Curious fish

This female betta fish does the same thing as the previous female betta. From inside her tank she follows my movements around the room. When I'm on the sofa, she's on the side nearest the sofa. When I'm sitting at the table she's on that side nearest the table. When I'm standing in the living room, she's on the short side of the tank nearest me.

I have a tank in the 2nd bathroom attached to the main bedroom. Oddly, I must walk through a closet to get to it. The closet is large as the bathroom. I've never seen a setup like this. It's like a bat cave.

I moved the fish to the bathroom tank while the new 55 gallon was being set up. It's very quiet back there. And dark. When I go back to feed them and turn on the light they dart all around and hide in a corner. Except for the female betta.

This morning I did that when I had to pee. No problemo, the tank is in a bathroom. I'm standing there peeing and the betta is closest to me and watching me.

She just likes to watch what I'm doing no matter what.

The tank has no background. I don't like the outside filter showing through to the front and reflected in the large bathroom mirror so I drew one to block it. Simple green vertical lines representing tall grass. I drew another sheet to cover the side next to the toilet but not all the way up to the top of the glass. While the rest of the fish were hiding she was up at the top watching me pee. She stayed there the whole time.

What a perv.

All the plants in the large tank started from leaf cultures did poorly during the transfer. So I bought new ones. When that happens I'm limited to what's available at the time. The old ones were doing quite well. They were expanding all over the place, filling the bottom of the tank and now I must start over as with hair plugs. I don't want any snails taking over. And I don't want any uninvited moss. Or else I'd just buy mature plants. 

I should probably move her back to the large tank all by herself while the tank is being re-planted with plant-plugs. I tried to find a few species that grow tall. But those have a tendency to send out runners and propagate throughout the whole tank. I want them to grow tall in patches. That means constant trimming and re-planting them where I want them.

I have a very thick layer of gravel. Actually, the fired clay bits used in ballparks. It's light and it holds a lot of air. It's turned out to be an excellent medium for plants. I add fertilizer in tablets into the clay where I want the plants to thrive.

I can add rocks if I like and driftwood type pieces to get junk in there to look natural. 

Or I have about fifty miniature Egyptian statues of various types that I can pile up like sunken Alexandria for a similar effect. I can just pile them up in heaps like an earthquake destroyed a city. Plus I have scores of Chia Pet rams that I can sink into the gravel to look like the row of ram sphinxes at Karnak. 

I might do that. Say, ten or so rams lined up and sunken into the gravel with various other statues strewn here and there. 

Then plants growing throughout and all over the place. 

That would give plenty of areas to hide.

I wouldn't have to break their little legs and glue them forward. I could just sink them into the gravel. I could fill them up with gravel and or leave them hollow. They're ridiculous little statuettes. I could give them undeserved aquarium gravitas. They have nothing to do with Egypt.

How do you imagine the idea of growing chia seeds on the outside of clay statuettes of animals happened?

*drums fingers, feigns boredom*

I think it happened by accident. I think it happened by laziness and by sloth. 

I think pretty much everything was.

Somebody in Central America didn't do their dishes. They let them pile up, as I sometimes do. When they returned they noticed some chia seeds got wet and grew right there on their ceramic plates. The seeds dried and stuck onto the plates. And the seeds grew. Like hair!

*ding*

If the plate were the shape of a sheep then this chia seed property of producing goo when wet and growing like hair could be used as a toy.

For as long as the seeds grow on the outside of the clay. Maybe the sheep can be filled with water to prolong the cycle of chia growth imitating hair. 

The Chia seed sheep held forth for a very long time. It was the animal that made the most sense. 

A Llama would do, so would an alpaca. 

After a decade, maybe more, the company expanded their line. Puppy, kitten, other fuzzy animals. 

How they decided on a turtle or a hippopotamus, animals that don't have hair, is beyond me. 

The very earliest thing of this type was around WWII, I think, there were human heads, goofy faces, the chia seeds were placed on their heads. Human heads makes sense to imitate hair but chia rams are the best. Nothing else comes close. And the earliest ones are deplorable art. As if the artists were young, probably children, and without a clear sense of how rams actually look. Their faces are all wrong, their eyes are jabbed in with a tool,  and their horns are unlike real rams. 

Incidentally, did you know that the statue of Ramses II as a child is a pun? It's a rebus. A play on sounds. 

Explanations online will tell you the hawk, Horus, represents Ra, but actually the sun disk does that. The child is "mes." And the sedge plant he is holding is "su." So then, Ra-mes-su. Close enough.

You have to ask, how did modern Egyptologists ever figure this out?

They sit around all day staring at these things looking at every single detail and putting 2+2+2+2+2 together until they get 18 million. And don't even try to argue with them.

I have a copy of this statue too. All of us do. It's a very famous statue. I can throw that in the aquarium too.