Brief recap:

We have, in our back yard, a small outdoor koi pond with two fountains to help circulate the water. It's stocked with a number of koi we inherited from the previous owner.

Back in December, a freak storm flooded our basement and yard. (This is the same 100-MPH windstorm that knocked the power out of most of the Seattle area for up to two weeks. We were lucky. Our power was back on in eight hours.) That storm dumped a pile of dirt, gravel, and grime into the pond, forcing me to turn off the pumps, and clouding the water so badly I couldn't check on the fish at all.

I thought all my koi were dead. It was a beautiful surprise when I found live fish in the pond about a month later.

Before we could clean the pond, we had to wait until the weather warmed up. Fish are cold-blooded and mostly hibernating in the winter. Transferring fish to a temporary holding tank when they're hibernating usually kills them.

Today, at long last, the pond got cleaned.

The pumps are back on. Everything works. I wasn't able to do a full count, but it looks like I've got about six or seven koi left alive, out of the dozen or so I'd originally had. It could have been a lot worse.

I'll start feeding them in another day or two, once they've adjusted to the new water.

You take your victories where you find them.

I've written before about the koi pond in my backyard. It's a tiny pond, small and narrow, holding maybe a few hundred gallons of water. I'm very fond of it. The water constantly burbles in a steady fountain from reservoirs on both ends of the pond. I love to sit in the yard and listen to the water in the summer.

The fish are very beautiful too. They're small, only a few years old, but colorful and bright and fun to watch.

Last month, during a heavy flood, part of our neighbor's driveway and the nearby hill washed through our back yard. Quite a bit of the dirt landed in the bottom of the koi pond, turning the water brown with mud and silt.

In an effort to save the pump that recirculates the water from being choked with mud, I turned it off. It was a heartbreaking switch to flip, because I was convinced I was condemning all my fish to slow asphyxiation, if they weren't dead already.

"They could be hibernating at the bottom," several people said to me. Yeah, but they can't breathe mud, I thought.

Of all the storm damage, losing the fish was what really upset me. Fine, they're just fish, but they're living creatures that I'm responsible for. Losing them was awful.

For most of the last month and a half, we've had Seattle's version of a bitter cold snap, with temperatures barely above freezing. The pond has been a raw wound in our back yard, silent and greyish brown and dead, usually covered in a thin film of ice.

Today is the first genuinely warm day we've had in awhile, with temperatures well into the 50s.

I stepped out onto our deck today to refill our bird feeder when I caught a glimpse of orange in the pond.

It was one of the koi, hovering near the surface, still and quiet.

Crap, I thought, and steeled myself to go get my net to remove the corpse from the pond.

Then the koi swam off.

Then another one swam by.

And another.

They were hibernating.

God knows if they'll survive the winter. It's too cold to feed them yet. The pond is still choked with debris. I can't restart the pumps until we get everything cleaned out, and that's going to take a professional. Without the spring and summer tree cover they're vulnerable to predators. But there's still hope, and I'll cling to that.

It seems to me that my blog has been a little dull of late. I've finally realized why. For months now, there has been a woeful lack of stories about dead fish.

When I was a kid, my grandparents owned a small summer home in northern Wisconsin. It was a tiny cottage, barely big enough for the six of us, but the location was unbeatable. There were endless woods to hike in, lakes for swimming and boating, and some of the most beautiful, tranquil afternoons I'm ever likely to see.

The house had a beach and a dock. You couldn't dive, but you could walk into the water and swim as much as you liked.

Never mind the swimming, though. My father and grandfather were there for the fishing. Once in awhile they'd get up at the crack of dawn, pile into the rowboat that served them as a fishing boat, and disappear for most of the day, returning late in the afternoon with a cooler full of fish.

Mostly they caught walleye and perch, both of which made for great grilled dinners. Their holy grail was a muskie, a long, powerful fish sought mostly for bragging rights rather than for food.

One very warm summer day up at the cottage, I was lying on a raft in the water, cooling off. I was about eight. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, the sun was blazing hot, and it was a sleepy afternoon. I had a book--some Tom Swift adventure, as I remember--but I kept getting distracted. Something shiny was floating nearby in the shallows.

It wasn't a buoy, or a lifevest, or any of the other marine flotsam I was used to seeing.

What in the world?

I put the book on the dock and paddled towards the shiny thing. Still couldn't figure out what it was. I got closer, and closer, till I was almost on top of it. Then I stared--

It was a fish like I'd never seen before, sleek and fierce, nearly as long as I was tall. A glazed eye out of nightmare peered back at me. Angled jaws looked ready to snap. The fish's silver scales seemed iridescent, alien, covered in some shiny ichor I'd never seen before.

