The fish and their hibernating (?) snail friend

Sorry for the long recess... getting back into the swing of things is more time consuming than I anticipated.

Plus, we got a Wii - more on that later.

I'm sitting here in wintry Cleveland. Outside the window is snow that has me considering a cancellation of meetings tonight. The roads are messy and the air is cold.

But inside, my thoughts are repeatedly drawn back to my fish tank sitting on the desk...

The life of a snail has me utterly transfixed.

And by 'transfixed', I mean in the long-term sense where I am able to get things done, yet glance in his direction at least a few times per day.

The story goes that I bought a snail for the little tank because its filter is a little sub-par and I wanted to at least keep the grime off the walls, and he did that job beautifully! Then, as snails have done for me in the past, he got pretty quiet after a couple weeks. (None of my snails have actually been 'loud', but you know what I mean by this... very little activity.)

I hesitated in taking him out for the trip to the porcelain depository primarily because he never 'relaxed'. All the other snails that I've had die on me always would be hanging out of their shell a bit and begin to float... definitive signs of departing from this life.

Instead, this little guy had merely huddled up next to my Toucan Sam submarine and stayed put.

And stayed.

And Stayed.

And STAYED...

It was a good two weeks before I saw any notable change in his position, and even then I wondered if the fish had just sort-of been pecking at him.

Then one day he was stuck on the side of the tank wall doing his thing again!

The next day, back behind the submarine for another week.

This rotation has been happening for about two months now. It makes me wonder what I can do to make life worth living for him... or if he just thinks that he's part of the submariner corps on some Red October sort of hunt.

Today, for instance, it seems like he's gotten himself into a nice pattern of making his rounds...

1. Start by the sub.
2. Pick a direction.
3. Go that direction till you hit a wall.
4. Climb the wall briefly to test.
5. Return to sub.
6. Act like nothing happened.

A brilliant existence!

(The snail is the dark one next to the sub. The lighter shell in the foreground is hollow. The apparently giant fish is the stand up fish... he's not THAT big.)

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