Random Buddha Pond Notes

I'll do the third and final post about Keybo's death after I get the final results from his Necropsy. I'm so tired of educated guessing, so I'm trying to get some facts.

Dreamcicle has been driving me nuts. I don't think she is ill, but I can't tell for sure. She's definitely not as active as usual, but it's been hot day and night and the pond water temperature has been staying at around 80 degrees F. Plus, she doesn't have Keybo to boss around anymore and that definitely was one of her favorite pastimes, if not the favorite.

Blue seems normal. I haven't introduced Blue yet because of Keybo's demise. I will. Soon.

The pond is driving me nuts, too. I'll be posting in the future about how the Pond Mojo has been all out of whack in 2007. It has never been this mysterious since the first year or two after we added fish to the pond in 2000. The usual tests (PH, Ammonia and Nitrites) look good, and today I also tested Nitrates. They're a little high, but dangerously so, according to what I've been reading lately.

The main problem at present is general cloudiness, even after water changes. That's never been a problem in the past five years, except after replenishing a large amount of Salt. That sometimes clouds up the pond as it dissolves (I add rock salt) but it usually disappears after 48 hours. I've added both some Accu-Clear and Simply-Clear. I probably should have been more patient and added one at a time, but the cloudiness is bugging me too much.

I'm going to have a drink now.

An Eye on Keybo

This is part two of what happened to Keybo. If you missed part one, it's here.

When you look at Koi in a pond, usually what you see is a torpedo like shape, similar to this picture of Keybo at right. Even when you can see that they may be large in length (Keybo was 17" long), they always look much smaller in the water than they truly are. To get a really good look at how big they are, and to be able to examine them completely, you need to see them out of the water. That is, you need to grab them in a net and lift them to where you can see and/or put them inside some sort of separate quarantine pool where you can get a closer look at them.

But they really hate that, and it's very stressful for them, especially if they are already ill, and the last thing they need when they are ill is more stress. So I really hate doing that, also. I basically don't do it, and they flip around so much in a net that it's too hard to see them anyway, except for obvious sores that may be on their bellies or other places you just can't see when they're minding their own business in the water. Also, the size of our Buddha Pond is small; it's about the size of pond that folks with bigger ponds use for their quarantine pond.

Once we had a leak in the pond, and had no choice but to get all the fish out so it could be fixed. We had a plastic tub about as wide as a barrel, but just trying to keep fish in there for a few hours was a challenge. They hated that.


Despite the short comings, I've resorted to letting the fish stay in the pond and trying to examine them by taking photos. Admittedly it is not an ideal option. You can miss things. I missed things when it came to Keybo.

What I could see and was not at all surprised by, was the lack of symmetry between the two sides of his head, when looking straight down at him. The reason it was not surprise was because of the whole weird thing going on with his eye. What I missed also was the significance of those small red areas on his head and near those apparent nostril like openings. On his left side there are tiny little bumps on his head, which look okay. On the right side they look little red depressions. Like tiny sores.


And this image of his right side hid a lot as well. What I could see clearly was partly what I already knew. Keybo has had a strange history of infections and/or wounds on his right side. As I mentioned in a previous post, it looked like he was sneaking out of the pond at night and getting into bar fights. In this case, not only because of the eye malady, but we had in the past seen unexplainable gashes on his side. It could be from rocks that are around the perimeter of the pond, but they are a good inch or two above the typical water level. They are not in the pond, and most of them are not sharp. So I never really had any idea of what the cause of those gashes were. All the fish have shown small spots and sores from time to time. Ponds are full of opportunistic parasites that are constantly challenging their immune systems. But for the other fish those spots and sores always quickly responded to medications, and they healed. We have only seen these scars on Keybo.

Even with a fairly clear photo, partly because of those blue sky reflections in the water near his face and partly because of the usual curvature of the water optics, I could not really see what was going on with the right side of Keybo's face, besides the whole eye thing.

The poor chap. It had occurred to me just several days before he died that perhaps putting him out of his misery would be the most humane thing to do. Just his behavior alone was telling me he was not well. I just didn't know a good quick way to accomplish it, so I didn't do it. And while I knew it was certainly possible, I did not at all suspect that something was more or less eating away at Keybo from the inside, nor that I would be getting a good look at him, out of the water, within 3 days.