My scream damn near tore my lungs out.

Several adults came running, and had to stifle their giggles when they figured out what had happened. Someone hauled me out of the water, wrapped me in a towel, and explained it to me: it was a muskie, quite dead, probably the victim of a motorboat's propeller.

"Oh," I said.

Kids recover quickly. I was back in the water a few days later. Didn't have a worry in the world, till a year or two later, when my parents gave me a mask and snorkel, and I discovered just how many crayfish lived in the sand and rocks under the water....

Oh, and:

I thought getting a cephalopod was a great idea, but bubblesutonium wasn't so impressed. She hears 'octopus' and thinks 'dinner.'

My favorite bit of the reading was an otherwise scholarly and encouraging article with the following caution:

Octopuses are escape artists and care must be taken to prevent losing one once you have captured it..... Once back at the Hall of Justice, (o.k., o.k., hotel room) Legs was placed in a five-gallon bucket with its lid slightly ajar to provide an air line to circulate the water.

Later, that same morning, a distinctive 'splop' awoke us, somehow penetrating our half asleep brains. That we heard it was no small miracle as we were no doubt still traumatized from waking up at 3:00 A.M. to go look for octopuses. We rushed into the bathroom of the hotel room and there was Legs, obviously upset, scooting around the floor. We managed to catch her and return her to the bucket (yes, the feeling of octopus suckers on your skin is weird at best).

Besides keeping the octopus safe, a well-sealed collecting bucket and/or octoaquarium helps to allay a loved one's fear that 'that thing is going to crawl out in the middle of the night and suck my brains out through my nose'.

Somewhere in the process of buying our house, I said to one of the sellers, "Hey, I didn't know you had a koi pond."

It was true. Our new house has a typical small Seattle back yard, mostly grasses and bamboo and beautiful Japanese maples. Along one side of the yard, there's a long, narrow pond, immaculately maintained. The pond has two tiny waterfalls, one on each end, babbling to each other constantly. And it's stocked with about a dozen tiny, juvenile koi.

"I know," said our friend apologetically. "I'm really sorry. We can have the pond removed if you want..."

"Don't you dare," I told her.

I love fish, and I've had an aquarium for a couple of years now. Now, apparently, I'm about to inherit a dozen more.

Why are they all juveniles? I wondered. "We'd decided a year and a half ago that we'd wanted to remove the pond," explained J. "So we gave away all of the koi and left the pond fallow over a winter, planning to remove it the following summer. Then one day we looked in the pond and discovered that the older koi had laid some eggs, and they'd hatched...."

The pond is sheltered and appears on first inspection to be well designed, with ample filtration, good pumps, and very clean water. It's quite small. We'll likely have to give a few of the koi away to avoid having too many fish in too small a space. But it's lovely.

So now I have an aquarium and a koi pond.

It could always be worse. sophia_katt pointed me to a page explaining how to obtain a pet cephalopod. Hm. I always did want an octopus.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but something in the chemistry of my fish tank has gone seriously haywire. The tank had been relatively stable for months, but not any more. I've lost two swordtails recently - one just this morning - and am well on my way to losing one of my angelfish.

I did a water change and ich treatment tonight. We'll see if that helps.

I'd be more concerned, but I'm already reconciled to the fact that it's incredibly unlikely that any of my fish are going to survive the move. I'm certainly going to try. We'll have buckets and clean water available for transport. I'm planning to set up the tank in the new location first thing so that the fish only have to live in the bucket for an hour or two. Still, fish don't do well with that kind of shock to the system.

I'm not having good pet karma this week.

I've been having troubles with my fish tank. Mostly, they're my own fault. I've committed two of the cardinal sins of fish care: not enough water changes, and introducing new fish to a community tank without isolating them in a holding tank for awhile.

I'd had a relatively stable tank for several months and decided to try adding a few more catfish. Bad idea. The catfish that I acquired apparently had a disease that rapidly infected everyone else in the tank. Over the course of two months, all of my catfish died, and my swordtails have developed what I think is a case of columnaris, an infection that renders them fairly listless and leaves their mouths white.

So far I've managed to keep everybody else alive, but I can't add any more fish until I've got the disease problem knocked down. Unfortunately, treating fish in a community tank isn't trivial, and most so-called fish medicine doesn't work anyway, I'm told. About all you can do is to change the water -often-, make sure you're keeping the tank clean and the ammonia levels low, and hope.

