Farewell dear Garry

I came home tonight ready for a bit of soothing fish swimming action after a hard day at work, and was greeted with a new level of inactivity from Garry. Yep, this time he really wasn't sleeping. Funnily enough he wasn't floating either. There was also a little tetra stuck to the filter. I presume it was less likely misadventure, and that he was another victim to the the Garry disease.

Poor Garry. He lasted just over 24 hours. But what a beautiful, short time we had together. I think for the record he had Ichthyophthirius, the dreaded white spot disease, and I suspect he has now contaminated the rest of the tank. Of course 5+ years of veterinary book-learning and I of course poo-pooed the idea of actually quarantining new fish before introducing them to the existing tank, so it probably serves me right.

I was all ready to perform a post mortem to confirm my diagnosis, but Petey put a brake on that little idea by insinuating that I really know nothing about fish innards, which is a good point, although I indignantly responded that I might know what I was looking at if I saw it. I guess i'd really rather remember Garry as he was anyway. It also seems in such poor taste to post mortem a fish with a steak knife on the kitchen bench. So here is Garry in all his glory. We will remember you buddy.

Garry the Gourami

And now for the article about fish

Heheheh! Surely after coming up with a blog name, the next hardest thing is coming up with the second post. Particularly since its only 10 mins since the first post, and I really haven't gotten up from my seat, let alone got on out into the world to live a little. Apparently its necessary to write at least 2 blogs per week to keep your readership interested. Probably a good idea to just get this one out of the way early, then as Petey says, i can just 'put it to sleep'.

So, i'll write about our fishies. Specifically i'm worried about Garry. We've only had him for just over 24 hours and already he's our favourite fish. He's a kissing Gourami, so he has these big luschious lips which he uses to suction off all the algae off the glass, which not only looks cute, but is extremely useful. All the rest of those layabout tetras only seem to eat fishy food, leaving me to take care of cleaning the tank.

So Garry has become very popular in the tank. At the same time that Garry joined our 'community' we took home Buffy. Buffy is an Angel fish (we're so good at fish names!), and was hanging out with Garry in his home tank in the store. The weird thing is that Buffy is hovering around Garry, possibly just as concerned about him as what I am. He's just lying there at the bottom of the tank. I'm not sure if he's just gone out too hard on the algae-eating, and just needs to sleep it off, or whether he's on borrowed time.

Now, in answer to the question, do fish sleep? Yes, yes they do. Or at least they do something like sleep. They have no eyelids, so of course its all eyes wide shut style. But they don't need to be moving in order to get air over their gills for breathing purposes, as apparently most sharks do. Interestingly sharks also don't have that bouyancy gland the swim bladder that other fishies have, so they have to constantly swim or sink. They do however have a huge fatty liver that accounts for 30% of their body mass and adds to their bouyancy. And probably their ability to hold their liquor.

Fish are so cool. And even better is the word aestivation, which is like hibernation, but in summer. The canny lungfish, not only can breathe air, as well as use gills to extract air, but they can slow down their metabolism to 1/60th of their normal rate, coat themselves in a layer of mucus and wait in the dried mud of riverbeds breathing only through a little tunnel to the surface until the rains come again. Come to think of it, i think hibernation is much more sensible, why miss out on the greatest season of all, summer? But then i'm not a fish. I blame Mandy and her spelling bee (definitely very addictive) for my new-found interest in cool words.

How hard is it to come up with a blog name?

Pretty hard. I now understand why Maz has 3 blogs. I suspect I may ditch this name and start a new blog myself when I eventually come up with a better name.

Petey in an extremely generous moment gave me a name he was saving for a rainy bloggy day. Its a great name. It is however better suited to Petey than to I. It just sounds a little riske for me, "naked beneath her/his clothes" just doesn't seem, I dont know, me.

Anyhoo, why a blog? Why, when I have never before shown an interest in blogging, why would I start a blog. Why, when life is already incredibly full of things I've started and am yet to complete and full of commitments it seems impossible to fulfill when we all have such limited time in the day. Why?

I'm asking myself the same question. Which brings me to my objectives, 'cause its always important to define your goals and set some clear objectives. I think what really cracked it for me was when I was sitting here for ages trying to think of a blog name, and what I could possibly write about and I looked out at the pool and thought, well i could write about the pool...well...I could write about the fish....geezus, what a narrow boring life I have? I really need to get out more. So that's it. My aim is to get out more. Read the paper (or at least news.com), be more interesting so that at least i'll have something more exciting to write about than the view from our kitchen table. I also aim to get a little more informed about whats going on in the world.

And already its a resounding success. I've learnt something already today. I learnt that that quote I have had stuck up in my wardobe for years is by Gandhi...of course it is, its just that I wrote it on that post-it note so long ago that I forgot its source. And so the blog title is born. At least for now.