Remembering Nabu

We lost Nabu on March 6, 2006. He was the prettiest fish in the pond. Unfortunately, he was also a jumper. Nabu jumped out of the pond on four different occasions. He was lucky the first three times.

He's done that three times in the past, but always managed to luck out by having one of us just happen to go outside in enough time to find him and put him back in the pond. He was exactly 18 inches long, but Koi never look nearly as big in the water as they do out of it. The first time I was taken by complete surprise. I even found myself just staring at him for several long igno-seconds wondering, "Where did that big fish come from?" I thought it was too late when I put him back in the pond and he just floated. But after about 10 or 15 minutes of motoring him around by hand, like a child playing with a submarine toy in the bathtub, he made a full recover. We really thought he was a goner the second time, as it took nearly a solid hour of submarine play to revive him. We must have spotted him right away the third time, as he commenced swimming on contact with the water.

The image above is from page 14 of my Buddha Fish book (I'll have more on that in the future).

I realize my past few posts must make it sound like we're terrible tenders of our Buddha Fish. Nabu jumped, Keybo was the first fish we lost to a pond pathogen, and we had no control over the storm that took our first batch of fish, though we could have been better prepared for a 36 hour power outage. We now have a little do-hickey (pictured below) that lets you power up to 95 watts from your car, which would have been enough to keep the pump running periodically. We've had it for several years, but you know how that goes: you never have the disasters that you're prepared for.

The Eye of Keybo

This is part one of what happened to Keybo.

Sometime in late Winter or very early Spring we noticed that Keybo no longer had a right eye. That's right. His right eye was gone. Vanished. Unfortunately, other than my video camera—which takes crappy stills—I didn't have any way to capture this, so I have no pictures of Keybo's missing eye. But all that was left of where his right eye used to be was a small hole. Other than that, there was no sign of any kind of trauma. No torn flesh. No visible scars. Nothing. Other than the small hole—which is where I imagine the optic nerve from his former eye used to come through from his skull—it was just fleshy, with his normal colored flesh, and it just looked liked he had never had an eye there, but he had.

Strange.

No. Very strange.

However, other than missing an eye and being obviously blind on his right side, Keybo's behavior in the pond appeared normal. Until about mid-May.

Though he was the biggest fish in the pond (after Nabu, who I haven't told you about yet) Keybo was the most shy. Usually when I approached the pond he would casually swim away. If the other fish approached he would join them, but keep his eye(s) hidden below them.

Sometime in mid or late May I walked up to the pond, and there was Keybo, sort of hanging on in one "corner" next to a plant basket. He didn't swim away as I approached, and he was hardly moving at all except for very slow gill and fin movement, to keep himself in place. His good eye was also tracking me as I moved about the pond.

Not good. It's never good when Koi isolate themselves from the others. They (the ones in the Buddha Pond at least) are generally pretty sociable and like to hang with each other. When fish isolate themselves it's usually a bad sign that indicates something is terribly wrong with them. Not only was Keybo keeping his distance from the others, but the fact that he was letting me stand there and look at him was not his typical behavior.

Then I moved over to where I could take a look at his blind side. I was horrified! It was all black and red and looked like your classic "black eye." Seriously. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought that Keybo was sneaking out of the Buddha Pond at night and getting into bar fights.

I dropped what I was doing and starting testing the pond. Pond Mojo was gone! Ammonia levels were somewhere between 1 and 2 ppm, while Nitrites were at or over 5 ppm—which the top of the chart! Both of those measurements were off the charts as far as I was concerned, since, according to previous testing results, I'd been able to keep them consistently at ZERO for 4 years or more. The water looked clean and crystal clear. Obviously that in itself doesn't mean a whole lot. I've seen times when the water looks murky, especially in the Fall, when leaves get in and settle in the pond, but even at those worst looking times, when I tested, Ammonia and Nitrites were ZERO.

So I changed the water in the pond. More than 50%. That is, I pumped out at least half of it, refilled the pond to full, then pumped that out about 1/3rd. Whereas PH can be adjusted virtually instantaneously with additives (citric acid or baking soda), there's not a lot you can do to instantly rid a pond of Ammonia and Nitrites. Water changing helps drastically, but it won't get those levels back down to zero instantly or even overnight. You need the whole bio-filter, beneficial bacteria and Pond Mojo mechanics going again to those numbers to ZERO. After you change the water you have to re-salt the pond (yes, even fresh water fish need salt in the water to keep them slimy, which is good for their health) and, for our pond, rebalance the PH.

