I didn’t get a chance to post this and I felt bad after posting that big thing on Peanut Chew yesterday but we have some more friends…in the fish tank at least. After about a year of just having Shaq in the tank

the big blue fish seen in the picture below with the as of this moment no named orange fish:

Shaq in this picture is a little darker than normal, we just cleaned the tank out and added two friends to the tank. Shaq used to have a friend, like a brother back when I was the RA on third floor hamilton (yes this animal is that old–if you remember your timeline, I was on third floor for only one year and on 1st floor for two years–this is my first year off campus, and I believe we purchased the blue fish in the spring of my junior year–so he’s about almost three years old–more or less at least). And if anyone can remember, his friend, who was also the same blue, had markings on him that resembled “Jonah” and I remember Sarah the RA on the other side coming in and naming him Jonah. Well, Shaq and Jonah never really got along, Shaq was more of a loner and Jonah tagged along a lot. Shaq never would let Jonah eat, he would attack him whenever he got a chance and would randomly hit him. It got to the point that Sarah took Jonah away because Shaq was now twice the size of Jonah…Jonah did not see my Senior year, he didn’t even see summer break, he died before the semester was over.

Shaq and this other orange fish that we bought at the same time (and I think we named them Evan and Tara at the time, but Evan and Shaq in this case) teamed up on Tara around the beginning of my senior year and she was a goner. So then Shaq and the newly named Psycho Evan fish tag teamed around the tank (I’m looking for pics of these fish, but I can’t find them) for a long time, up until about a year ago when Shaq kicked Psycho Evan’s ass and he was a goner too (I should have learned not to name fish after people I know…like that time I named that dark blue fish Kenyatta…I showed it to Kenyatta and he was very taken by the fish, he said that “Its all dark and sexy…just like me” I’ll never forget that. Nor will I forget the look on his face when I told him that Kenyatta (the fish) died…he was upset). Also, we had two kissing fish, whom I loved dearly (named Cos and Mel) pictured here, this picture was taken from my first year on 1st floor hamilton (the great senior year…oh man, to go back and relive that…):

This next picture has the kissing fish, Shaq in the background, the two orange fish called Evan and Tara (Evan at this point hadn’t turned psycho yet) and suctioned (is that how you even spell it?) to the front was one of our bottom feeders…they lived a long time, too long in fact, they out grew the tank and this past summer we had to toss the bottom feeders into the pound in my backyard. One of them died last I checked, I didn’t know about the other one. That was sad. I loved those fish too.

One of the kissing fish passed away about a year ago and the other one didn’t last too much longer after that…and up until New Years Eve it was simply Shaq dominating the waters.

Then we tossed in the orange no name fish and a little crayfish:

My parents call it the lobster and threaten to eat it or feed it to the cat one day. My mom loves it and watches it every morning (since obviously we don’t have the fish tank in our apartment, its been at my parents house since probably second semester senior year…)

The Crayfish…or lobster…is called George…Melissa and my mother both named it George, separately, Melissa said on the car ride home that we should call it George and then my mom said it when we dropped it in, so you can’t disregard something like that.

Every time someone walks into the room George runs up to the glass and stares at them. yesterday i was teasing him sticking my head closer to the glass and then farther (repeating) until he ran into the glass with three of his claws (they have like four or six claws, two big ones and a bunch of little ones) I think I made him mad.

Here is another picture of George.

So as you can see the family is growing. My parents have a lot of little grandchildren (pets) I hope to put more fish in the tank and I still love my girls over here (Erika and Dale). Message me if you’d like to come see any of these animals…

–Socram