tails from the elite..

[karazy]

haha, well i had so much fun today i thought i would make a thread about it.

but first let me explain a lil. today and also tomorow i am volunteering at elite aquatics because...well i love fish :P

so today i worked from 12-4, as i will tomorrow.Ofcousre i offered to do the job, colby didnt ask me too. now lets get on to the fun stuff.
im just so happy that he is giving me this experience
so i woke up all exited this morning (how couldnt i be) and waited for my dad to arrive to drive me to elite aquatics.
when he dropped me off i walked into the shop with a smile on mm face, and got to work.
first colby had me unloading 6 new boxes of liverock from Jikarta(sorry for incorrect spelling). Ofcourse i was exited because i got to hand pic the pieces that were the nicest to go on top :P
so i get to the bottom of the first box to find all sorts of life waiting for me to discover them!
there were crabs of all sorts, snails,pods, and the biggest treat..a baby mantis shrimp in almost every box! only about 6/8ths of an inch long each, yellowish green with white little speckles. now came the hard part. how do i get all these lil critters out without getting pinched, pincered, smashed, or speared?
well i found that the mantis shrimp were too chilled out from being under all the rock to realize i was picking them up, until they were in the water that is
i found the best method to get the rest of the guys out was to simply dump them out (there were very tiny pieces of rock too)
but just my luck, everytime i went to dump the suckers in, george the longhorned cowfish would go right infront of the box and start spitting water at me for food. lucky for me all it took was a lil nudge with my fingers to make him realize he had to move.
now when i got to about the 3rd box, there was one mantis shrimp that was a little lively. long story short, he ended of smashing my finger. thank god he was tiny otherwise it woulda felt like more than a flick
I had the pleasure of helping 2 very nice customers out to pick live rock while colby was helping other customers. I showed them some bad crabs to look out for (hairy, red eyes) and showed them my lil jackpot piece. it was the nicest piece in all of the boxes. they seemed to enjoy my help, and bought about 25 pounds of liverock (give or take) i think it was a job well done. Then i had the pleasure of putting the new clams into their tank. they were all small, but one freaked me out while i was taking it out of the bag by shooting a small jet of water at me. they were nice clams all in all.
Next i squeegeed and buffed all the tanks(with reef safe cleaners ofcourse). It was pretty tough work suprisingly. I actually broke a sweat

Next was the fun part. I got to feed all the fish.It gave me the chance to meet Colbys turtles for the first time what did i learn from that..big yellow cichlids dont eat as much as you expect, rainbows eat like lil devils, and some species of fish freak out so much that they jump right out of their tanks the lil bastards

I then swept up the shop, and before i new it it was 4 o'clock and my dad was there to pick me up. "darnit!" i thought. time goes by fast when you are having fun.

So today i got cut by liverock, smashed by a mantis, some bristles in my thumb from a bristleworm, and i got a lil too close for comfort to an urchin (i gotta pay more attention )

And surprisingly, it was one of the best days of my life so far.
and i get to do it tomorow too!
so more writing tomorow. i hope you dont mind that this is so long.

Sincerely, Evan Volk.