Sunday, October 25, 2009

Time to edit my "About Me" blurb

At the moment it reads:
Hi, I'm Mim, a 38 year old mother of three (David 12 yrs, Caitlin 10 yrs and Thomas 7 yrs). I spend my time doing mum stuff, volunteering at the kids' school, making jewellery and occasionally pretending to be a viking and I also work part-time for a small magazine publisher. I'm a book addict and I'm always in need of new bookshelves. I have a dog, 2 cats and a 4 foot fish tank with one lonely fish in it.
To begin with, 3 of the numbers in the first sentence changed in the last 2 weeks, and then today there was a dramatic change to a couple of the numbers in the last sentence.

Don't go getting too excited though - it's the fish numbers that changed, the mammal population of the house remains the same.

It's been quite some time since I did any actual maintenance on the big fishtank, when people asked if there were any fish in there I'd say "possibly." Turns out the answer should have been "no." I think I've been feeding fish food to the plants for a while.

Anyway, today was Tom's eighth birthday and he'd been asking for a Siamese fighting fish for weeks. Problem is, I hate looking at those tiny little tanks with one slightly pathetic looking fish, so we asked about keeping them in a community tank and were assured it's possible as long as none of the other fish are nippy types. Tom, therefore, is now the proud owner of a 40L tropical fish tank and Simo the Siamese fighting fish is hanging out temporarily in one of my flower vases while we wait for the tank to be ready for him to live there.

Meanwhile, seeing as I was on a bit of a roll with the whole setting up of fishtanks thing, I cleaned out the big tank that sits in our front hall, rinsed the very dusty small tank that has been sitting unused in the kitchen and set it up in the lounge room, sorted through the accumulated crap in the cupboard under the big tank, took the kids shopping at Reef River Reptile up at Hornsby, came home with 6 silver tip tetras for the big tank, a bunch of plants and the afforementioned Simo, spent a good couple of hours fiddling around with tank layout and then collapsed in exhaustion. (Ten litre buckets of water are kind of heavy and there's an awful lot of them involved in setting up 280L worth of aquarium even when the 200L tank only needs half refilling.)

They look so pretty when they're all clean and tidy.

The big tank with the 6 silver tip tetras.

4ft fishtank

The small tank in our lounge room.

Our 20-inch tank

Tom's fishtank.

Tom's new fishtank

And last but not least, Simo the Siamese fighting fish.

Simo the siamese fighting fish

Now, to edit that blurb...

6 comments:

Louise said...

Love your fishtanks. We have one 60 liter fishtank here, it needs cleaning, but we have many small fish in it. And those guppies keep breeding ;-)

Deborah said...

Happy birthday! And evidently happy fish tank cleaning day

Anonymous said...

The fishtanks are fantastic Mim. What a lot of hard work, but an absolutely fantastic result at the end. I just can't believe that our 'babies' are eight years old now. That is just plain scary.

Ariane said...

Cool, the fish tanks look awesome.

May the fish live long and prosper.

Mary (MPJ) said...

The fish tanks look awesome! And congratulations on the birthdays! :)

(BTW, did you get what I sent you? It could be as if it were a birthday-ish present.) ;)

Penny said...

Fish are so restful to watch :) not so much to clean...