...he's back........ with a vengeance! LOL!

... it's true, i am back at last - and starting with this post - will be writing at least 3 or 4 times a week! Yay!

“...it all starts with turtles... or, 4 ½ years of Logic in the making.”

It starts at Chinese New Years, Chinatown Los Angeles...end of January... Nine of us all together go to the parade, play with fire works, make fun of the new Mayor Antonio 'If there's a camera in sight I am there' Villaraigosa (after all, ex-Mayor Jimmy Hahn comes from San Pedro ya know...); and get in a fight with snooty people across the street; then on the way back to the car my sister says "Lets get Ashley a turtle!" (Apparently since her daughter Alice has a menagerie we must now also build a zoo here in San Pedro)... Mom frowns and agrees.... Hence, we get two. "Well, they do so much better in pairs ya know..."

Back home, we start with a miniscule turtle tank for two...... and it grows from there.

We decide we both want a new tank for fish again. I had a 150 gallon one way back in the day, and Rina got one during Asher’s 9 month 'sleepover' to help her relax..... so we find a 30 gallon tank in the recycler, comes with fish (of which we subsequently exchange all but two for our Africans, and if you look close in the image below - next to the heater - is the ONLY fish she named out of all of them... a Neon Tetra called Ballerina - which "disappeared" about three weeks after we got the Africans) and all the fixins' and Rina shrewdly bargains the extra 10 gallon tank and cover out of the guy's garage as part of the whole deal.

Now the turtles have room to expand and grow, we add a plecostamus to keep algae down, and she names them "Amanda and Julie" (irregardless that they are both boy turtles) based on the recent addition of her twin little sisters via her dads new romance... at least they weren't named Sam.

Another story another time for this...

Forward a couple weeks, and one turtle (eerily similar to its namesake) is not eating, and subsequently dies on us (but not the namesake at least)........ So - we add Goldfish to her tank - can't kill those, right? Pleco dies next during a water change, but the goldfish... when they came home, were dropped in their bag to acclimate... come back a couple minutes later and the bag is sitting outside the tank on the floor... Reason being? "The turtle will EAT them" she cries emphatically... and a small fight ensues as to what and what not the turtle with it’s oh so small mouth can actually fit inside it to eat or swallow...

all this because we had subsequently traded the fish that came with the big tank and started our collection of African Cichlids... which we explained will eat other fish in the tank if we get anything smaller. She crosses this information with the turtle eating potential gold fish and wants nothing added to her tank then... but we convinced her otherwise.

Now the Africans started out on just flake food to keep them non-aggressive and to allow them to grow to the size of the surroundings...

Three months later and we are current - the Africans are now on a diet of flakes and live guppies which constitutes about 60 of them every three days or so... we have added a few small guppies to Ashley's goldfish and turtle to try to do some breeding of our own food supply and yesterday we come down to the following conversation:

Food Chain Basics 101:

We needed to go get guppies and food for both tanks, so a trip after school was headed to the fish store. On the way, Ashley decided we needed to put all the guppies in her tank and not feed them anymore to the Africans... we explain that her tank isn't big enough to hold 60 additional, although very small guppies to her now crowded habitat and that in simple terms "this is just the laws of natural progression - big fish eat little fish which of course eat littler fish" and a simple glossing over of the mechanics of the food chain.

Here the aforementioned 4 and a half years of Logic enters the picture...

"I don’t want the fish to eat the small ones anymore."

"Well, they need them now since we have them on this diet", I answered and then suggested that "as People we eat hamburgers and steaks which come from cows."

Mom interjects that "Chickens come from where? “and gets back

"from eggs."

Mom again... "We eat chickens and eggs, and we eat hamburgers, right?"

Ashley comes back with:


"Hamburgers come from Burger King.
And milk comes from cows. "

Mom starts with "Where do thick, juicy steaks..." (her 4 and a half aged favorite way to describe them anyway) and I mutter under my breath she is gonna say the grocery store... and before I can finish, that is exactly what rolls off her tongue glibly ...understand that this is no regular 4 and a half year old but actually a very sarcastic small person merely pretending to be a child for hers' and our amusement who just so happens to fit in the booster chair in the back seat and can carry a conversation better than most adults I know.
So I try again to explain the food chain, momentarily stunned still by the Burger King comment and now trying to rid that god forsaken cartoon come to life in the commercials that scares me in my sleep out of my minds eye to keep focused on this conversation...
"Steaks and Hamburger come from cows, as well as milk... "
but I am cut short again by the commanding voice in the rear stating

"I am done playing THIS game, are we there yet?"


Score:

Ashley - 2
Mom and Dad - 0

Just remember: it all begins with turtles...

take heed now.