Kamikaze fish and shrimp eggs

Francis the betta jumped out of his bowl yesterday while we were out.  I forgot to put the lid back on when I changed his water.  Mark found him and thought he was dead.  Fortunately he landed ON his lid, which made him easy to pick up.  I flipped him back in and now he's swimming around like nothing happened.  Bettas are tough.  One of our shrimp has eggs, too, so hopefully by this time next month I'll have a bazillion tiny baby cherry shrimps swimming around in there.  We have completely given up on the red claw shrimp though, and have put our smaller gourami male in the old ten gallon, so that Talbot will leave him alone so he'll color up.  Got one more female too, so we have four females and two males.  The plants were supposed to come today but didn't.  They sent me a bunch of extras to make up for not shipping them sooner though, and they will get here for sure on Monday, so it's ok.  Disappointed though, I had been counting on spending my evening planting plants, not sitting around doing nothing.

In news that people other than me (and apparently Byron) care about, we went to the pool today and had lots of fun.  Got a little sunburned dispite the frequent slathering of sunscreen though.  At least Elspeth seems to be burn free.  Me and Mark though are definitely lightly toasted.  Apparently I look ok in my swimsuit though (a relief, I don't think I've lost much of the weight from Emersen yet).  Also, Mark got called as the move in specialist in our church.  Which is funny, because our other calling is as cochairs of the new member committee, so the two sort of go hand in hand.

Ninja shrimp

Well, I can't find mama redclaw shrimp ANYWHERE.  It's only a 10 gallon tank too, either she climbed out (unlikely, I would have found her) or she's a freaking ninja.  Not finding any babies in there either.  I'm considering just getting a bunch of red claw juveniles from a dude I know in Payson, and growing them out myself, as I went back to Animal Ark and they appear to only have females... that also makes it possible that mama shrimp's eggs weren't fertile in the first place, so boo.  I did find a baby cherry shrimp in the other tank though, so at least one made it, maybe more.  I have a huge hair algae infested ball of java moss in there, if they climbed in there I'd never find them.

In non-shrimp news, Elspeth now says "yokai" when I tell her to do things... whether she does them or not.  Silly baby.  But she is learning Japanese, which I had been starting to wonder about.

Stressed out

We have been having a hard time.  We went to visit my family in Colorado for a few days (my mom got a 56 gallon tank, and didn't know what to do with it, which was more than enough to lure me out).  Ended up staying a bit longer than planned because Mark got sick, high fever and headache.  Setting up the tank was lots of fun, but we were sleeping on the fold out in the basement, and Elspeth decided she was afraid of the basement, so not much rest was to be had.  When we got home on Monday Elspeth's schedule was all off.  She was mostly on by Wednesday, but then she had diarrhia and diaper rash.  That's about when I discovered that she had cut two more molars too, explaining why she'd been so dang cranky.  Then on Friday Mark decided we HAD to have a better stand for the shrimp tank (the one we made is an Abomination), and so he got one that would hold the 10 gal for the shrimp plus and additional 20H... yay!  But just when we had the shrimp tank settled in place, Elspeth wonked her head on it and cracked the glass from top to bottom.  It's ironic that the tank took so much damage as Elsepth doesn't even have a bruise, but if I had to choose I would indeed pick the broken tank.  So we were at Petsmart as soon as they opened to get a new tank, which I spent the rest of the morning moving my shrimp into.  The worst part is I'd just had a hatch in there, and I don't think any of the milimeters long babies made it into the new tank.  I TRIED, I really did, but they are just too tiny to find!  It looks like we'll have more eggs within the week though, so everybody pray for my shrimp tank... we don't have many shrimp left, and I don't think I can handle anything else dying on me right now.

In good news, while we were at the LFS in Orem looking for plants, we discovered that they currently have red claw shrimp... and one was pregnant!  I totally had to buy her, so I moved all the fish into the new 20 gal so she gets our original 10 all to herself.  She's gorgeous too, a good three inches long with very nice markings, and very active.  So, hopefully I will have baby macros soon too!  But in the mean time I'm changing water like crazy, because the nitrate levels in that tank are much too high for babies!  Maybe I'm being paranoid, but it's giving me something to do, and at this phase in my life, that's a very good thing.