One Sunday I started swishing the net around to draw the fish out from under the rocks, where they had been hiding in a lethargic stupor, and all seven of them appeared. At least I wasn't scooping out dead ones. I put some clean well water from the tap into a big stainless steel pot and placed the little Dace and "Shiners", for lack of a real name for them, into it. What a weird thing for them, I would think, to be in an environment one minute, then suddenly scooped up and put into a very different one that resembled nothing they had ever experienced. The water was undoubtedly cleaner than what they came out of, but it didn't move. Visually, it was just a silver-gray featureless space. They camped out in that pot for the next couple of hours. Next I set up a siphon tube in the tank and ran all of the water out the window onto the lawn as snow began accumulating. I took all of the larger rocks to the sink and scrubbed the green slime off them with an aquarium scrub pad, put all the gravel in a strainer and rinsed the shit out of it. The rocks ended up arranged differently than they were before, less aesthetically pleasing to me, but placed to provide lots of nooks and spaces for the fish to sleep in. I put the gravel in, then cleaned the filter and pump and filled the tank with water up to a level several inches higher than it was at its most decrepit state.
Once back in their tank, the fish were energized and active again. The rocks were in a completely different arrangement than before, and I had moved the filter further down toward the right side of the tank. This means that even the current made by the filter would flow differently than before, so they were really in a completely different environment than before. Yet another foreign world for them. How odd it must have been. Soon enough they became accustomed to it and I'm sure they appreciate the oxygenated, ammonia-free water. It looks clean and cool. Since moving the filter, the water that spills into the tank from it streams down onto a pile of rocks that I had placed in such a way as to create a little cave for the fish. The top stone is about the size of a pack of cards with a flat surface and it is on about a forty-five degree angle. There must be a nice current running up this rock from low in the front of the tank up the rock and toward the back. The fish, sometimes three lined-up in a row, like to park their bellies on the rock facing the current and just let the water flow into their gills. It's good to see them enjoying their environment again.
It's getting near the time to go down to the river and see if we can get some new additions to the tank. I'm hoping for a little baby Bluegill, or a crayfish...
Before I started this blog just over a year ago, I looked at some other people's blogs. You go to one blog, and then at the top of the page is a link that randomly sends you to the "next blog". I saw countless blogs where the blogger would post that they were really sorry they hadn't posted in a long, long time, and that they were going to resume blogging in earnest from now on. Almost to a one, the date of the post was more than a year old! I hoped that I would not follow that suit with my blog, and while I have been a bit absent for a while now, I know I have a backlog of topics to cover. I'll get to them in due time. I am, after all, a champion procrastinator. To be fair, though, I have had a surprising burst of enthusiasm for some other of my pursuits lately, and they have prevented me from sinking too far into an easy chair. Coming out of Winter is a good thing. I was almost at a point of no return. I tend to go a bit cuckoo in the winter. Anyway, the post you are reading now was begun several weeks ago, before my vacation, then it just languished for a while. This evening I resolved to finish this one. Actually, I had to split it into two different posts--the next one will deal with the vacation I finished a week ago, and this one necessarily must cover a little development I noticed when I looked at my stats...
The Blog provides you with statistics as to how many views you get, and from where in the World people are reading your writings. Normally I get a small handful of views a week. Nothing special. I don't really promote it or bug people to read it. I'm intrigued that people in many countries have read it. I wonder if the views are the result of Google searches for the words "salmon" and/or "river". I suspect that "salmon" results in most of the views coming from Russia. I get the most views from the U. S., then Russia, then Germany. Sportsmen looking for good salmon fishing rivers, I'm sure, may be disappointed when they arrive at my blog and find these posts about Grammar Policing, Hunter Thompson, some fictional jerkwater town called Pediddleville, and my aquarium. So it was with some surprise that I found that in the last week I have had nearly two dozen views from Germany! What could have spurred that on?
The last post was an article called "Pondering Hollywood", which was about a trend I noticed about the way movies and TV shows get their titles--more nerdly Grammar Policing. It sat there on the blog for several weeks, getting a small number of views as usual. I guess the word "Hollywood" was not much of a draw, even during the time close to the Oscars. During that time I kept editing the post because I kept coming across new titles I wanted to add into the text, then it occurred to me that I neglected to consider a ripe segment of the entertainment industry that I was not well-versed in, so I added a post script to the post that contained THE word that apparently dozens of people in Germany were looking for--PORN! Hello, Germany, you horny wankers! Let's see how many hits I get after this one...
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