Afterwards I became super-diligent about monitoring the pond everyday for the next week or so. I also monitored Keybo several times a day. He was definitely improving, though I wouldn't say he ever became normal again. But he did get out of that corner and was spending more time with the other fish and he resumed being afraid of me. If I wanted to get a good look at his eye I had to sneak up on that blind side.

It's usually hard to get a good look, but, after only a few days, the discoloration of his missing eye was way improved, but not gone. Then, oddly, I noticed something even stranger about it. It vaguely looked like his eye was reforming. At first I convinced myself it was an optical illusion of sorts, but a few days later, with the discoloration all but completely gone, I was certain. His eye was coming back!

Whether it was ever really gone or had somehow sunken back into his skull, I'll never know. The end of May was when I bought my Pentax K10D and started taking frequent pictures of the Buddha Pond and its residents. It came in particularly hand for examing Keybo, since he is too afraid of me to let me get a good look at him. If I could at least occasionally capture of decent photo of him, I could examine it all day long on my computer. The problem was capturing a decent picture, because Keybo was so afraid of me and stayed low in the water, below the distorting ripples. By June 11 I had a decent enough image of both sides of Keybo to compare his two sides.Keybo's formerly missing right eye (shown on the right) was beginning to be visible, but it still looked different and more sunken in that his left eye (shown on the left.) Then I got smart on June 15th and turned off the pump and caught some undistorted pictures. This image is a full-screen snapshot taken while I examined a photo of Keybo using Apple's Aperture. There was still a visible redness, but his right eye had, indeed, returned.

Meanwhile, I continued to monitor the pond and Keybo and the other fish. Keybo was still spending more time than usual by himself, but appeared to be making a full come-back.

Three days later he was dead.

(to be continued)

Oblique Strategies

"Listen to the quiet voice"

That's the card I picked this morning.

It was a long, late night last night, peering into the technical secrets of crass commercial messages. That and also moving the Oblique Strategies page from its former location to the new blog location.

I think I should have done that a long time ago.

This is fun

Dumpr.net has a number of photo gimmicks you can play with after uploading your own photos. I thought I'd share this rare self-portrait that now hangs in the Frist Center for the Visual Arts (I wish).

Dreamcicle is there too!

Seriously, though, I think I may need to go up and check out Jim McGuire's Nashville Portraits. Here's a blurb:

A native of New Jersey, McGuire moved to Nashville in the 1970s to pursue his interest in music and the people who made it. He began the Nashville Portrait series in 1974; it now includes more than a thousand images of America’s most influential singers, songwriters, and musicians, often depicted with the instruments that are the tools of their trade.

Pond Mojo

I've begun to get some preliminary info back from the state animal laboratory that is doing the necropsy on Keybo. I'll cover what happened to Keybo after I have some more facts.

That's the trouble with keeping a fish pond: it usually comes down to Mojo more so than it does to hard, cold facts.

We inherited our pond along with our house, in 1999. The previous owners had fish in it, but they took them with them. We simply put a pump in the pond to keep the water from getting stagnant, and let the pond remain fish free until the Spring or Summer of 2000.

I got some books on fish and ponds, as I wasn't finding near as much on the web back then as I can find now. We read up on the particulars of an "established" pond and started to learn about all the ins and outs of pond mojo. Most of us who ever had a goldfish as a kid learned about how bad chlorine is for fish, and how algae can grow in a fishbowl.

In order to keep fish alive in a pond you have to be able to keep the PH balanced, have zero levels of Ammonia and Nitrites, and in some quarters the jury seems to be out on Nitrates, though it looks like they're leaning towards Nitrates being bad too. When I first started putting fish in the pond, Nitrates were being rather downplayed, and I'm still not totally up to speed on those.

Where Ammonia and Nitrite were toxic to the fish, Nitrate is essentially harmless. There have been reports that high nitrate levels may weaken the colors in Koi but there have also been reports that high nitrate levels can enhance the colors. Similarly, I have read reports, fortunately not in the same article, that high nitrate levels will both stimulate and suppress spawning activity. If the Nitrate concentration gets too high, the Nitrite-Nitrate converting bacteria (Nitrobacter) may not be able to do their job effectively resulting in a raised Nitrite level. Nitrate is the end result of the nitrification cycle and is very important to plants in their life cycle. This is why the plants in your garden can flourish from being watered with the waste water from your pond (assuming you haven't added too much salt).

