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Life with Freya has been an adventure. She is daddy's spoiled little girl. But I couldn't say why...I don't suppose I spoil her, but my lord you'd think I gave her everything she ever asked for (and yes she asks, folks, Freya knows four languages aside from K-9). I guess I could be more strict, but I don't care if she sleeps in the bed...However I do care if she eats human foo, so no scraps. I Who knows, maybe I'm just the world's greatest owner and I don't realize it. But probably not, otherwise she wouldn't eat all of the belongings! Pulling garbage bags (sans garbage) out of a garbage can, only to leave garbage (sans garbage bag) in the can...crafty. She eats tissues and toilet paper and diaper that have been used. She rarely uses the bathroom inside though, maybe a forced accident, and even then she has A spot so we always know.

She does love to play on this giant fort we are building....yes a fort, pictures forthcoming, naturally. She loves to live on the edge and fall into the stupid useless jerk ponds. She love eating honey bees, even if the do leave stingers in he chin like a poorly shaved middle aged comic book store owner. She will bark without cause or concern of people, surroundings, or logic when she hears a person coming to the door. But she is loyal as a dog should be. We share the couch while watching TV, or reading, writing, or just sitting.

She no longer tries to beat Conner and he no longer tries to care.

She loves our newly converted outdoor to indoor cat Coco and there will be a picture of them sharing food and water.

She loves kids but is over eager with them.

She is terribly allergic to fleas.

And she is the worlds greatest dog.

Hmm....sad days.

Ok...this pond has become an uber-fiasco...over the past year of not blogging about it, I have had to drain and redo it countless times. We have bought a plethora of fish that have all died, all the while my babies have lived peaceably. Until we added on to the new section...then Pam died after being trapped and starving...then I thing a massive bull frog ate Jim....then the other day I found my favorite, my wonderful Dwight floating...so here I am, 15 fish, myriad pond attempts, and some angry days later giving you guys the heads up...my boys and girl are gone. I will post all sorts of things over the coming weeks to show progress, regress, and whatever else I have.

If one thing comes from this that is cool...when they died they dried like seashells, so I have let them sit and dry in the sun then applied lacquer to them for posterity...

Take that Algae!

We have been in discussions about how to better take care of the side of our pond, the rocks that fill it, and the new porous shells we dropped in for the frogs to hide. We were worried about the addition of a big fish like a Koi or an Oscar as these can occasionally become aggressive towards outward species, IE, frogs. And getting rid of mosquitoes is great and all, but they would also rid the pond of the frogs, which is a terrible crime.

Then we ran into the problem of Connor. What would he do to the fish? I mean this is a duck who is so territorial that he will beat birds to death then rip them apart in some gruesome manner. Not rarely, or occasionally, but normally, and on a semi regular basis. So tossing some fish into this pond that hang out near the surface is asking for trouble. Now I'm not saying he'd eat them, but I full expect there would be some beaten fish floating belly up by the time he finished.

Then we remembered back, there was the perfect fish we could get, a bottom feeding algae eater. A pleco.


We used these a lot when we had our 75 gallon fish tank. They never got really big because of the amount of other fish to food ration, but one thing they did do, was get fat off the algae produced. And they did a marvelous job, are durable fish, and kept to themselves and most importantly on the bottom.

So I bought three of them. Two mediums, who I named Jim and Pam, and a large one who I named Dwight. Dwight is about 8 or 9 inches and Jim and Pam are about 4, currently. But given that the pond is clocking in at over 500 gallons, they should have plenty of room for growth, and hopefully expansion (assuming they are boy and girl).

Here the new kids are.

This is Dwight, he is all of the images but one, which is Jim.





This is Jim, he looks huge because I was rocking the zoom, but he and Pam are only about 4 inches in length.





As you will notice Dwight is rather long. Which is good, I didn't want a ton of tiny suckers in there so I forked over the 30.00 and bought Dwight. There was a larger one, but he was 40.00, and in all honestly he was only darker in color and a little fatter. He wasn't 10.00 larger by any stretch. (And if you are wondering Jim and Pam were 9.00 apiece.)



You will notice Pam is not in any of the images. This is because she immediately took off around the pond like lightning, then hid in the stacked mass of rocks in the middle. Kudos to you Pam, you camera shy scamp.

As of this morning none were out and about, but I attribute this to them being twilight fish.