Thursday, June 07, 2007

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.

2 comments:

greensquares said...

You gotta send me some of those shrimps babies for my new tank. I hope they can stand up to my voracious pond snails... I had to fight to get them off the walls of our big tank!

Kim said...

Pond snails won't hurt shrimp unless they're already mostly dead, but if you mean the redclaws, the shrimp will eat your snails! They just reach in and pull them out of their shells, it is cool to watch.