I'll never forget this Memorial Day...

Since it's the one where I ran over a kid.

You heard me. Here's the story:

My best friend Jen is in town for Alex's baptism (which was yesterday - I'll write a post about it on Alex's Blog in the nex few days or so). Justin went golfing with my dad, so I decided to pack Alex up in his carseat in the big blue truck and go visit Jen and her family for the day. As I was driving across 12th St (a 5 lane road - 2 lanes in each direction, with a turning lane), I had to stop for a red light. I stopped back at the white line, and thought to myself, "Boy those people next to me sure pulled up far - what if someone wanted to cross the street?" The light turned green, and I started accelerating. That's when this 16 year old kid on a bicycle came screaming out from beside the building into my traffic lane. I slammed on the brakes, and he disappeared then popped up in front of me. I put the truck into park, and got out of the car. The car that was next to me was already across the intersection, but pulled over and got out. The SUV behind them stopped next to me, and the car behind me also stayed.

The woman behind me is a nurse, and she checked the kid over. He said he was fine, but his bike was obviously wrecked (the front tire was at least). He had knocked off my front license plate, and he was *VERY* lucky we didn't have any kind of receiver in the front hitch. He was spitting some blood, due to the fact that he hit his mouth off of his handlebars.

The cops were called, and a fire truck, an ambulance, an EmergyCare SUV, 2 police cruisers, and 3 motorcycle cops showed up. The kid was cited for failure to stop at a red light, and possibly for riding the wrong way in traffic (since he was riding against traffic, instead of with it). His parents arrived, and I assume they took him home. I feel sorry for what happened, but that kid was very very lucky that I was paying attention and not talking on my cell phone, taking care of Alex, or dealing with some other distraction.

Oh, and Alex is fine - he slept through the whole thing.

Beware of the attack beagles!

It amazes me how many people are afraid of Chance and Harvey. Of course, we live in "the ghetto," and I have found over the years that many, many black people are afraid of dogs. I've even talked to my black friends about it, and they agree there's a high percentage of blacks afraid of dogs.

At least several times a week, whenever Justin and I are outside of any length of time, we tend to take the dogs out with us. They play in the driveway, pee on the garage, and sleep under the bush on the grass. More often than not, they are not on any sort of leash or chain, because they simply do not wander. It amuses me to see how many people cross the street to avoid the dogs. Dogs that are most likely doing this:

The people that aren't afraid? Little old white ladies. They will come right up and pet the dogs.

There are times where Chance & Harvey do bark - but it's mostly because someone will be walking by, minding their own business, and happen to look over and jump and exclaim something (usually a swear word), and get nervous.

Oh well. At least it provides amusement, and no one is going to bother us with our "attack beagles" around!

Big Scary Fish

Four years ago, we were garage-saleing, and this lady had a ton of aquarium stuff she was trying to get rid of. Eventually she persuaded us to take two 10 gallon tanks, a bunch of rocks, a half dozen filtration units, several dozen filters, some breeding tanks, a bunch of fake plants, and a couple of heaters all for $10. We got home and six months later cleaned everything out (hey, it was a nice wintertime project). We threw away the rocks, because Justin said you don't know if they have anything harmful in them, and it's always best to have new rocks. Justin just wanted to have plants. Ha! We did go to petsmart to get plants, but they were also having a 99 cent fish sale! We ended up getting some zebra and neon tetras, a pleco (algae eater) and an aquatic frog. (oh, and a few plants)

Well..... the pleco died because we were stupid. It was a NEW tank, therefore there was no algae for the pleco to eat, and we didn't know we were supposed to feed it when there wasn't anything else! We took it back and got another. The aquatic frog died after a few days, so we returned it and got another... which also proceeded to die. We got yet another, which ALSO died. At that point, we decided to stick with the 3 zebra tetras, 2 neon tetras (which actually I think originally was 3), and the pleco.

The pleco quickly outgrew the 10 gallon tank, but we didn't want to upgrade. We named him Big Scary Fish, because compared to our 1.5" tetras, this sucker was a good 8" long. Whenever we would replant the fake plants, he would go around and swish his giant tail to free them all again. Eventually we quit replanting them, because obviously, BSF wanted the room.

All this time, we've either had to go back to our house in Ohio, or ask our neighbors to feed the fish on the weekends. Finally, last weekend, we purchased a brand new 29 gallon tank from Walmart, and set it up. We headed out to our house on Sunday, and loaded up the fish in a 5 gallon bucket with the bubblers in it, and covered the top with Glad Press-n-Seal. I plugged the bubblers into my handy-dandy 110v outlet in my Vibe, and we headed back to our apartment. Since the water in the bucket and the water in the tank were two different temps, we decided to let the fish hang out in the bucket overnight so the temps would equalize.

Monday morning, I got up with Alex around 7am, and fed him. Afterwards, we hung out in the living room for a while, and around 8:30, I was walking past his bedroom (where the fish tank is) to ours, where I was going to lay Alex down for his morning nap. I happened to glance on the floor, and I saw BSF on the carpet, not moving! I told the dogs to stay, then hurried into my bedroom to lay Alex down in his bassinet. I then ran back to his room, and grabbed the net. I put the net under his tail, where he was stiff as a board. "Oh no," I thought, "BSF is dead." I put him in the new aquarium any way, which at the time had nothing but water in it. No rocks, no plants, no bubblers other than the filter. It was even only filled to about 15 gallons. He sunk to the bottom and since there were no rocks in the tank, I could see his sucker moving on the bottom. He was still alive!

He looked pretty bad though. He had flopped on the carpet at least 4 feet from where the bucket was, and had hair and other carpet fibers on his body. I let him be for a while, since I didn't want to stress him out more. After a few hours, I added the other fish and more water to the tank. When Justin came home from work, he put in the bottom filters, the bubblers, the rocks, and the fake plants (we have since added some live ones).

BSF was (and is) starting to look pretty jagged. I took these pictures on Friday:

His dorsal fin is even worse, and his tail fin is starting to die off. His back scales are flaking off and they are pretty red underneath. I went to an aquarium shop a block from the house and talked to the owner, and he gave me some medicine to hopefully fix him. I have to put in 1tsp/10gal of water for 7 days. Hopefully he can hold on that long and his fins will start to grow back. If not, he will just be even scarier, I guess.