Now the clocks have changed and the weather is turning warmer it is now that time of year again.
Caravan season
I guess we are now at the mercy of people out for their weekends away tootling along at fuck all miles per hour oblivious to the annoyance they cause. Great.
I got up this morning to find four inches of snow outside. The roads are pretty dangerous and blocked up with either snow or other vehicles that have got stuck. So no work today. The photo below is the view from our bedroom window looking up towards the currently invisible hills.
On my journey to work I drive past a primary school. The parents park on a blind bend, they hardly ever indicate, stop their cars whenever they feel like it and generally cause chaos. It’s quite annoying but I’ve grown used to it. On my journey yesterday however there was an incident which raised the stupidity bar higher.
As per normal I drove past, stopping for all the non-indicating masses. After grinding to a halt for the last time I was just pulling away when a mum, clutching a child’s hand in each of hers looked directly at me and marched out in front of my car. Needless to say I stopped yet again.
This incident got me thinking about what those kids would be learning from her attitude. Such as: it’s ok to step in front of a car if it’s outside my school. Still, I guess given the lack of intelligence of at least one of their parents I suppose this attitude might weed out the gene pool it bit.
We have more fish! Two Dwarf Gouramis, two Yoyo Loaches and one Sucking Loach, unfortunately the other sucking loach died.
There occasionally seems to be some friction between the male Gourami and the male Molly, the Molly nips at the Gourami. It tends to occur when he’s also chasing round the female Mollies. He’s a randy little guy as our second lot of Molly fry testifies.
Well we’ve had the baby fish for a while now and in spite of not making any special arrangements for their safety we still have four of them. They now look like proper fish not just tadpoles with tails. I think they have reached a size that the other fish don’t look on them as food.
Neither the Guppies or the Mollys have had any more babies so I’m hoping that we have only females because if four were to survive every month the tank would fill up very quickly.
Several months ago I ordered some Converse from Noflysonus - an online clothes shop. I patiently waited for my new pink shoes to be delivered. After a week I had received no shoes and no emails to keep me updated as to when I could expect them so I went back to the site and logged in to see if there was any information. I was informed a had a problem with my credit card. I had not long changed address so this was not surprising (I’d had this problem with another shop).
As there was no information on how to rectify the problem I emailed them using the address I had set up specifically for them. (I tend to alter my email address to companyname@mydomain.com so I’ll be able to tell if my details ever get used elsewhere). I received no reply.
Fast forward a month and I started getting loads of spam to the Noflysonus email address. I guess they either broke their own Terms and Conditions and the Which! Web Trader code of practice they claim to adhere to…
…We will not e-mail you in the future unless you have given us your consent. We will give you the chance to refuse any marketing email from us or from another trader in the future…
…The personal information which we hold will be held securely in accordance with our internal security policy and the law and the Which? Web Trader Code…
…or their server got hacked and my details were stolen. Either way I’m quite glad they weren’t able to process my credit card as I really wouldn’t want that finding it’s way online.
Just got home and counted up the Molly fries and I think there are three left. Of course more of them could be hiding in the plants. The littlest one seems to have found a good place to hide inbetween two rocks, he just darts in and out of there. I think I should put my money on that one surviving.
Before the next batch I think I’m going to space out those rocks a bit.
We’re continuing to stock up our aquarium so this weekend we bought four Guppies and three Mollies. Two days later I had a bit of a shock when I give them their breakfast - the Mollies had had babies! I counted them up as best as I could (they move around a lot), we had eleven. Eleven one centimetre long aquatic knats flitting about the tank.
I researched our new fish online, which I’ll admit is something I should have done to start with. Both the Guppies and the Mollies are what’re called Livebearers. Mollies can have twenty fry per month and we have at least two female Mollies. I’m still trying to decide what the third one is. I’m hoping it’s another female and we just had the unfortunate luck to buy an up the spout Molly, the tank cannot support that many fish.
A lot of the fry will be eaten by the other fish in the tank but if even one survives per month we’re in trouble. Doesn’t stop me from wanting them to keep out of the way of the big fish though, it’s a different story when I’m actually watching them.
As it’s now been a week since we got the four Neon Tetra fish it was time to add some more. I got home from work today to find the O.H. had been out and bought four more. So now we have eight. The next step is to move to some slightly bigger fish, Angel fish maybe… depends on whether they will coexist with the Neons.
And I’m still pondering that fish webcam.
I was sat watching the fab four this evening when I noticed a ’something’ sort of floating down one of the plants. I watched this thing for a while trying to figure out what bit of plant it might be. That is until it changed direction and moved back up the plant! We decided (by this time the O.H. had wandered over to see what I was muttering about) that it was a snail. In fact we have two snails in the tank. It would seem the Neon Tetra’s have some new neighbours earlier than we had planned.