Like all living things, fish eat and they pee and poop, creating "waste." Waste creates Ammonia and Nitrites, and so does other waste like rotting, uneaten fish food, and rotting leaves and other dead or dying plant dying life that gets in the pond. Along with mechanical filtration of the water (filtering out heavy particles like dirt and leaves) you have to have a good bio-filter which consists of colonies of beneficial bacteria. I can't see them, but these supposedly live inside little plastic balls that look like black, wiffle golf balls. The little balls are inside the mechanical filter, as part of the pump housing.

Good pond mojo is when everything is in perfect balance. The beneficial bacteria turn the Ammonia and Nitrites in the pond into Nitrates which, theoretically, are either harmless and/or are consumed by any living plant life in the pond. To oversimplify it a bit, you feed the fish, they feed the beneficial bacteria, and the beneficial bacteria feeds the plants. When all this is good you have a healthy and clear pond with healthy, happy fish (the pond is the fish and the fish are the pond, you can't really separate them).

When you've really established good pond mojo, this can nearly happen on auto-pilot. I should qualify that. You still have to change the water and mechanical filters periodically (you don't clean out the bio filter because those good bacteria need to stick around), but everything else (PH, Salt levels, algae control) should only need a little tweaking now and then.

Getting there can take a long time, at first. For the first two years we had fish in our pond I nearly always felt like I was chasing something by applying additives to the water. More clarifier (powdered bacteria), more algae control -- which clogs the pump and filters with dead algae -- more acid (our tap-water and rain tends to be alkaline), more water changes (getting traces of Ammonia and Nitrites). It went on and on.

Part of the problem may well have been overcrowding. There's a rule of thumb of 10 gallons per inch of fish. We had put small fish into the pond, but then they grew big.

Also, I had put gravel in the bottom of the pond, but I hadn't rinsed it first. I think there was always a lot of suspended gravel "dust" in it. Then one year the pond had a leak in it, so we had to take the fish out and find the leak. I took that opportunity to shovel out all the gravel and rinse it really good before putting it back in, and that seemed to make a big difference. The water stayed much clearer, much longer and more often.

Then we had a terrible storm in 2003 that knocked out our power for 36 hours. With the pump not working, and no backup, we lost all of our fish except for one, Dreamcicle.

Eventually we added three more small fish. But also, eventually, I seemed to get a handle on things. The water was clearer most of the time. Whenever I tested for Ammonia and Nitrites they measured zero. Even during times I felt I had neglected the pond, like in the Fall, when leaves kept falling in it and I wasn't out there daily getting them out. We have a screen, but it doesn't provide total coverage, so leaves were still getting in. They tend to steep, just like tea leaves, turning the water the color of strong tea, but as dark as it was in color it was still clear. So it looked bad, but it tested good.

And it pretty much stayed that way -- with periodic water and filter changes -- for the next three years. That is, usually clear, no measurable levels of Ammonia and Nitrites, and the fish seemed healthy and happy.

Our fish stay in the pond year-round. The pond is in shade during most of the year, but once the leaves fall off the trees it gets more sunlight than usual. During the Winter, if the Winter is cold, that is not usually a problem until early Spring, when the algae starts to take hold before the leaves return to the trees. And even if it gets a head-start, the usual chemicals for algae control usually do the trick of getting it calmed back down. Then, once Spring and Summer are in full bloom, we usually have plants in the pond that compete with the algae for the same nutrients in the water, and so that also helps keep the algae under control.

So that's good pond mojo: you change the water and filters periodically, and adjust the PH and Salt, and everything else works to maintain a balanced biosphere for the pond and fish.

If only it could have stayed that way.

Didn't Go Away

No, I didn't go away and I'm still going to blog about what happened to Keybo.

Ads are now appearing on this blog and I wanted to do some other housekeeping, like cleaning up the main Raindear Media pages.

The Vice-President is Crazy

Let's face it. Dick Cheney is nuts.

And here's the best line I've seen on this whole Dick-Cheney-is-his-own-branch-of-government story, from Kevin Drum.

