic for size and shape on Blockposter.com, printed the pdf they gave me, taped it together, and taped it to the back of the tank.  The tree-i-ness of it blends with the driftwood roots and gives the tank kind of an underwater-forest look.  

Here are Fancy (left) and Pants).  Near as I can tell, Fancy is a girl and Pants is a boy.  Of course, I could be wrong about that, I'm not shrimp junk expert.  I'd be perfectly happy being the owner of a billion little blue shrimps, but I'm also perfectly happy just having two, so, whatever they feel like doing or not doing, that's just fine with me. 

* I can't type the word "gallon" without first typing "gallong" to save my life. It's not the only word it happens to.  People named Kevin(g), you have my apologies. 

Fail! Score! And Week Ahead...

The good news is, my A/C isn't broken.  The FAIL! news is that it shut down this weekend because the filters were so clogged that it quit and froze over!  I cannot believe I let that happen.  I have the washable filters, so I didn't even have to replace anything, just take them down, hose them off on the back porch, and dry them in the sun.  Fail, fail, fail!  Thankfully, everything's up and running again; and I'm going to flush the condenser drain this week for good measure, too.  Jeez.

I found some awesome fabric yesterday on clearance! And I'm not going to tell you about it!  :D  Actually, I'm going to move all the costume crap over to its own blog this week, and keep this one to house-y stuff and garden-y stuff.  I'll link the new blog once it's up.

Coming up this week:

1. gardening! 
2. shelves! 
3. living room artwork!
4. curtains! 

Stay tuned...

for Racu  :)

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Fish II

I stopped and got some aquarium plants on the way home from work yesterday, as promised.  Got them home, opened the packages, cleaned up the plants, and rinsed them off, then hit the internet to learn more about each kind -  I went plant shopping with a list in mind, of plants I'd used before and was familiar with, but only found one of the plants on that list;  the rest were new to me.

And, as it turned out, the rest of them?  Are rooted cuttings of land plants packed and labeled as "aqua plants" - they can be grown in water but won't do well in it, and can't really be grown under water at all.  Bad pet store, no-no!  Caveat emptor, though, right?  Yeesh.  

Some plants are better than none, at any rate - certainly better than a floating sprig of plastic foliage.  I did end up putting one of each of the land plants into each tank;  I figure, they'll look nice for now, and when they start to die off in a couple of weeks I can pull them out and replace them with new ones. 

So here's what the tanks look like now: 

small, yes, but the fluffy ones will grow FAST

"Louise" hiding in the upper left corner

black rocks to set off the bright greens

see my stove?  LOL

WHAT.

Even though I used some of the non-aquatic plants in the tanks, I still had a whole bunch of tiny plants that needed a home.  I don't have a container I can use to set up a proper terrarium right now, so for the time being I set up a vase with some of the black aquarium gravel for them, until I can throw together something nicer:

$1.99 Ikea "VASEN" vase

You know, it occurs to me that since I took down my last aquarium a few months ago, I'd been waffling over whether I should get a betta, or start another terrarium.  And then Life goes and hands me TWO bettas AND a ton of plants with which to start a terrarium!  Weird. :)

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