Bloggin' Umholtz

Of bug-eyd fish...

My apologies for being away so long. Occasionally my life gets interrupted by the mundane. You know, work and such. And once I get away from something it seems to take forever to get back to it. I was jarred from reality and back to flights of fancy by a hand written note on the cover of my current PGRS newsletter, which simply said “ Any more stories?”

Stories!!

Here I am, meticulously committing to paper the ongoing saga of the N. P. D. & S and someone calls it a story. Would you call War and Peace a story? Is the Encyclopedia Britannica a story? Well okay, maybe volumes C through F, but the rest is definitely not a story”. I was busily working up a good harangue for this unknown note writer when I suddenly realized… I have a fan. Someone out there misses “Notes”. Either that or nobody’s writing for the newsletter. I prefer to cling to the former. After all it is my flight of fancy. At least that’s what the voices in my head tell me….

Now where were we? Ah, yes… bug eyed fish. It was fall when I finally completed the wall and installed the pond so I couldn’t see the sense in putting anything in it until the following spring. Through the Winter I stared wistfully out the window and occasionally contemplated my navel. In January I discovered I could make a few bucks on Ebay selling all the things I’d been saving for a garage sale. $600.00 later I ordered 4 boxes of Aristocraft track, taking advantage of their annual sale. Buy 4 get one free! 300 feet of track was resting comfortably in my basement by the time the crocuses started to bloom.

One day I woke up, walked outside and immediately knew winter in Ebensburg was over. My eyes beheld my neighbor cleaning up all the little doggie presents that had remained hidden by the snow these last several months.

My first goal was to get the pond up and running. I installed a ground-fault receptacle and dropped the pump in the pond. I was going to buy one of those flowerpot filters until I saw the price and decided to build my own. About 20 bucks later I had an operational filter sitting above the pond and trickling down the rocks like a waterfall. My son came wandering by at the time and I asked him where he was going. “Walmart” was the reply. I reached in my pocket handed him 5 bucks and said, “ Bring back a couple of goldfish to throw in the pond.” He looked at the sawbuck and asked “Is 5 dollars enough?”
“Yes” I replied. “You should be able to get a couple of goldfish for a dollar or so.” About 45 minutes later he shows up with two goldfish and tells me I owe him another 5 bucks.

“Say what?”

The first goldfish was just that… gold. It was also about 5 inches long. I asked him why he bought such a big one. He said “ You won’t be able to see the small ones” I asked if he, my Vice-Chairman of Wildlife, understood the concept of how animals start out small and grow larger as they get older. Sort of like him… (I did point out to him the exception to this in that some parents in the animal world eat their young.

Hmmmm…

He simply handed me the second bag. This goldfish was… well… it was black and it had bug eyes. I asked him, going back to his prior reasoning on buying the large goldfish, how he expected to see a black fish against a black pond?

“But he’s neat, don’t you think?” Well one of us wasn’t thinking but I decided to let that pass. In go the fish. The following day during a trip to Wally World I confirmed my suspicions that indeed you still could buy goldfish for under a buck and I added four more to the pond. At this point the vice chairman of horticulture arrived on the scene. Inspecting my creation, she commented only that we needed plants in the pond.

Will I ever get back to the railroad????????

Next Installment: tadpoles, snails and toads “Oh my”