So here's my question: If a quantum superposition of a dead cat and a live cat is Schrödinger's Cat, is a quantum superposition of legislative Cheney and executive Cheney Schrödinger's Dick?

Help us, please!

Saturday Maintenance Note

I'm adding some Pond and Fish resource links to the sidebar today. Also trying out the addition of a custom Google search. With my luck, the folks from Adsense will come check this out while I'm changing stuff and then send me an email saying they've declined because my site is broken. Happened once before on another blog.

Also, I noticed that some of the images I uploaded via Blogger are not the full desktop size I intended the inline images to be linked to. Blogger is cropping or shrinking the full sized images. So, soon, I will be updating some of the previous posts to use the correct images.

The desktop images I'm sending up are formatted for a 23" Cinema Display. That is, 1920 x 1200 pixels. Depending on what kind of computer you use or the size of the display, you may want to crop or resize these if you are interested in using them as desktops or wallpaper.

That is all.

Keybo

I'm going to miss Keybo.  I didn't realize when I started this blog that he'd be gone so soon.  I'll cover more about his recent fatal woes in another post.  For now, I'll just tell you about who he was.

In 2003 we lost four fish after a devastating storm knocked out our power for 36 hours, and we didn't have any sort of backup power to keep the Buddha Pond pump running.

Dreamcicle was the only survivor, and she was looking awfully lonely.  So we waited a few weeks until it seemed that the worst of the violent Spring storms were over, and we traveled up to a local place called Ponds by David.  There we bought Keybo.

We named him Keybo because of his white color and black markings, which down along his spine reminded me of a piano keyboard.  Keybo was only about 6 inches or less in size, and he seemed pretty scared when he was first introduced into the pond.  Any chance he could get to hide, he would.  That didn't seem to change much as he got older, except that he became much too big to be able to successfully hide anywhere in the pond.  His final length was 17 and a fraction inches.  We'd had him almost exactly four years when he died.

Dreamcicle seemed to look after Keybo when he was smaller, and they appeared to remain good pals to the end, with Dreamcicle even appearing to look after him in his final days.  Later on in 2003 we also got Blue and Nabu, and all the fish appeared to happily co-exist in the pond with one another, and though we've gotten them all while they are small and a bit frightened, Keybo seemed to be the one that remained the most shy.  Whenever the other fish gathered and huddled together, Keybo would hide his eyes underneath him, like a child hides their eyes, thinking you cannot see them then.  Like all the other fish, however, we would seem the most brave at feeding time.  Sometimes when we'd walk up to the pond they sort of parade to the surface, one after another, popping their heads up to the surface with a big wide "feed me" open mouth.  Keybo would join in, but then once the food was thrown in the water he's sort of hold back on eating until we walked away from the pond.

I was able to catch this behavior on video in 2005, for a DVD I made for my nephew.  As for still images, it's often difficult to get decent pictures of fish in a pond with moving water.  Even small waves distort the fish like fun-house mirrors.  After I recently purchased my Pentax K10D, I found it particularly difficult to get good pictures of Keybo, because he would stay low, near the bottom of the pond, where the water color and waves just made it near impossible.  When he did come near the surface he would hang close to the fountain, where the water distrubance was the worst.

On June 14th I manage to find a good time of day to try shooting pictures of the fish.  The pond is usually in shade or dappled sunlight, but there was about a 30 minute window when some late afternoon sun shined right into the pond, giving it a golden color.  That was the day Dreamcicle nearly came right up and posed for me, but Keybo remained illusive, though I did manage to capture one decent image of him.  It was the least distorted, wave-wise, but he was deep enough in the water that he appeared yellow in color.  Also, the angle of light that afternoon was creating an interesting "swirly" effect on the surface of the water.  It reminded me a bit of Van Gough's brush strokes, so I went with that in Photoshop CS 3, and pumped it up for effect, and also played with the color noise to exaggerate it into somewhat of a Monet effect.  So that's the reason behind the name of the first image, above, Keybo Van Gounet.

On June 15th I returned to the pond at about the same time of day.  I got a little smarter that day and turned off the pump.  Sure, I know that seems obvious, but I do actually like the "action" effect of the moving water, even though it makes fish pictures more difficult.

