Five alive

Wow. I've completed my first (academic) year of grad school. How weird. Can you believe it? I surely can't. I seem to have survived my hell-week of 5 papers. Don't quite know how I managed to, but I'm still here =D. And my final was super easy. Finished it in half an hour (and that includes going back and checking my answers). Gotta love undergraduate classes... Grades haven't been posted yet, so I can't say definitively that I survived. But I'm confident. And that confidence is more than warranted, I'm sure.

To celebrate being done, I washed Steggie. Lord, was she filthy! Now she's back to being my pretty princess car. I also bought and assembled a new bookshelf. I don't know what it is, but books reproduce like guppies! At least, in my room they do. My room wasn't that cluttered with my existing shelf space, but somehow the new bookshelf is completely full already! Craziness! My room truly does feel neater and more organized with it though.

The reason I absolutely needed to get a new bookshelf is that I'm going through with plans and got an aquarium. Said aquarium is to live on top of one of my existing bookshelves, which meant that the assorted jumble on top of it needed a new home. Which just wouldn't be possible with the existing furnishings of my room.

So on Friday, after I built my bookshelf and populated it with its books, photos, and whatnot, John and I went to get the aquarium and necessary accessories. It's a 10 gallon. We had to let it sit and filter overnight, to get everything ready for the fishies. Then yesterday we got five neon tetras. They're cute little guys. I want more fish, but John, the animal studier, said it'd be better to just get a few and make sure the water's all right for them. So these tetras are the proverbial canaries. In a couple days I'll go get some buddies for them. All five of them are still alive today! Stupid me though. I totally spaced and forgot to get food for them. They seemed ok eating Napoleon's food last night though.

But it gave me the perfect excuse to go get some more decorations for the aquarium today! It was pretty spartan so far. Just had blue gravel, a few marbles, and one fake plant. The coolest thing about fake aquarium plants is that they have their scientific names on the package. The original plant I got is Vallisneria spiralis. The place where we'd gotten the aquarium didn't have the greatest fake plant selection, plus John kept making fun of my taste in fish-tank-interior design. He's apparently a minimalist. Good thing I'm not a fish of his. I'd be driven crazy by the monotony of a stoic tank. So today I got (along with fish flakes) some more fake plants to hang out with the vallisneria. These are Acetabularia calyculus and Dictyota rossa. And, to keep John happy, I got a lava rock too. Apparently that's the one thing he condones to decorate aquariums with. None of the tetras have been adventurous enough to swim through the cave in the lava rock yet. I hope that they eventually do!

So yeah. The aquarium is now aesthetically pleasing to me. And not gaudy or tacky either, as John implies my taste to be. Yep. I'm definitely not going to have any depressed, visually unstimulated fishies! Above the aquarium, I hung a picture of Napoleon that I painted. It's to proclaim that this is indeed the Napoleon-memorial aquarium. Maybe I should make a little plaque =).

I can't wait to get more fishies! I already have names picked out for them. I can't name any of the tetras, because I promised Jenny that that could be her job. It's her little school of tetras. I'm going to get an angelfish to be Napoleon II. And some other cool fish, perhaps a paradise fish to name Aristotle. I also super want an algae eater, a plecostomus, but first I have to have the aquarium long enough for it to start to get scummy. And John says infusing algae into a clean aquarium would be silly. Oh well. I suppose he's right. Anyway, I think that my algae eater will be named Wiggles. I'm sure I'll get other cool and cute fishies aside from those I've listed. I'll keep you posted!