Done with fish

Jocelyn got fish in 2014 when she was 12. We bought her a 20 gallon tank. Fish came, fish went. Early on we got some plecos from a friend of hers, which are bottom feeders and glass cleaners. Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that "tropical fish" have a maximum temperature that's cooler than you would expect, and all of the pleco's were dead after there was a heat wave and our air-conditioning was not really working. Eventually we bought another one, which was just an inch or so when we got it.

Six or so years later it is 8 inches long, Jocelyn has left home. We were waiting for the fish to die (a few have expired), but it seems like the pleco was going strong and might do that for a long time, and somebody might actually like to have this fish. So we called a specialty aquarium place to see if they would like to take it off our hands, and they said yes. They will take the rest of the little crappy fish as well. So off all the live parts of the aquarium will go tomorrow, and then we will clean up the inert parts and maybe give away the whole setup.

I took many pictures, including close-ups of the pleco, and the top of the tank for the "fish cooler" that Ken made out of old computer fans. This works remarkably well, to keep the temperature below about 77 when there is a heat wave.

I made a page to advertise the aquarium, including some of the above pictures.

Non-pet spam

So I see that I have not been keeping up with posting!

Health update: I had the implant put in where I had a tooth extracted four months ago. It was kind of unpleasant; I don't remember it being quite this traumatic my previous implant. But, this is a rear molar, and so it is apparently more difficult.

I still have that stupid leg pain; I went to a different PT and they did different things than the previous people and give me different exercises, and they may or may not have helped. Thing that seems to help the most is not wearing jeans anymore, but wearing loose pajama pants. Then I did some mild trauma to it, so now I have a bruise, so it's making it hard to tell what part is actually hurting, since now I have two problems.

The fallout from Covid seems to be that I sleep an extra hour than I used to. This is annoying, because I already sleep more than the average person.

Lake update: we put in the first section of the dock today! It was 59° in the water. I wore a wetsuit, and Ken wore waders, and we learned that the waders leak pretty badly, so he got almost as wet as I did.

Bicycling update: as of this morning I had 666 miles, which is 1/3 of my goal and it is 1/3 of the way through the year, so that's great! (Then I rode 11 miles today, so I didn't keep the number of the beast for long.)

Kid update: Perry had a co-op job this past semester (Wentworth's schedule is little skewed, so the semester is over already and he's home). Apparently he did well at it. He will go to school during summer semester, and then have another co-op next fall semester.

Jocelyn seems to be dropping out of school before her last year and going to do circus stuff in San Diego. She applied to real circus schools, but once again did not get in. (Still waiting for a response from the final school in France, but not really expecting acceptance.) The San Diego place is a step down from a real circus school, but it's a place that she is familiar with, and maybe something good will come of it. I don't know what her plan will be about finishing her degree, but I'm expecting that eventually she will do so. I have explained to her that she needs to pay attention at around 10 years to whether she wants to do that because it will become harder and harder to get places to accept old credits as time passes. She doesn't know what her plan is; I think she's going to see what happens at the end of the year, like can she get a job doing circus stuff (performing, not just teaching), or is that too much of a pipe dream and she should give it up as a career and have it just be a hobby, and finish her degree and get a day job. She's been talking about physical therapy as a potential career, which would require first finishing the bachelors, and then going to PT school. So that's all much in the future. This summer she will live in Portland with her boyfriend; she'll get some kind of job probably teaching circus.