Lazy Lap Dog Sunday

Now That Is a Happy Cat

The seriously sunny weather here is making more than just the humans happy.

Montreal!

We've returned successfully from our visit to the great white north. So far all evidence points to the cat having been locked out of the house during the 4 days we've been gone and living in the garage. She's safely back inside, and so are we!

Tetley vs. Beep

You can ignore the last minute of the video, where nothing fun happens.

Today's Tweets

• 17:21 Just uploaded 5 new photos to my SmugMug "Food > Avocado" gallery: bit.ly/4aTTmN #
• 18:08 Just uploaded 31 new photos to my SmugMug "Pets > New Fish October 2009" gallery: bit.ly/1HzKT2 #
• 23:05 Astute followers of @furchin (is that allowed?) should note I am only using twitter to interconnect Smugmug, Blogger, and Facebook. :) #

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Fish by Mail!

I've done this once before, but it's been a really long time. It still strikes me as really awesome. Everyone knows you can buy stuff online. But I don't think most people realize you can buy pets online. And I don't mean "look online, then go pick up in person." I mean buy online, pay online, next day air box. Well maybe you can't do this with real pets, but fortunately for me, I have an aquarium. A bona fide saltwater marine tank (that's redundant, but whatever). Only I'm not exactly very good about changing the water all the time so all sorts of algae have moved in. Plus the heat wave this summer killed off at least two snails, and it's been a while since I've had any fire shrimp which are the whole reason I got a salt water aquarium in the first place. So Tuesday night I spent a few hours online price shopping between marinedepot.com and liveaquaria.com (the latter won) and picking out about $150 worth of aquatic life, consisting entirely of

2x Fire Shrimp
5x Chestnut Turbo Snail
5x Turbo Snail
3x Dwarf Red Tip Hermit Crab
4x Peppermint Shrimp (they were all sold out of spearmint, sadly)
5x Nassarius Snail
5x Cerith Snail
2x Emerald Crab
4x Dwarf Blue Leg Hermit Crab
10x Astraea Turbo Snail

Now I profess to not really being sure what each specific snail type does (and in fact I can only tell three of them apart, and only name one). I think my general strategy was that I have a lot of different types of algae, so let's get a lot of different types of snails to eat the various things.

So fast-forward to today, when the packages showed up. Ironically, I worked from home today so I could be present to sign for the packages, and they were delivered during the one hour I was at work for a meeting. Good thing I left a note.



Let's open this puppy up! (Oh wow, these pet-in-the-mail jokes literally write themselves, don't they?)



Free Styrofoam coolers!



Inside the coolers are bags of fish, just like you'd get in the pet store. Only they're sealed a bit better (and I think I read somewhere that they use oxygen in the bags). And a few are double-bagged, and there's a couple which apparently don't like to look at each other in dark bags so they can't see anything.



I hold up the bags and eyeball the contents, trying to determine whether the bag does indeed contain 5 snails, and if so, which set of five snails it is. The futility of this is quickly realized and we move on to the next step, floating!



The bags float in the aquarium for 15 minutes to bring their temperature up to the water temperature. After the allotted time is up, into the bucket everyone goes.



The instructions that came with everything indicated the acclimatization process should "take no longer than two hours" in the instructions from the first box, and "take no longer than one hour" in instructions that came in the second box. One box came from Miami and the other from Los Angeles, so I'm not really sure what that says about either city. But guess what? There are like 20 bags here and I only have one bucket. So into the bucket everyone goes. (In retrospect, there's no way the Californians had the same water as in Miami, so maybe I should have had two batches for each time zone. Ah well.)



Then the IV drop starts. Dripping 2-4 drops of tank water per second (actually a little more because of the relatively huge amount of water in the bucket) to bring the salinity, alkalinity, and similaritinity of the bucket water closer to the tank water. This continues until the bucket contains 75% tank water, at which point the net comes out and we transfer the guys into the tank.