On a related subject, I need to figure out how to get the aquarium secured to the wall in case of earthquake. Hmm.

My mother-in-law called. Yes, they're fine. The house sustained minor damage - probably missing shingles and dinged siding - and the lot looks like the result of a couple of raccoons in God's own yard waste can. Aside from that, everybody's well.

---

I lost one of my new cory fish today. This time I feel no guilt. He looked unhealthy the day I bought him. In fact, I told the store guy that, but he shrugged and told me to exercise the store's two week guarantee policy if anything happened to the fish. (Yeah right.)

The guys who run this fish store are serious stoners, baked out of their minds most of the time they're working. It's not worth arguing with them; they're not working on the same plane you are. I normally buy my fish elsewhere, but it happened that this store had acquired a great stock of schooling adult cories, so...

As a precaution I did an extra-large water change today and will probably change the water every 2-3 days for awhile instead of once a week. Sometime this weekend I'll see about replacement.

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( Dinner with the chefs )

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Off to be productive, or at least look like it.

I'm meant to be writing some technical documents at the moment, but I'm in that pattern where you stare at an empty document for awhile, slowly type T-h-e-spacebar, pause and look at the screen, then exit without saving.

Instead, I will write about my fish. They were looking lonely for awhile, so I've been stocking the tank again. I'm up to six cory catfish, fun little small guys who scuttle around the bottom of the tank and occasionally play hide-and-go-seek with the bigger fish.

I'm debating whether to add another pair of angelfish. I'd love to, but they might be a bit much for my 45-gallon tank. As an alternative, I might get a couple more swordtails, or something similarly sized.

The only major problem with the tank to date, apart from the outbreak of ich early on, has been keeping the algae growth down. (The fact that the tank is right by a window doesn't help.)

I've been mumbling about getting a second fishtank for my office, but I'm far enough away from a sink that the water changes would be incredibly time consuming and annoying. Instead, I've got a mobile of hand painted, carved wooden fish behind my monitor. They're not quite as entertaining, but I have to admit that the maintenance is a LOT easier.

Sometimes life's little pleasures are what get you through a tough week.

For instance: tonight I picked up a hardbound, first edition, first printing copy of Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana at a used bookstore near my office. $7 for a small treasure in great condition. zauditu will appreciate this.


Another instance: There's a specific moment of relief and relaxation when you come home from a long day at work, put on some music, and curl up on the couch with a soda and a good book. It can't be bottled, boxed, labeled, or sold, but it's worth more than anything that can be bought.

---

Somebody pointed out that I haven't talked about my fish in awhile.

When last we left our heroes, I'd lost two fish to a disease that apparently got introduced when I, in my hubris, tried to add two angelfish and two cory catfish to the tank simultaneously.

It's hard to treat fish in a community tank, since you can't exactly medicate them individually. I spent two weeks doing water changes nearly every day, replaced one of the two filters, and knocked down an outbreak of ich with a course of ich treatment. (Ich is an incredibly common fish health problem. Your fish turn listless and develop white spots not unlike a fishy chicken pox.)

Before the outbreak was over, I lost one more catfish, but that ended it. To my amazement, both of the new angelfish lived
, and in fact are thriving. The one angel that arrived with nibbled fins and a sickly pallor is now happily darting around the tank, filled out and robust, while the other likes to play around my hand while I'm cleaning the tank. And, of course, my original swordtails and cories continue to live happily.

I've been waiting for the tank to stabilize before adding more fish. At this point it's long since ready. Next time I get a chance I will head down to south Seattle and see if I can't find a couple more catfish to add to the tank. Cories are schooling fish, and I currently only have two of them. Ideally I should have at least another four.

All the fish are fascinating to watch. Some nights I can stand in front of the tank and lose myself for quite awhile watching the fish play. Our cat Grover agrees with me. When I'm cleaning the tank, I always set up a table or chair right next to the tank to hold some of the cleaning stuff. Grover immediately jumps up and starts pawing at the tank to try to get to the fish. It's very cute, but it's a damn good thing Grover can't jump on top of the tank, or I'd have a lot fewer fish.

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Seattle's Public Library opened its new central branch building last week. I dropped by to take a look on Sunday. It's a very funky design, with pyramidal glass walls and a great deal of open space. The decor looks a bit like the result of a mating ritual between an Apple store and an Ikea. It has hundreds of computer terminals to supplement the five floors of bookshelves.

