Weekend Mania

When I went in Thursday and saw it was still there, I asked them to try feeding it again. They threw in some frozen brine, and to my surprise, it was eating like a pig! I wasn't planning on getting another one so soon after I had just failed with the last one, but it's so incredibly rare to find one in the store that actually eats that I just couldn't pass it up. So I had them put it on hold for me for a day so that I could get a quarantine tank set up.

I picked up the fish on Friday, got it into the QT tank, and it's been readily eating brine and mysis. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I can properly quarantine this guy and get him eating other foods before I put him in the main tank.

That evening we went out to dinner at Asian Pearl in Fremont for my mom's birthday. Seems like that's the only Chinese restaurant my family goes to these days. Good food though. I think I could eat Peking duck every day.

I felt great most of Friday, but when we were getting ready to leave for dinner, my throat suddenly started to hurt. A few minutes after that, my muscles started to feel sore, and my skin started to feel raw like it does when you get sick. In the span of about an hour, I went from feeling fine to feeling like crap.

The worst part is that we were planning on going skiing on Saturday. So I went to bed relatively early Friday night, and we woke up at 4 am. Kenny and Cynthia and Steve were all going with us. Leslie had to work, so he couldn't go. We were out the door by 5, and got to Bear Valley at around 7:30, which was quite a bit earlier than we'd planned!

We had to hang around a bit, since nothing opened until 8. Marc and I had all our gear, so we shopped at the ski shop while everyone else went to rent their stuff. Since we were only going to be there for one day, I decided to just ski. Plus, I wasn't feeling well and didn't feel like falling a bunch of times.

The snow was great! I was pretty tired in the morning, but felt a lot better after lunch. We got some really good runs in. We left around 3:30, and we were home by 7. Not a bad day trip at all.

Sunday we didn't do anything. We pretty much just lounged around all day, which was great. Nothing like a lazy, rainy day. It got a little exciting in the evening though - I was starting to worry that Dory had gotten flukes (annoying parasites) from the last regal angel we had, and I got the bright idea to try to dip her to see. Of course, that meant that I had to catch her. She is surprisingly the easiest fish to catch in the tank, although the last time I did it was years ago when she was only about 3 inches long. She's too big to catch with any of the nets, and it's difficult to do it that way anyways. The easiest way I've found is to do it by hand - if you can get a finger on each side of her and apply gentle pressure, she freezes, which is what a lot of fish do. She always wedges herself into a crevice somewhere, so it's not hard to get ahold of her and her size and shape make it easier to do. Plus she doesn't freak out when I touch her.

It only took me about a minute to catch her, but she was in a tight spot and I had a tough time pulling her out. I ended up having to grab her a little closer to her tail, and just as I was about to pull her out of the nook she was in, she darted away, and in the process one of her tail barbs caught the tip of my index finger and sliced it right open. The tail barb is about a centimeter long.

Blood was gushing everywhere, and I ran to the kitchen sink, cussing the whole way. Marc was great, he quickly grabbed the first aid kit and some peroxide. It would not stop bleeding, and I was worried I was going to need stitches. But we got the bleeding to finally stop, and bandaged it up. It's not too bad now - was oozing a bit the first night, but seems to be okay now.

I left a nice trail of blood from the fish room to the sink - nasty!

I still wasn't feeling well on Monday, so I called in sick. I'm feeling a little better today, though I've got a nasty cough now.