Water World

I have a few new additions to my aqaurium. Last week I went out and purchased some glossostigma. Glosso is a very nice small plant, made popular by Takeshi Amano, and used as foreground planting (see picturre at left), where it can carpet the bottom. Presumably it is fairly difficult to keep (needs a lot of light, CO2, and soft water). I provide enough light, occasionally supplement with CO2 and Flourish, but don't have a clue whether the water is soft or hard. We'll see what happens.

Also I have gradually lost many of the fish I had when I first established my 20 gallon long aquarium last year and have had to get new ones. One fish that I have always liked is the cardinal tetra and I got nine of them so they can school together. These brightly neoned blue and red striped fish are really pleasing to observe. One day I'll get the proper equipment for taking better photographs, but for now the picture of one cardinal tetra (right) is the best I can get. They dart around very quickly.

Here is what I'm especially excited about. I got my first invertebrates! Four ghost shrimp to be exact. I have been ogling various invertebrates in my favorite tropical fish stores but have been wary about investing in them thinking that they might get eaten by the fish. The ghost shrimp I got were very inexpensive, so I have a chance to see how they progress around some quite larger fish. I have one dwarf gourami and two plecos that, although reported to be good community fish, are big enough to do real damage to the shrimp should they have a notion to do so. So far so good and it is really very interesting to watch the shrimp forage along the bottom and swim around. The ghost shrimp pictured at right has a bunch of eggs under her abdomen and soon I should have many baby shrimp.

Presidents Day Weekend

Over Presidents Day Weekend we took Judy and Elroy on a college visit to St. Mary's College in St. Mary's County, MD. That was on Monday and I'll post more on their college searches some other time. On Sunday, we took Astro for a long hike behind Magruder High School. The area, nameless as far as I know, consists of acres upon acres of open fields and woods. Although this area had clearly once been farmland, and would make a great park, it is destined to one day become a cross-county connecter between two nearby interstate roadways. Even though there are countless trails crisscrossing the fields and woods, we've never come across anyone here and we can let Astro off the leash so he can run around without fear of meeting other dogs and getting into a fight. Until this area is developed we occasionally bring Astro here for leisurely walks. On this day as soon as we arrived at Magruder HS the sunny sky turned ominously dark gray (see picture above), shortly followed by an intense winter snow squall.

It has been frigid here for the past two weeks and the last snowstorm had left four hard-packed inches of icy-crusted snow covering the ground. The ice crust was so hard it even supported my weight and one could just shuffle-slide across the top of the snow. As we ventured carefully out onto the icy crust, soft snowflakes began to gently fall around us. However, ripping winds soon kicked-up and turned those welcome snowflakes into deadly ice crytals that felt as through they could pierce any exposed, unprotected skin. The snowflakes were being blown completely sideways by the gale force winds. I had to stop and put up the hood on my coat to prevent the lethal snowflakes from knifing down my neck. I was able to just get off a couple of pictures (see picture of Elroy and Judy) before my fingers ached so much from the biting cold that I was forced to bury them deep in my pockets to rewarm.

The squall subsided after 15 minutes and the sky once again cleared and the sun shown. As we shuffled through the trails, there were signs of life everywhere in the dry brown thickets. Birds were flitting about, little mice were scampering under brambles and the many deer footprints frozen in the ice crust were evidence of their passing through. Jane and the kids found a large hill that they could slide down on their backs. Astro also slid down, unintentionally, which made us all laugh. It looked like a lot of fun, but I was too cold to try. We had come to this spot at the exact right time for an adventure and were not dissapointed.

Home Addition

This morning we signed-on with the Design/Build firm that we contracted for our last home renovation project in 2002. In that project, we remodeled the kitchen and family room and gave the entire outside a facelift. Over the past few years we have received many compliments from our neighbors that the house looks great. Now, we plan to use the same firm to add on nice master bedroom and screened-in porch off the rear of the house. I think Jane and I have a pretty good idea of what we want to achieve, although there are a couple of remodeling issues to deal with. This will give me ample opportunity to update here the process as we go forward.

Pictures to Remind You of Summer

Here are pictures from our flower gardens that I have been saving to post during the coldest, darkest days of winter. Enjoy!

Big Wheel Keep on Turning

Here are some pictures of Elroy's wrestling team and of Elroy doing battle on the mat. To set the stage, at the beginning of each wrestling match the team limbers up by running a few circular paths around the mat, followed by a few token calisthentics and then they all dive to the center of the mat where they huddle up to....well, I'm not sure exactly what they do there, but it has that aura of galvanizing team spirit and machismo (except for the girl laying on the pile). Anyway, no other team they've wrestled does this particular pre-game demonstration, so I suppose it's the coaches' "secret weapon" to fire-up the team psyche to do battle and crush their opponent. But, in fact, in many of the meets this year the warm-up routine has been the singular highlight of the meet for Elroy's team. All kidding aside, the team and Elroy, did well against a handful of teams, but when matched against schools with a tradition of fielding competitive sports teams and having knowledgable, aggressvie coaching staffs the results were overwhelmingly one-sided. This has been going on for some years now and there doesn't seem to be much parent or school support for the team. The sad state of Elroy's wrestling team is reflected in the paltry parent turn-out for home meets, where usually there are more visiting team parents and friends in the stands. However, Elroy's wrestling coach, we'll call him Wheels, generally appears clueless to what is going on around him. While the opposing teams coaches are shouting instructions to their wrestlers, what moves to do or to get more active, Elroy's coach usually sits in his chair and has one verbal command......"Get up" and this usually comes just as the kid is about to be pinned. Get up, Geeett up, Gggggeeeeetttt uuuuppppp! It has gotten to the point of being comical, like Larry the Cableguy's signature...."Git-R-Done." Maybe I'm being unfair, after all Wheels is pretty old and maybe that was the most important wrestling move back when he was young....to just get up and he's teaching the kids all he knows. The best wrestler on Elroy's team this year had his own personal wrestling coach and fitness trainer. Elroy had Wheels.

It's just frustrating, but I think it's one of those coming-of-age situations every teenager has....the awful coach experience. Gosh, my football coach in high school was bad, bad, bad. It's normal for a coach, especially a football coach, to be intimidating but my high school football coach's principle teaching tool was humiliation. But that was years ago and I've gotten over that trauma, gotten over that trauma, gotten over that trauma, gotten over that trauma.......whoops sorry. Anyway, this reminded me of the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry's and George's high school phys-ed teacher, Mr. Heyman, purposely mispronounced George's name: instead of calling him Costanza, he called him Can't-Stand-Ya and gave George an atomic wedgie. Mr Heyman got fired for giving George an atomic wedgie, but the coaches like Wheels and my high school football coach, keep coaching even though they really aren't competent to adequately teach and prepare the kids on their teams to compete. Big Wheel keep on rolling. I hope you like the wrestling pictures of Elroy, we're very proud of him.