Lost

I've been having some trouble over here lately. A month or more ago I bought 3 summer skirts. When it got be warm enough to wear them, they had vanished. I searched the house up and down and even cleaned our bedroom (a true rarity). Several days later I found them in the girls room in a stack of too big clothes. Whew. I was driving myself crazy looking all over. That was last week. Now, I'm looking for a handful of trinkets I bought at the hardware store the other day. I have the receipt. I paid for them. I remember handling them at the car, so I don't think I left them in the cart. I've turned the house upside down once again. We cleaned the basement (another rarity). I even cleaned the car. Yet another rarity. Before I gross you out with my tornado zone of a house, I will say that the one place where cleaning is not a rarity is my kitchen. But nevermind that, I can't find my hardware trinkets and it's driving me crazy. I even checked the shed. I looked under the pine tree. I checked inside the hose reel box. I'm telling you, I've looked there! Why does this keep happening to me? Ok, don't answer that.

Because I know you care.

When we lived in MN we had a tank full of beautiful african cichlids. It looked like this:





But then they had babies. And the babies grew up and began to invade the already claimed nooks and crannies of the rocks. These fish get rather feisty when somebody steals their spot, and so the fights began. We grew a bit weary of our not so peaceful tank and its occupant's shenanigans and then we moved to Nicaragua, so we got rid of the whole lot.

Now, we live in IN, we set up the tank again, and decided that this time we'd try live plants. This meant different lights, gravel, etc. It wasn't exactly cheap, and it was a colossal failure. It looked like this:

But, today, 2 months after sinking more money into a silly hobby and shelling out for a special filter, I'm happy to report that our tank now looks like this:



Not nearly as sculpted and perfectly arranged as we had in mind at first, but hey, the plants are finally growing and the water's clear. And there's a little algae on the back wall that I should be cleaning instead of wasting time telling you about it. Oh, and the fish are peaceful. Anybody nippy has been sent to the pet store. I hate nippy fish. And there isn't really a phantom photographer living in the tank. That's me.