Their SF section is very poorly stocked, but their fiction and mystery selection is quite good, and they've got a stellar nonfiction and history collection. I have a feeling I'm going to be spending a lot of time in there. My only gripe is that right now they're doing a land-office business, with as many as 20,000 visitors per day. If you're trying to find a popular book like Bob Woodward's latest opus, good bloody luck.

---

Many congratulations and good thoughts to tafkar, who graduates this week with her bachelor's from Harvard University. Persistence and patience pays. WOOT!

Every now and again I have one of those happy days at work where the magic mix of adrenaline, caffiene, and stress happens. That's when I can get through nine hours of meetings, every one of them on a different and unrelated topic and several of them mildly hostile, and still feel energized and cheerful at the end of the day.

The trouble with those days is figuring out how to stop.

---

We're leaving again. Late tomorrow we're heading up to Whistler, a wonderful ski resort town a few hours north of Vancouver. It looks like this will probably be my only chance to get on the snow this winter. We're heading up with the same friends we went to Kalaloch with last month, so I expect a long weekend of snow, food, drink, and hot tub, not necessarily in that order.

I love British Columbia, for a lot of the same reasons I like Australia. It's close enough to US culture for Americans to feel relaxed and at home, but more laid back, less self-righteous, and much more amusing. Besides, any place that sells Sunkist orange soda in most stores understands what's important in life.

Whistler is the only place I've ever been where the liquor store serves free samples.

---

My fish, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, have decided that they only like the left side of the tank. They rarely venture more than a few inches from the glass on the left side of the tank, except for food. Clearly I need to add more fish.

I also appear to have a very butch female fish and a very femme male. When I bought them, they were both the same size and tended to divide up the food evenly. Now the female has become seriously dominant and about 25% bigger than the male. Mind you, this happened in four days. I'm almost nervous to find out what they're going to be like when we get back.

And now I have two swordtails. They're a little shell-shocked at the moment. If you walk into the room they immediately dive for cover behind the decorations. This is only understandable. If I'd been scooped up, half-drowned, tossed in a tiny plastic bag, half-drowned again, and dumped into an unfamiliar environment, I'd be a little annoyed too.

When H. gets home tonight I'll see about digging out the camera and taking some pictures, per request. No guarantees. Fish in aquariums are very hard to photograph. You tend to get reflections off the glass. I should find one of those underwater cameras and take a couple pictures from inside the tank. Meanwhile, here's the first swordtail picture I found on Google.

The goal is to add more swordtails, one to two pairs of angelfish, and a bunch of cory catfish. That may change depending on availability and water quality.


It says something about me that I got almost no sleep last night. I was dreaming of every possible scenario that could lead to dead fish and forty gallons of water on the floor. (Major earthquake, the air filter cracks, the tank springs a leak, the air filter gets misaligned and starts pouring water on the floor again, the floor collapses under the weight, one of the cats accidentally jumps into the tank and knocks it over while attempting to flail her way out...) Some of those scenarios are unsolvable, but I do want to get a flood alarm, redo the electrical a bit to make sure the outlet isn't near the floor, talk to my insurance guy...

Off to the home of spoomeister and pinky_ki to catch a bit of the Super Bowl and commiserate with the pregnant lady on bedrest. Later maybe I'll rant a bit about the joys of finding a decent fish shop. Hint: Anything but Petco.

Let's face it. I live a kinda dull life.

I work 50+ hours a week at a desk. I live comfortably with my wife and several pets. My idea of a fun evening out is dinner and drinks with some close friends. These days I rarely go to parties, even more rarely to concerts, almost never to clubs. I travel a lot, but usually to over-civilized places. If I need entertainment, a book, a DVD, or my novel usually satisfies me completely.

Still, every now and again, I need something new in my life. I get an Idea.

About five years ago, I got an Idea. With no particular provocation, I told my wife: "I want to learn how to ride a motorcycle."

"OK," she said.

So I took the classes, passed the license test, and bought a 600cc Katana that I promptly dropped while trying to park. A year or two later I bought the BMW R1100RT that I still ride. Riding a motorcycle is like driving, but you're much more intensely focused, and you have much more awareness of what's around you. I still love it, even if many of my friends and family think that I'm suicidally crazy.

Not long after we returned from Hawaii, I got another Idea.

"I want an aquarium," I told my wife.

"OK," she said.

I love my wife.

( The joys of fish )

OK, so maybe this doesn't rank up there with shaving your head and going for a motorcycle tour across eastern China. The hell with it. I'm having fun.