Here Fishy Fishy Fishy

Why hello there!

It certainly has been awhile, hasn't it?  Sorry, I was on vacation.  And then you know how things are after you get back from vacation-- everything that you were supposed to do on break jumps you all at once and you have to struggle through for a bit.

University of Michigan is weird.  Classes restarted on January 5th this year.  It was like being back in high school again.  What college does this?  I am also bothered by their idea of "Michigan time".  Instead of scheduling classes for 50 minutes like a normal school, to provide students 10 minutes of travel time, they instead schedule them for a whole hour, then expect people to be 10 minutes late.  If you expect people to be on time, you have to specifically declare your event "not Michigan time".  Ridiculous.

But ranting about the weird traditions of my new school is not what I intended to do today.  Instead, you get to hear about my new fish!

I've had a small aquarium for awhile, but unfortunately, fish do not move well.  While I was careful with them and they survived the trip from Virginia to Connecticut at the beginning of last summer, the trip from Connecticut to Michigan at the end of the summer did them in.  After that, I was moving in and getting work done, and I never really had a chance to get new ones.  So this past week, I finally made it to the store and picked up some awesome new additions to my fish tank.

A general rule for freshwater fish tanks is that you want, at most, 2" of fish per gallon of water.  This means that the max my fish tank can hold is about six small fish, so of course I got six.

The first two are neon tetras, some of my favorite fish when my family had an aquarium when I was growing up.  A picture of them is below.  They're some of the smallest fish you can get, but completely awesome, because their name comes from an iridescent blue line down their side that really does look like a neon light.  I named them Xenon and Argon.  Those of you who know your periodic table are laughing right now.

The second two are cobra guppies, a breed I actually couldn't find a lot of information on when I did a Google search on them.  I have no idea where they're from or anything.  They do have a snakeskin-type pattern on their sides and tails (see below), but I'm not sure I really would have gone with cobra for the breed name.  However, since the breed designation is not up to me, I went with it and named them Indiana and Sallah.  ("Why'd it have to be snakes?")

The last two are tequila sunrise guppies.  I was unaware this even existed as a breed and again find myself seriously questioning who names these things.  Really, tequila fish?  I do have to admit that their coloring does match the name, though.  So their names are Jose and Patron.  Mine have better tails than the ones pictured below, but you get the general idea.

I know this post is far less informative or academic than most of mine, but I was really excited to get new fish and proud of myself for not killing them when getting them into my tank (the shock of moving kills a lot of fish, like I said).  So I decided to share!  I'll get back to the more important stuff on Wednesday.  See you then!