Swimming with the Fishes

I have a few new pets.

No, I did not decide to adopt that bird I was on about a year or so ago. I decided against that silliness.

Birds are for the birds.

California Guy has an amazing saltwater fish tank full of all kinds of beautiful, colorful fish. He's got Nemos, a Dory, a couple of gobies that suck up sand and discard it through their gills, and several wrasses. There are also buttloads of hermit crabs (all I usually see are little legs sticking out of shells), snails, a foxface, and some others I have no idea what they're called.

I'm not a fish gal. They're kind of like plants with me. I'm lucky if I don't kill them.

Or they're lucky.

California Guy is very into his saltwater aquarium. Apparently when he decided to ditch California for Wyoming (of all things), he couldn't leave all of the ocean behind, so he brought some of it with him.

I'm supposed to be adding to the tank a clam. Did you know how many species of clams there are? And how many different colors?

And how expensive?

Yeah, neither did I.

But it makes him happy and his birthday is coming up, so he'll be bringing in his one-year-older with several bottles of wine, cupcakes, and a new clam.

A few weeks ago he decided to create me my very own twenty-gallon tank. He loves his big tank (I don't even know how many gallons it holds, I just know it's bigger than my TV and usually a lot more entertaining). He's filled his tank with all sorts of colors of the sea, but for my twenty-gallon tank, he decided to keep things simple.

I have several hermit crabs (teeny-tiny ones), a snail (he's pretty cool and he has funny lips), a pretty little wrasse, and some transparent bluish thing that seems to have trouble pooping, as he had a string of something yellow hanging off his butt the other day.

Oh, my God, it's the fish version of Percy! He totally fits right in with my brood!

Anyway, California Guy created the smaller tank specifically so I could have an emerald crab, because the one we originally put in the big tank got punked by one fish or another (we blame Dory). The only thing left of him was a claw lying pitifully in the sand.

Poor Crab Cakes.

So California Guy made up a smaller tank just for me so I could have a new Crab Cakes. Crab Cakes wasn't too interesting at first. All he did was hide out in the rocks, until one day when he molted and now he's huge and bright green, and he's always stuffing his face. He likes to hang upside down under the rocks, and shovel in the algae. Sometimes he perches on a ledge in the rocks and gawks at me with his little beady crab eyes.

California Guy also added a Scooter Blenny Fish to the aquarium who immediately became my main source of amusement this past weekend. I was riveted to the tank, taking pictures, videos, and talking to Scooter like he could actually hear me or cared that I was alive. Scooter is not codependent like the other pets. I'm more codependent on him. A day beginning with watching Scooter scoot around the sand is a day beginning well.

I could watch him all day.

I did watch him all Sunday morning.

It was the most relaxing thing I'd done all week.

That includes the massage I had Friday, where I basically got stretched,cracked, and twisted a pretzel.

Of course as soon as I got home, Percy stalked around the house yelling at me and deposited a nasty dump in the litter box; Puckett kept slipping into my spot on the couch whenever I got up to go to the bathroom or get a snack; and Willow got caught red-handed with her nose right in the leftover avocado.

Someone was feeling south of the border.

Both girls received a pat to the behind, a scolding, and a timeout.

They were not impressed. Willow went in her cage and Puckett sat on the floor by the couch, glaring at me as if she could reduce me to a puff smoke for my insolence.

Scooter and Crab Cakes are infinitely the most well-behaved of the pets. Plus they are contained in a small glass box so they can't escape.

It's a good thing we don't have an octopus. Those buggers love to get out.

It's also a good thing Scooter and Crab Cakes live at California Guy's house. If they lived at mine there would be three cats rooted in front of the aquarium, utterly transfixed.

And Willow would probably fall in trying to catch one of them.

Isn't Scooter just so cute??