Another Norseman’s Diaries Supplemental: Vacation in Paradise

Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Originally intended as a Letter to the Editor/postscript to last week’s article “Norseman’s Diaries Supplemental: A Brief B-Erf Day Special”.

Saturday evening and the day and first vacation week is nearing an end. Only one more to go and back to Covid Land—but it’s probably just regular ER bedlam because I’ve not heard much about the virus lately on the news since the world has found other things to worry about.

The War and the Fuher couldn’t be more obscure on the Planet Mongo or my Turtle Ranch!

It’s been a busy week.

Finally took another great leap of faith and got the 150 filled to capacity and it’s stood going on a week now and might be go for putting in substrate and some feeder fish to seed the biological filtration media that I plan on putting in the corner wells. And I’ve tested that system too with a 300 GPH Smart Pond pump set in the center with a T connector to split the flow to both ends.

Other project of the week was the reboot of the mouse colony that I had going briefly back in my first year out of the service. Before I mothballed the cages and equipment for years. Jerry rigged some shelving in the space under the staircase where I had the mice set up before I gave up on them in favor of buying bulk frozen ones in bags and the space was devoted to a set of ten gallon aquariums that became my holding tanks for new fish and for rearing young ones from my own.

Now I’ve found a way to have both and get the maximum out of that space like I’m doing with the Room.

It’s a paradise in there!

Plop!

I could write a whole story about this and I will in a future Adventures in Herpetology article. And I’m hoping to maybe get in a few herping expeditions and fishing trips this summer with friends. Something I haven’t done in years and long overdue.

Today I began the process of moving fish outdoors for the season. A couple of bullheads and a Redbreasted Sunfish that I’m hoping is a female so it can mate with the big bull male palomino phase who lives in the main pond with the goldfish and successfully made it through the winter this year!

He’s the one on the upper right. Hope to get a good story out of him for a future installment of the Diaries.

And the day and week of vacation in Paradise are rushing to a close. A Paradise of my own creation that is the next best thing of life in an O’Neill cylinder that I almost wrote about in my last article for Earth Day last weekend and was going to do this one were it not for being so damned busy with projects and just enjoying life itself. Maybe it’s a fool’s Paradise and I’m doing this in vain only to loose it all because Biden-Flation and the Green New Deal render my way of life untenable- or I’ll die in a nuclear war.

I’m hopelessly lost in dreams and remembrance as the music of my younger days sounds comes through the staircase window from the Bluetooth shop light in the Florida Room where the future still remains so bright that I gotta wear shades!

If it was good enough for the days of Reagan and the final phase of the Cold War it’s good enough for now.

Looking forward to another Saturday Night 80s while I work on my tanks and tidy up the basement some more. That’s my island of Paradise in this ocean of hell.

But not all is bad out there.

This week Elon Musk bought Twitter and the lefties are going bonkers. That’s the best news I’ve heard in ages. Not only is it a new hope for Freedom of speech in social media but maybe also a bully pulpit for Musk to sell the High Frontier as the cleaner, greener and open ended future alternative to the national suicide pact of the Green New Deal.

Imagine if you can.