Obama won. I (and Fred) are of the "thank goodness he won" camp, rather than the "OMG he won, the country's going to hell in a handbasket, we have to do something" camp.
Living in Missouri, we encounter many people from the second camp. Our local paper ran a letter to the editor (on the front page of the Opinions section) which referred to Obama as, I believe, a "sodomite baby-killer." The fact that there are loonies who write this stuff doesn't disturb me as much as the fact that our paper considers it worthy of print.
We went to the Obama rally in our town, shortly before the election. It was at a high school within walking distance of our house, so we didn't have to tackle the mass of traffic that resulted from 40,000 people descending on a parking lot that was not designed to hold anywhere near that many. We got there at about 7 pm and Obama talked at about 9:30--not bad, considering that we got standing room pretty close to the podium.
Life. National stuff, and local stuff. Locally, an older gentleman at church has given us two fish tanks. He is trying to cut back on how many tanks he has to manage--I think he had a heart attack.
We went to his house, and he must have had about ten tanks, most of them in his basement. It was quite interesting, really. He doesn't have fancy-shmancy decorative tanks--they were crusted with water deposits and the stands were rusty. The fish, however, were thriving. He had a couple of tanks of guppies, and I swear there must have been hundreds of guppies in each tank, all sizes--obviously they are breeding.
He said for tank maintenance, we just need to change twenty percent of the water once a week. I'm used to the idea that you have to totally clean a tank every now and then--take everything out, hose it all off, refill it. Otherwise, you get crud built up in the gravel on the bottom. A girl I work with actually boils her gravel--she says it keeps the water from getting cloudy.
There's no way that's going to happen with the kind of tanks he's keeping, so I've been trying to figure this out. His tanks have actual dirt in the bottom, and planted plants. Once they're set up, they're set up for good, or at least until we move to a different house.
So I looked up tank-keeping on the internet. Apparently, there is new interest in a kind of old-fashioned system of keeping fish tanks, called the "natural" system,or something similar. You put topsoil in the bottom of the tank, cover with fine gravel, plant plants that don't need a lot of fertilizers or mega-watt light fixtures, add the fish, and it all kind of balances out. Supposedly you should end up not even needing filters, although a pump to keep the water circulating is a good idea.
I think one key is not having too many fish. Apparently most people today have a fish vs. plant ratio that is too high on fish, thus the need for fancy and expensive bio-filters and such.
I don't think the guy who gave us these tanks is into a new back-to-nature fish movement. I think he just keeps tanks the way people kept them back when a fish tank was an inexpensive and entertaining scientific hobby, not a decorative statement. He gets his tanks at garage sales. It seems to work for him. We'll see if we can pull it off.
So far, we have a tank set up in Fred's office at church that has Missouri creek fish in it (he gave us the fish, too). Then there's one at home that is going to be set up for guppies.
Fred has taken an unusual interest in the aquariums, which is nice. At first, he told me I could set everything up--which I usually do, when it comes to pets. When the first tank turned out to have mucky muddy gravel in the bottom of it that was crawling with live snails, I refused to set the thing up, so Fred had to. This turned out to be a good thing--he's gotten much more interested in all of it, and he has set up the Missouri fish in his office. For someone who refuses to admit that he knows the names of our dogs, this is a big step.
So--in anyone's life, there is the interaction of national and personal factors which influence what happens to us from day to day. Will we remember someday that we got the fish tanks about the time Obama was elected? Maybe, maybe not.
Oh, I also brought home a pug. On the day of the elections, actually--will I remember that in five years? He was a stray, found by a woman who is a client at the vet clinic where I work, but who didn't want him.
I resisted this dog for a whole day, although I love pugs and have always wanted one. We have too many dogs as it is. But he was really sweet. And cute--not huge, the way a lot of pugs around here are.
The second day, I gave up and took him home. He turned out to have: fleas, ticks, whipworms, hookworms, and a respiratory infection. I think we have it all cleared up now.
Tillie wanted to name him Barack. Instead, we named him Bug. After all, the name "Barack" might one day be too dated. This pug is only about a year old. If he lives eight more years, he might make it to see another president.
