Doug vs. the interweb

July 21st, 2010 12:43 AM

Sometimes my subconscious surprises me by its level of competence. There are times where my mind seems to subtly hint at the importance of some seemingly inconsequential thing, and a lot of the time it turns out to be valid. An example: I was at the pond today, and was walking through some tall grass. I felt something fall between the side of my foot and the sandal strap, and paused to try to dislodge it, figuring some grass or whatever fell in there. As usual, it's really difficult to get anything like that out without sitting down and taking the dang thing off, so after a moment of futile bent-over effort I gave up and started to straighten-- but for some reason I felt that it was important to keep trying.

I bent down again and tried to push whatever it was up and out. A tiny leopard frog poked his head out from between my foot and sandal. I pushed him out the rest of the way and he hopped free. If I had kept walking I probably would have smushed the poor little crazy guy, only finding out way later when I took my sandals off. What the heck.

In other news, I have finally begun to understand how to catch aquatic turtles, so much so that instead of finding them by blind luck, I actually was able to purposefully catch four of them tonight. By becoming better at catching something, I feel less compelled to keep every single specimen I find -- the same thing happened with frogs. As a result, I can keep much more manageable aquariums here, by simply keeping smaller or simpler dudes. For example, I have let go all of the big green frogs in favor of a small tank with a wood, pickerel, and green frog; it's like a little cross-section of the abundant true frogs in the area. In the 20 gallon, I've got three baby turtles: a snapper, a musk, and a painted (there's a divider screen cordoning off the snapper to his own smaller section because I don't trust the guy). I still seem to spend way too much time maintaining, cleaning, and rearranging these tanks though.