(no subject)

[which_chick]

It would appear that I am now the proud owner of two vaguely purple bettas. These are fish. They have to be kept in solitary confinement and they need to be *warm*. I have no idea what I'm going to do when it gets on toward winter. If they are still alive by then, I'll see what I can do. Fifty degree mornings probably would not be good for the fish because they're tropical.



I don't like fish. I never understood wanting to keep fish. But I went to inspect the apartment at 321 and there were fish. There was no tenant. There was no note along the lines of I will be back for my fish in a week or so. Please take care of them until then.. There were just two vaguely purple betta fish, each one in its own teeny little container half-full of murky water with some blue and white fishtank rocks and a small plastic tree. They're probably WalMart fish. It's not their fault, except perhaps on a grand karmic scale, that they wound up in sad little mass-produced lives as the property of poor white trash careless or heartless enough to leave them behind in a vacated apartment.

So I have these two purple fish. I guess they can live okay in those tiny little containers but I bought each one a better container at WalMart. They had "cracker jars" on sale for four bucks and the internet says betta fish do not need an aerator, so cracker jars it was. These hold about a gallon of water, which is about three times as big as the little containers that they were in, and I rinsed them out (no soap) and filled them with room temperature water. I rinsed off (no soap) each fish's plastic tree and fishtank rocks and put them in the new containers. They don't really fill up the new containers at all, but I think the effect is sort of zen. The trees float because the jars don't have a stick to impale the tree trunk on like the bottom of the teeny little containers had. I'm okay with floating trees.

We'll see what happens to the fish. It's quite possible that they will die on me, what with being WalMart fish neglected for a week or so by the tenant and then shifted into new and different water and new and different containers by me. But, well, at least it's not the swirly hole.

Comments

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

Glad you are taking them under your wing. If you truly do not want them, we will take them off of your hands.

Will you name them?

[zhasper.livejournal.com]

I don't know what bettas are like, but I know that for most fish you need to get rid of the chlorine in the water before you put fish in..

The low-tech way is to just leave it to stand 24 hours after it comes out of the tap. The hi-tech way, for impatient people, is to add special chemicals to get rid of the chlorine in a hurry...

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's what the instructions say on the internet. I didn't get too excited about that because my water comes from a spring up on the side of the mountain above my house. It isn't treated or filtered or anything. The water bubbles up out of the ground, flows into a catch basin, and runs through a pvc pipe into a large holding tank. The holding tank, which is about halfway up the mountain, uses gravity to provide water pressure at my house.

[zhasper.livejournal.com]

Of course, a *careful* reader of your LJ (as opposed to one who merely enjoys the ongoing soap opera as a diversion from their workaday concerns) would remember this - you've mentioned it repeatedly, in, for instance, the saga of getting the Automatic Pumping Action happening.

I'm cold, it's 12:10am, and I've just finished work. Time for sleep.

I'm exceedingly jealous of your water supply :(