Yuku free message boards

That sucks pretty hard. My credit card companies would credit any payment that got to them by noon of the due date.

I'm not sure if they actually PROCESSED them that fast. Maybe they put everything that got to them on time in a big pile marked "okay", and it was counted as "on time" even if they took longer to process. But in any case, I never had any trouble with nearly last-minute payments.

I couldn't resist one last look at the spider.

It looked like it was staggering back and forth, confused, on the floor, away from the ant.

If indeed that was a flying ant that was made loopy with poison, I wonder if the poison might affect the spider, too?

One other time when we used an ant trap, the dead insects were actually inside the trap. So, I guess I assumed death was quick, and maybe consequently, less painful. Maybe not. But like you said, it also could depend on the size or hardiness of the insect. Those flying ants are fairly large.

Anyway, FO confirmed that the spider was moving around this morning. I tried tapping near it on the ground to try to startle it, but the evidence is that this type of spider plays dead when it's startled.

My sister wanted a tropic fish once...

This might have been because my mother's second husband had a big hobby of having tropical fish. I think it's possible that in his younger days (he might be a born-again Christian now) he was in the fish dealing business, which might have partially been a front for shipping drugs.

Anyway, long after that, he had several large tanks filled with tropical fish. They actually weren't the nicest thing to look at. One of the strongest memories I personally have of his fish is that one day I was downstairs near the tank, just taking it easy, and I looked over to see a long, narrow fish swimming vertically, ass-end to the air, with another long fish protruding from its mouth. It was wiggling back and forth, but more or less in place, I guess to try to help it swallow the fish. It was like that for at least an hour.

At the time, my sister had a much smaller tropical tank with about 8 fish in it. I don't anything weird happened with them.

So, much later, she wanted her own tropical fish. The place she was in contact with had a big plan for doing it right. You have to get the tank set up, and the rocks at the bottom actually filter crap, and you have to get the temperature right, and the oxygen flowing, etc., etc. And supposedly when living fish enter the tank (due to things like them producing waste, breathing, and generally living), the tank goes through some cycle where the pH fluctuates, eventually reaching some safe stable value. Other symbiotic plants might start living in the rocks, too.

The problem is, tropical fish might not survive that pH fluctuation. But you need to put SOME living fish in there to get the process started. The solution is to use an eel. They are robust enough to survive the cycle. The fish dealer would loan out an eel, and after the cycle was complete you could take it back and get your tropical fish.

Well, my sister became attached to the eel. You'd feed it frozen dead fish, which came in a cube, but when it hit the water, it'd break up into strands. Sometimes when you'd do that, the eel could nibble on your fingers, which couldn't hurt you. Or, it'd try to hunt the fish pieces as they fell. Or, it dig them up after they hit the bottom.

So, she still wanted a tropical fish, but she didn't want to get rid of the eel. She got a fish, a nice looking, iridescent blue one, and put it in the tank with the eel.

I don't remember much about the tropical fish, but it wasn't too long (weeks, maybe; possibly even days) before the eel ate the fish.

She was sad about it at first, I reckon, but eventually decided that she was attached enough to the eel to continue to keep it, and just never bother getting any other fish.

It did some other neat things, like bury itself in the rocks, with just its head sticking out.

She moved it several times, but, hey, the thing was supposed to be hardy, and it was. She kept it for several years -- probably a good long live span for an eel. Eventually, it seemed like it might have been going blind -- it couldn't hunt the frozen fish anymore.


Long story short, I think of eels as pets now, and can't eat eel sushi.