The Great Fish Relocation

I really never know what the day will hold around here. On Tuesday I cooked breakfast, tended to morning chores, took out ground beef for dinner, followed DH to town so he could drop his rig off at Mark's (our mechanic and super nice guy), drove back home, turned towards the house to start dinner when DH asked for help cleaning out a water trough.

A few years ago I brought home some tiny goldfish - we put 2 in each trough to help keep it clean. We still have to clean them out, but definitely not as often as before we added the fish. DH added the hose and started draining the tank and saw a lot of tiny fish.

Well the water was running through the horse pens and my job was to pick up all the baby fish being washed along the way. I wanted to take all kind of pictures, but I was too busy stooping to scoop up slippery fishies and trying to keep them from wriggling out of my hands. We ended up with 2 buckets and about 60 fish

Then we proceeded to 7 water troughs fairly close to the house to distribute fish:

We REALLY need to clean some of these troughs out too, but one thing at a time.

We'll carry the bucket of fish around for a couple of days and add a few to each trough as we make mineral runs and check things. In the meantime, these two are enjoying their clean trough

It just reminded me of another fish relocation story I wanted to share if you would humor me as I take a walk down memory lane. When we lived in Texas, we lived in the Davis Mountains, on a ranch called Timber Mountain. We never took vacations. Heck, we had lots of picnics

and went exploring:

and fished

and camped

and swam

and hunted

 and were horseback

...all without ever leaving the ranch. And we fished a lot:

The dirt tanks and stream up Madera Canyon were filled with fish:

But when we hit a looong, multi-year dry spell and fell into a serious drought, almost all the dirt tanks dried up. So one day we set out on a rescue mission.

The bottoms of those dirt tanks get BOGGY and on order to reach the fish, DH set out pallets and everyone tottered out

to catch

what they could

, set them in empty mineral tubs and relocate them to the 2 dirt tanks that still had water. I wish I had more photos

but I treasure the ones I DO have

as well as the memories.

These photos were taken before digital cameras so the quality isn't the best as I just took pictures of the pictures.

I was a camera bug even 20 years ago

and I'm so glad:

Oh, my goodness, that was a fun day!

Surely, they aren't scarred from never having visited Disneyland:

And I hope our chiddlers' recall their childhood as fondly as I do.