Whenever I turn the pump off, the fish usually gather into a huddle down at one end of the pond.  Most often when I turn off the pump it is in preparation for a water change.  After years of doing this the fish seem to sort of anticipate what's coming next -- like a sump pump and/or hose into the water.

So they gathered as usual, including Keybo, who had been isolating himself from the others during his long ordeal of Spring maladies.  After a few minutes passed with the water still and me not doing anything put snapping pix, the fish finally began just swimming around and acting as they naturally do, and I was finally able to get some clear, undistorted pictures of Keybo.

I had no idea they would be the last pictures of him alive.

Updated 6/23/2007 at 4:21 PM: Updated desktop images to full sized versions.

The Pain (2007)

The Pain is a song I co-wrote with Ransom James in 1989.



I hadn't been able to find any recordings of the two of us performing it, but I did find some solo efforts. In any case, I can guarantee you that those old acoustic recordings—done with a shitty tape deck—sound like shit.

So I re-recorded the song in early 2007. Though I generally do music with Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason, I did this recording with Apple's Garageband.

The song was originally written shortly after a woman had ripped my heart out.

Not that a dead fish quite makes me feel the same way, but I felt like hearing the new version tonight, and so I'm sharing.

Oh, hey, a side note: It's officially Summer!

Garden Buddha of the Buddha Pond

I've got a number of last pictures of Keybo I want to get together and work on, so I'm not ready yet to write about him -- may he rest in peace.


So, in the meantime, I thought I'd just post a desktop picture of the Garden Buddha of the Buddha Pond.

He's got a little bird crap on his head. But that's what birds do.

Updated 6/23/2007 at 4:05 PM: Replaced desktop image with full sized version.

Web Voodoo

After a quick Google search I can't say that I've "coined" the phrase. Somebody has even had that domain name registered since 1996, but still only has a parked page. Though perhaps there is some initial uniqueness in my intended context here.

You know what I mean about Web Voodoo? It's how, at worst, you can lead your self astray or, at best, back into a confused circle of unknowingness when you're trying to research some practical, remedial information on the Internet.

Don't get me wrong. I love looking up "how to" stuff. There's hardly a day that goes by when something or another makes me seriously wonder how we lived without the Internet. If you needed to do something but didn't know how, and you didn't know someone who did know how, and your local library didn't have any books on that subject, what did you do? You could probably find some reference material that would point you in the right direction of where you might find magazines from which you could learn about books that you could then go to the bookstore and ask them to order for you. You'd have to want to learn whatever it was pretty bad, and not be in any hurry, if you could afford to wait that long to get your hands on the desired information.

On the other hand, these days, you can find out nearly anything without getting out of your chair. Within minutes you can capture all kinds of links to all kinds of good information to bookmark and/or to save or print for later reading. But when it comes to "how to" or "what to do" stuff you often find out just too much damned information that eventually it all contradicts itself.

Always do it this way. No! Never do it this way, only do it that way. Use that much. No, always use this much. Always try this before you attempt to do that. No! Never do this unless you've already tried that, first, then do this. Doing it this way is harmless. No! This could kill you unless you have done that.

It's not unusual for there to be a world full of experts who all contradict each other. It's useful sometimes and helps one to apply some healthy skepticism before diving in to one method or the other without more research. But then the more you research you sometimes feel like you're back where you started. You just don't know what to do.

That's what I mean about Web Voodoo.

Bad News

Not a good day. I haven't even yet had a chance to tell you about Keybo, but I'm sad to report that this morning I found him lying on the bottom of the pond.

I'll have more later.

Meet Dreamcicle

This is Dreamcicle.  She was one of the first fish we put in the Buddha Pond in the Spring of 2000.  I don't know exactly what kind of fish she is.  We were very new at this.  She was sold to us as a Koi.  She is not a Koi, but I don't know what she is.

We call her a "she" because she was very round when we got her, and the salesperson called her a she because it was presumed she was pregnant, but we've had her for 7 years now and she's always been very round.

Also, we named her Dreamcicle because when we first got her she was a very deep orange color, except for about half of her head.  So she reminded me of one of those ice cream bars that is half ice cream and half orange sherbet.  But she started losing that orange color about three years ago, and by last year she had lost all but a very slight, almost translucent orange tint.