This is a rose bubble tip anemone. Sharp readers out there like yourself will refer back to the list at the beginning of this post and notice the anemone wasn't on the list. And you'll be absolutely right -- I've had this anemone long enough that it's undergone asexual reproduction and now I have two (which is really awesome, since they're $100 each at the store). But it turns out that taking pictures of snails, especially through algae coated glass (because they haven't eaten it all yet), is just not that exciting. But you can still see all the photos if you really want.

The cutest pumpkin ever

We got Tetley a Halloween costume today.

Tetley Taste Test

Guess who left their muffin unattended (and whole) on the coffee table last week? And then it's easy to guess who took several bites before deciding it was tasty enough to stash in one of his favorite hiding spots.

We are cruel

We bought some saddle bags for Tetley. He does not like them, but he's willing to put up with them while being fed treats. Now he can carry all his own stuff for longer outings.

Tetley and Michal vote NO on wearing

Tetley and Michal vote NO on wearing sweaters. Maybe I will try again in winter...

Introducing Tetley

For everyone who hasn't already heard in one form or another, we got a dog last weekend. He's a bit camera shy, which means when I point the camera at him, he runs.

Officially, he's a Pomeranian, and weighs just shy of 14 pounds, but he's overweight. We're giving him lots of exercise and putting him on a strict diet of dog food (he was previously fed only people food, which explains how he got overweight in the first place), and he's doing great. His target weight is 10-12 pounds. He came with papers, so we know he turns four years old tomorrow, July 16th. He and Rocket are getting along great, although they are still competing for petting. It turns out Tetley has a taste for Rocket's favorite mice toys. Luckily, they are cheap, because he's already eaten one. He can catch treats and other goodies thrown to him, and has already learned sit so well that when he wants something, he does it automatically. He's an excellent companion for walks, although I haven't taken him more than two miles yet.

Happy Birthday Tetley!

Two Facts (aka "That Noise Last Night")

1. The noise last night was the cat knocking down my jacket and a camera filter from the green chair.

2. As a result of the jacket being on the floor, she peed on it this morning. I don't think that's legitimate. If I leave it on the floor, ok. But she can't put things on the floor then pee on them. Sadly I didn't discover this second fact until I had gotten into the car, wearing the jacket of course, and thought the car smelled bad. It took me all the way until 15th and Beacon to discover what smelled bad. When I got home again the cat was in a lot of trouble. Still is going to be in a lot of trouble tonight. I'm probably actually going to take the time to cut off her food supply finally. Grr.

In the Dog House

We had a visitor of the canine persuasion for the long weekend. Wheatie came to stay with us Friday to Monday while Andy, Angie, and Ally played in Hawaii. We got lucky with the weather, and had very little rain during her stay.
Wheatie has a basket of toys here, and she played with all seven in the first hour. We prolonged the life of several with duct tape, and they lasted throughout her stay. She also slept in several of our old dog beds. For anyone who has met Wheatie, you'll realize that she exceeded the intended occupancy size by a bit, as seen here. Rocket's manners deteriorated during the visit, and she jumped up on anything to stay secure, even though most things were off limits. Rocket and Wheatie tolerated each other, and nine times out of ten Wheatie didn't even approach Rocket unless she ran (at which point the chase reflex kicked in). We did spend a lot of quality time with the squeak toys. Best of all, one afternoon Wheatie squeaked her green bone, and Rocket immediately made the exact same sequence of squeaks from the other room. Needless to say, Wheatie preferred the live version.

Rocket's New Bed

Rocket loves the blankets that Kasia made us for engagement presents. Normally we keep one out on the couch, where it matches both the couch and the cat so well it seems like Kasia knew exactly what colors both were even thought she'd never seen either before. Recently, we put both blankets in a basket under the table beside the loveseat. Apparently Rocket likes the blankets enough she's willing to follow them.

Meet Our New Hampster, BP

I'm not sure that his name is actually BP, but that's what we're calling him. We got him on Sunday, and he's a lot more shy than Pongo was, but maybe he just needs to get used to us.