critter story

So...

I was happily painting these little boxes this morning when i heard some shuffling noises coming from the direction of my son's basket of toys. The first time, I shrugged it off, thinking I was hearing things and maybe if I ignored it, it would go away. The second time, I stared long and hard at the pile, crossing my fingers that one of the cats would emerge. No such luck. The third time, I jumped to action, assuming that aforementioned noise was being generated by some form of large rodent. (my mother-in-law just last night was talking about her resident rat...so this was consequently on my mind) I ran into the next room and grabbed the one of two cats that I thought was best qualified for the job of earning her keep (and this took me several seconds because they are both pretty docile). After planting her in front of the toy basket, I quickly picked up the toys hoping that imagined rodent would appear and cat would, indeed, earn her keep. But what did I find?

You see...

Toy baskets sit underneath our 50-gallon fish aquarium. After a brief stint of trying to maintain a salt water aquarium, I sold the lot of salty critters on e-bay and filled the aquarium with fresh water (much less time consuming) koi. I have 5 koi fish. They are larger than your average gold fish...not quite as large as the koi you'll see in larger ponds.

So...

When I lift the toys, I see one of the koi fish flopping there on the floor! I suppose what had happened was that after I fed them, this one must have gotten overly excited and just torpedoed himself right out of the aquarium! Thinking back, I think he'd been flopping there for probably 5 minutes - and yet, when I plunged him back into the aquarium he was absolutely fine. Sure he spend about another 10 minutes in recovery on the bottom of the tank, but now he's swimming back and forth with his tank mates like nothing's ever happened. Resilient little bastard.