Friday Fragments and Linkfest No. 14

Hosted by Mrs4444.

I've less of my own fragments and more of the linkfest stuff to share this week. Don't forget to pop on over to Half-Past Kissin' Time when you're done here and check out all the other Fragmented Friday-ers!

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After watching all three extended version Lord Of The Rings movies this week David came to me at bedtime tonight and asked "Where's The Hobbit?" Amazingly enough I actually knew where one of our copies was. A few minutes later I could hear him giggling to himself as he read. To appreciate the true significance of this it's important to understand that David, aged 12 and 3/4, could count on one hand the number of full length novels he has read. And I know for a fact that one of them he started half-way through. I'm holding my breath and hoping this might be a turning point.

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At the end of December my good friend Jen and I went out to lunch at The Buddha Belly (the website is a work in progress), a restaurant in Terry Hills. The food was fabulous, we will be going back. Lots. But what I really liked about the place was the surroundings, you sit outside on wide covered verandahs overlooking gardens and a carp pond. A carp pond with the most enormous fish in it.

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Looking to donate towards disaster relief in Haiti? Posts with info on which organisations will do the best with your money can be found at Hoyden About Town, Bitch PhD, Shakesville and Greta Christina's Blog.

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Do you visit Astronomy Picture of the Day? I have it in my feed reader but I often leave it unread for weeks on end. Which is silly, because the images are awesome in the true sense of the word. Nebulas are probably my favourite astronomy images, galaxies come in a close second. As a teen I had a poster of the Horsehead Nebula in pride of place on the wall above my bed.
Orion's Horsehead Nebula
The Flame Nebula
Spiral galaxy M94

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TED talk - Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey

Click here if you can't see the embedded video
(via my cousin at slightlyodd.com)

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There's a lovely interview with Judith Kerr, author of the Mog books and The Tiger Who Came to Tea, at the Guardian.
(via Penthe at life or books?)

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Did everyone see the coconut shell carrying octopus? If not, well, you should. Now, I could just embed the video here, but instead I'm going to send you over to Save Your Breath For Running Ponies where you can watch the clip, read a bit about the research behind it and have a good giggle at the story at the end of the post. And then you can lose yourself for several hours rummaging through the archives and following a whole bunch of links to new and exciting places and filling up your feed reader with a whole bunch of new blogs. At any rate, that's what I did.

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Squirrel ingenuity at Twin Cities Naturalist.

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Ummm...yep, that's all I've got for now, do share your cool interweb finds in the comments!

Mondays aren't usually this bad

Today I have dealt with more than my fair share of angst.

I got up this morning with some no small effort and went to check on Tom's fish tank. I hadn't done this for nearly a week, Tom had been very responsible with feeding his fish and I've been kind of busy. In Tom's tank I discovered one very ill looking siamese fighting fish lying upside down on the gravel. Tom had to be bundled off to school hoping that his Simo would be ok, I warned him that it didn't look good. After the kids had gone to school I checked on the fish again and Simo was dead. Then I realised I couldn't see one of the rummy nose tetras either (found the corpse tonight when I did a water change).

Then I went to feed my fish and one of the dwarf gouramis was dead with the other looking decidedly unwell.

I did find baby platies in Tom's tank though, just 2 of them, but yeah, baby fish! I think one of Tom's platies was looking kind of plump!

I had a meeting with David's teacher just after lunch all about how worried he is about how David will cope at high school and how he's likely to be a target of bullying and it all so different and how he feels like he's let David down because he hasn't "fixed" him or something. Told me he didn't think David was having a very happy childhood, by which he meant David wasn't happy at school, wasn't enjoying it. Yeah, the only way David could suddenly start loving school would be if he stopped being David. I'm aiming to have him survive it myself. Anyway, he was offering to get in touch with the high school and talk to them about David so that they know what to expect. That part I'm very pleased with, I wasn't expecting it because David doesn't fit into any categories that are eligible for special consideration or help or anything.

Then I was picking the kids up from school and Caitlin came out of class with tears streaming down her cheeks because she'd missed out on being nominated to run in the prefects elections. Followed by Tom who was crying because there'd been a dead baby bird on the oval earlier in the day and as a bonus some other kid had mocked him for caring about the dead bird. And then I had to tell him his fish was dead. Almost ended up in tears in the school playground myself.

As a crowning glory Adam's car got a flat tire on the way home and because he has a silly little car that doesn't have room for a spare he had to wait for a tow truck which he was told could take two hours.

At which point I gave up and went to get fish and chips for dinner, because deep fried potato makes everything better. (Adam was home within the hour, which was nice.)

Know what else makes things better? Kids and puppy dogs having fun.

Clara on the trampoline

Click here if you can't see the embedded video

P.S. I've updated my NaBloPoMo prize offer post with the actual prize options.

Sleep deprivation, I haz it

I procrastinated a little too long last night and ended up still working on P&C stuff after 2am which left me with less than 4 hours of sleeping time. I had to get to the shops before school started to get extra supplies for the Kindy Orientation morning tea this morning then go to work and come home to a full afternoon of kid-wrangling - homework, drama class, singing lesson and preparation for the school talent quest tomorrow. Mum helped again, she is totally my hero. Then there was the conjuring of dinner and having Adam's mum join us for the meal. Sadly, after quite a few weeks of her being sober, tonight she'd been drinking again. After dinner was more homework helping and I'm now sitting here writing a terribly uninspired blog post while David plays Guitar Hero.

Did you know it's incredibly frustrating trying to take photos of fish? The rotten things just won't stay still and they keep hiding behind rocks and plants. Adam was totally laughing at me the whole time I was taking the dozens of photos needed to get just a handful that were even vaguely in focus.

Clown Loach



Dwarf Gourami

It's so far so good on the fish-tank front, all the fish we've brought home are still alive, the plants are growing like crazy and the male platy in our small tank is showing lots of interest in his 3 female companions, with any luck we'll have baby fish before too long.

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.



The small tank in our lounge room.



Tom's fishtank.



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

Now, to edit that blurb...