So long, farewell...for now

I am down one fish. When I awoke yesterday the stripey (yellow/black) one was acting bizarre - flipping around in the tank, hyperventilating, smashing herself off of rocks and things in the tank. So I brought her down to Ed and he tossed her in his tank with the others of her kind and she still acted funny. He tested my water and my ammonia was off the charts. So he said it was from the ammonia being so high. He kept her, hoping he can get her feeling better in his zero-ammonia water, and I bought some bacteria builder and came home.

After a 50% water change, I sprinkled in some more salt and two caps of the bacteria builder. Everyone else is acting fine, but I am going to give it another day and then I'm going to head back over and Ed said he would give me a new fish. Either one of the same kind or different.

This isn't on the same subject as fish, but you know I just have to say... some people go overboard when it comes to pet stores. Ed and his lovely wife Lisa just opened this pet store in my town. The place is wonderful. You can walk in, lean on the central pen filled with gerbils and bunnies - and you wouldn't even know you were in a pet store if you closed your eyes. Lisa keeps things THAT clean. It's all she does is clean. So what is the problem? They sell puppies. Dum dum dum.... Which has brought protesters to their store, a full page slam ad in the local paper and then a write up by the local paper on them. They only ever have one - SOMETIMES two puppies at the same time. The puppies are in a central wooden pen during the day, and get walked every day, and go home with an employee at night.

So to avoid bad publicity, they promised not to buy puppies from the guy they normally bought from (in Wisconsin or something, he flew the puppies to them). But that means now they have to find someone local to buy from. Two issues there - one is that there aren't many small breed breeders locally (which is what they want to sell), and two- the local breeders want to sell the pet store the puppies at a higher price than the STORE would sell them for. So it really sucks for them. They're just trying to make a living, provide a service to this area that we presently don't have (there are no pet stores here, and haven't been) - and people have to throw a wrench in the works. Idiots.