aceofkittens

more cat pictures

It's like... a photo from the inside of my mind!

My snails are a lot of work.

First of all, the HR girls gave me a bunch more from their fish tank — in fact, they gave me all the snails from their fish tank. Those girls know I am soft hearted and won't let any snails get flushed down the garbage disposal, which is what they said they would do if I didn't take them. But that means that my snail population is constantly growing and the filter isn't able to keep up. The water is icky and smells bad and even though I've tried to do population control by scooping out eggs, I still end up with tiny baby snails. Eventually, I will have 10,000 snails.

Meanwhile, I bought new rocks that are bright white so that I could see the snails better. They were very hard to spot on top of the dark rocks. I like how they travel along on the underside of the water, hanging upside down. It's very cute. I also like to make them happy by throwing algae flakes into the water. They still like the pirate ship and travel up and down the rigging quite a bit. Captain Jack Snailo is very large, comparatively speaking. Pretty soon, s/he will be big enough to photograph, I think.

So, in a nutsnail shell, my pond snails are nice and I like watching them. However, I really hoped for something a little less high maintenance.

My mom spontaneously came to visit over the weekend, which was awesome, but made the weekend very busy, since I already had some other plans, including a wedding shower. The funniest moment during her visit was when I came out into the living room and found her dusting. I said: "What are you doing?" She said, "I'm looking at your knick-knacks." I said, "MOM! We look with our EYES, not with our HANDS!" :) After denying she was dusting, she finally cracked and said, "Well, if you're going to have knick-knacks, you should take better care of them!" :) Hi-larious!

Unfortunately, I seem to fail at snail. I had my first work-snail fatality, followed by the realization that the bowl was exuding a foul stench. It proved to be that the water plant is rotting. I don't know if it's because it needs running water or some other reason, but I guess I'm probably going to have to get a real tank if I'm going to keep these snails. What this also means is that my home-snails are probably going to be doing even worse, since their bowl is smaller and the plant is probably dead there too (though I haven't noticed a stench). I cleaned the bowl and replaced the water in the meantime, and they are all exploring their newly-clean world happily and climbing up the rigging in the pirate ship.

Tonight is a work happy hour... all I can say is:

Got some interesting, though sparsely populated, suggestions. What, are you all asleep? :) Surely you can't have better things to do with your life. Start commenting in my polls and feeding my ego!!!

The runners-up:

"Fencing" — I used to do that competitively. It's too expensive & time consuming & no longer appeals to my "innner Musketeer."

"Yoga" — I already do that. :)

"Bird watching" — Mmm, tasty... little birds... tasty. I do occasionally do that by the canals. I've seen a bittern, coots, pelicans, and my precious black-crowned night herons.

And the winner is.... 8ofswords with her suggestion of "Urban wildlife photography - the snails!" :) She will receive an autographed copy of my future book (no doubt a national bestseller) of snail photography, entitled Happy Trails. Ta!