Getting away from the hustle and bustle

Finding a moment of solitude.

A very long moment.

I was hoping the Boesemani rainbow would not go into the holes in the Chia Pet rams. The neon tetras will fit, but not the rainbows, and not the harlequin tetras. The baby harlequins will fit but not the older adult ones. 

They could die in there. And that would be such a bummer. 

Yesterday I happened to notice the female betta do exactly that. She looked so cool going into it. I grabbed the cell phone and turned on the camera app and waited for her to come back out. Waited and waited. 

And waited and waited and waited and waited and waited and waited, you see where this is going. 

Now I worried about not being able to see her way out. The lights went out. Then I was fairly certain she would die inside there. 

This morning she was swimming freely with the other fish.

What an i-i-i-n-n-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g fish she is. She just wanted to be alone. All those other fish going back and forth all over the whole place.  It's a rather busy aquarium right now.  Like fish tank New York. She's such a Greta Garbo betta. 

I never got a video of her coming out. Because she stayed in there so long. That would have been so cool. 

A long time ago at the previous apartment I had artificial rock against the back glass. With suction cups. A lot of it. the rock formed a wall on the entire back glass. There were like six separate sets of the stuff. You only get a few pieces in each set.

The bench with carved horses was set in front of the tank and I spent hours just watching it like a t.v.

Possibly minutes. The bench is hard.

The plastic rock has holes in it of various sizes and shapes.

As I gazed upon the backdrop I noted a neon tetra's head facing forward. 

It had got behind the rock and came through one of the holes.

It was stuck. 

Now, you'd think you could just gently push its head back through the hole. 

But its scales prevented that. If I pushed any harder it would rip off the fish's scales. 

I could not push it forward and I could not push it backward. 

It was well and truly stuck.

I took the piece off and removed it from the aquarium. The fish now out of water. I tried my best to save the fish but everything I tried failed and the fish was dying from being out of the water so long. 

In desperation I gave one good push and decapitated the fish. 

!

I felt really bad. 

Poor thing. 

I learned from that. I got rid of all the suction cups and put the rock on the outside of the tank between the aquarium and the wall. I draped black cloth behind the artificial rock. So now the aquarium is extended by the depth of the rock. 

That faked out the fish who all thought they could get to the rocks. But the glass stopped them.

My own father could not figure out what I did by sitting on the bench and trying to understand what he was seeing. He never put it together that the rock is not inside the aquarium. He never saw the black cloth that hid the wall behind it. That was such an ace configuration. But not possible now because the tank is not positioned in front of a wall. Now the tank is a room divider. Not a wall decoration. It's even more cool now for being nearly 360° view. 

We aquarium hobbyist types think up all kinds of stupid crap. 

And now I'm risking the same thing with these Chia Pet rams. The holes in the back of their necks used to fill them with water are various sizes. The whole thing is totally random. The setup invites similar tragedy.