Readership, Meet My Pets

The picture you'll find one or two posts below (I think) is one of my ecosphere (Tommy gave it to me for Christmas this past year since I'm always bellyaching about not being able to have a pet.)

If you'll look closely, you can see three little tiny brine shrimp, Ruby, Onyx, and Pearl (really, you can just see two of them...and that's a stretch. They're no bigger than the white moon-shaped part of your thumbnail).

So my little shrimp(S) live in this totally contained ecosystem on my desk--it's a perfect pet, the ecosystem. Never have to feed or water the thing. Just sit back and enjoy it when I happen to be in town. Only maintenance required is to occasionally scrape a magnet across the outside of the sphere to wipe off the algae that's building up on the inside.

I named them by their coloring. Ruby, not surprisingly, has a reddish tint to her little body, Onyx has a big black vein in his back, and Pearl is sort of see-through. There used to be a fourth shrimp. I went away for several days on a work-related trip. Upon my return, I found the floating remains of Opal's skeleton inside of the sphere. Poor Opal. Ahhh, the circle of life. (Too bad, too, as opal is my favorite (semi-precious)gemstone.)Admittedly, it's not quite the same effect as a warm-blooded pet.

But they're pretty funny, you have to admit.