This past week, we bought a pair of mystery snails in an attempt to give our two South America cichlids a bit of company. Well, that idea didn't work. One of the snails died yesterday and the other died this morning. We're not certain if they were killed by the fish or just couldn't adapt to their new home.

Not that we're trying to kill anymore of them, but they came with a warranty, so we're going to give it one more attempt with them. Hopefully we'll have better news on the indoor front.

This weekend, I'll be doing what I can to clean some of the muck from the front pond. My wife spent a few minutes the other day picking out leaves that fell into the water from our oak tree. She said that Redhead, the name of the goldfish in that pond, spent the time watching her from just a few inches away as if he was her supervisor and had to see to it that she got all of the leaves.

In the latest major rain that we had, we lucked out. In a way, the duckweed and other plants were swept to the low edge and that kept any of the tiny fish from being carried out by the overflow of water. In the past, that was a problem and on one occasion, we got lucky when I happened to check on one pond while it was still raining and managed to save about twenty small fish who would have otherwise perished after they went out of the pond onto the ground. We generally lose one small fish with each major rain, but this was an improvement in that we didn't lose any.