Hurray!
Also, I realized I skipped out on Mythology Monday because I posted my ridiculous cops story instead, so I'll either write a mythology post on Friday, or maybe just wait until Monday.
Whoops.
ALRIGHT. SO.
When I was about 8 or 9 years old, my best friend at the time, Maddie, got me this tadpole habitat for my birthday. It was this little plastic contraption about a foot long and half a foot wide, with plastic hills and plastic shrubberies and a little plastic pond that you were supposed to fill with water and mud and things.
All in all, it was awesome.
What you had to do was call this number or send these people a letter, and they would send you a few tadpoles in the mail, along with detailed instructions on how to raise them, how to feed them and everything, and then eventually these tadpoles would grow into frogs, which you then had to take care of and buy live crickets for them to eat and everything.
Admittedly, I was a little pissed that I had to go out of my way to get tadpoles. I wanted them right there and then, because waiting was not something I was good at (it still isn't, actually).
Because I was too lazy to call this number or send the company who made the thing a letter, I never got tadpoles from them. The cool plastic habitat was shoved in the back of a closet and forgotten about in favor of stupid things like furbies and other such monstrosities.
About a year later, Maddie and I were down at the park, playing in the nasty, mucky swamp water creek-thing that runs through the park behind my house.
Hurray for Diagrams.
Anyway, we're playing in the creek, and we see all these little black goops wriggling around.
I say goops because they were too big to be called dots and too little to be called fish, and they kind of looked like the fish shadows in animal crossing.
Also I just really wanted to say goops several times in a post. Seriously, say it out loud right now. Best. Word. EVER.
Those little black goops were, of course, tadpoles. Not frog tadpoles, at least I don't think they were. I assume they're toad tadpoles, because we have toads coming out of our asses around here. They're actually pretty cute, to be honest. We have one that lives on our front porch who is called either Fred or Jeff, depending on who you ask.
Me and Maddie got all excited, in that way that only 8 or 9 year olds really can. We found a waterbottle that someone had thrown into the creek, as well as some plastic cup or jar or something of that sort, and got to work catching as many of those tadpoles as we could.
After about 20 minutes, we each had at least 50 tadpoles in our containers, and we were feeling really damn proud of ourselves for being such expert fisherman.
It was then that we realized the fatal flaw in our plan.
"So...where do we put them?" Maddie asked.
We certainly couldn't put them back, because then they wouldn't be our tadpoles anymore, they'd be the park's tadpoles, and that was clearly unacceptable.
I briefly toyed with the idea of putting all of them in my pool, but quickly decided there wasn't enough food in there for them, and they would get scared because it was so big.
We were almost about to put them back in before I realized that I still had that crappy plastic habitat still sitting unopened in the back of a closet.
We raced back up the hill to my house, being careful not to spill the tadpoles. We left them outside and got out the habitat (Maddie didn't really care that I hadn't used it yet, which is good, because looking back on it I probably shouldn't have told her that it had been sitting in my closet, unopened, for the past year) and dumped them in.
Then, because there wasn't enough water, I went over to my pool and got a cupful of water and dumped it in with the tadpoles.
I secured the lid, making sure the plastic habitat was shut up good and tight so the tadpoles couldn't get out in case they spontaneously turned into toads overnight.
I then left the habitat in the direct sunlight so the tadpoles would be nice and warm and feel at home.
Maddie and I then went inside, washed our hands, had lunch, and went about our day, playing in my pool and playing My Little Ponies and whatnot.
The tadpoles were soon forgotten.
The next afternoon, my Dad was going to mow the lawn. He saw something sitting in the middle of the yard and went to go pick it up.
Oh, by the way, my parents didn't know anything about the tadpoles. Something told my that my mother wouldn't be too thrilled about my toad farm, especially because there would have been at least a hundred toads popping out of that thing before too long.
Suddenly my parents call for me, furious.
"What is this?!" they ask, pointing at the plastic box.
"Oh, me and Maddie caught tadpoles yesterday down at the park! They're gonna grow up to be toads!"
"Honey...you filled the box with highly chlorinated pool water, and then left it in the sun without poking any airholes in the lid. All of the tadpoles are dead."
I had essentially fried them alive while they suffocated and died in the chlorine water.
Not only had I massacred all of them...dead tadpoles smell like absolute shit. And that smell was wafting EVERYWHERE. You could smell it from inside the house once we took the lid off.
So then my Dad and I carried the box down to the creek and gave the tadpoles a funeral by dumping them into the creek.
I think the chlorine had dissapated enough so it wouldn't hurt any more tadpoles...or at least I hope so. I really hope I didn't kill even more of them. I don't know that much about how chlorine works.
Then I had to go home and hose out that habitat before recycling it, because there was no way to really salvage it. It smelled like death and horror in there.
For the record, I haven't killed any animals since then.
Though my hamster did almost suffocate to death once because I let her play with this desk toy I had and she got stuck in it and her tongue turned blue.
She was fine though.
Long story short, if toads had history books, I would be in them as a terrible baby-killer. I am to tadpoles what Godzilla is to Asian people.
No offense, Asia.
Poor things! Talk about a painful way to go. You can't breathe, you feel like you're on fire, and are in water full of chemicals! Ouch.
ReplyDeleteP.S. I did say goops out loud. It was just kind of awesome. XD