Dreamcicle is my favorite because she's a real survivor and trooper and all those sorts of things.  We got four other fish the same year we first got her.  She's the very orange fish in this early picture, along with Mandingo (a lucky Black Koi), Coolio, White Star and C3PO.  We had them all for three years, and they were all about the same size (small) when we got them, but the real Koi soon started growing and it was clear that Dreamcicle was going to be the runt of the bunch.

Sadly, the others all died after an extremely severe storm in May of 2003 knocked out our power for nearly 36 hours.  We couldn't keep the pump running in the pond and the oxygen was quickly depleted.  We soon had a bucket full of dead fish.  All except for Dreamcicle.

I know it's dangerously deceiving to attribute anthropomorphic values and emotions on "dumb animals," but Dreamcicle was obviously freaked out, and I don't hesitate to say she was bummed out, as well.   For nearly three days she swam in circles around the pond.  It seemed pretty obvious to us that she was desperately searching for all of her old pals.  Then that just plum wore her out.

For the next day or two after that she just stayed in one "corner" of the pond.  Not moving at all.  Not good.  Even though the pump was running and everything else was back in order, Dreamcicle looked like she was dying.  We started gently poking at her with a net, just to get her moving.  That kept her alive, but she was clearly distressed.

So eventually we got more fish, and I'll tell you about them later.  They were all small when introduced to the pond, so Dreamcicle was -- briefly -- the big fish.

But now we've had her for 7 years and she is most definitely the queen of the pond, even though she is, once again, the runt.  She's nearly fearless.  She'll swim right to the surface when one of us walks near the pond, and when I went out there recently with my camera she practically came right up and posed for me.

So, if you like fish and you'd like to have a nice big desktop picture of Dreamcicle, go ahead and grab it.

Post 1 - Buddha Fish

Fair Warning: I'm notorious for setting up new blogs, actively posting for extended periods of time and then -- POOF! -- no more posts for a good long time or forever.

In 2003 I kept a War Journal going for sometime, but that started to drive me really nuts.  I read a lot of news and political blogs, and that's okay, but when I started doing the work to keep up my own it just started to bum me out.

For a while I maintained another blog called "Is That How Jesus Drives?"  No, not What Would Jesus Drive, but how.  It was inspired by the fact that I live in an area of the country where people love to wear their religion on their car and truck bumpers, but then they drive as maniacally as everybody else, so I often wonder if those are the kinds of values they learn about in church (3 times a week for some).  Alas, researching the hypocrisies of dogma bums me out, too.

So I deleted those first two blogs and started another one which is, ostensibly, about screenwriting and soundtrack music.  That one's still around, but I haven't posted to it in over a year now.

But recently I bought a great digital SLR.  A Pentax K10D.  I love it.  It's the second good camera I've owned in my life and it's my first digital camera.  Back in the '70s I had a Pentax Spotmatic SLR.  I got it while I was still in high school, had fun shooting pictures and developing my own black & white prints in a darkroom down in the basement of my parent's house.  I was just beginning to get pretty good at it when I moved to Chicago during my college years, and my camera was stolen within my first week or so of arriving in town.  After that, I only had a few point-and-shoots and a Polaroid to amuse myself with, but it was never quite the same.

I've been an avid Photoshop user since 1991 and have spent countless thousands of hours tweaking and manipulating images from scanned and downloaded sources, mostly for amusement.  When digital photography first became popular, I discovered all the things I didn't like about many of the cameras available and the pictures they took, primarily from photos gained from others.  Conversations about Mega-pixels aren't particularly my bag, but I really hated it when I found a nice image I wanted to blow-up to a decent size and found that I couldn't because the pixel data was just to sparse.  So I continued to put off even looking for a camera of my own until 10 Mega-pixels became common and reasonably affordable.

So now I've got one and I'm having a blast with it, trying to make up for the 30 year gap since my last good camera was stolen.

In just the last few weeks I've taken loads of photos right in my own backyard.  In particular, around a little pond we have that we call our Buddha Pond, in which there now lives three fish we call our Buddha Fish.  There used to be four, but I'll write about that later.

Shooting pix of the pond at night and the fish during the day has given me lots of good practice as I learn my way around my new camera.  And, finally, after 17 years, the photos I'm tweaking and printing with Photoshop are my own.  

So maybe there's some good blog material here.  I will make no promises, but, as always, I certainly intend to keep this going for a while.