its been a smooth start to the new year for me, for which i am very grateful. despite the full car headlight meltdown, which was easy fixed. december was kind of a nightmare for my work life but it seems like things are settling down and starting to go nicely again. i have officially been freed from the role of head nurse! my contract ends in early feb and i'm free to just go back to normal and stop worrying about dumb shit i don't care enough about. new staff is in the works so we can function to full capacity again. i cannot wait. we have had some crazy stuff coming into the clinic recently too, i think we had three consecutive emergencies back to back one random day last week. hectic! i'm really looking forward to my contract ending because this means they'll be hiring a new head nurse instead, who actually has that experience which means i will finally have someone to ask my questions to, rather than just having to figure stuff out on my own.

i did get to do a bunch of cool stuff this month already - took my dad to our local theme parks for the first time, i got to visit the university jellyfish research labs, got to visit a native wildlife conservation park and see loads of cool little critters. i have been enjoying sprucing up and maintaining my new fish tank which is also doubling as a hydroponics setup for pothos at the moment.

in other semi-related news, i had to take hopscotch to the vet a week ago for an issue he's got with his left arm. it seems to be uncomfortable for him; he'd been holding it a bit funny and seemed reluctant to extend it all the way out. it comes and goes, sometimes he will wake up and won't move it, and then suddenly an hour later, he's up and clambering all over the tank like nothing happened. i took him into my local exotics vet and had a consult that only really ended in some NSAIDs dispensed for him, as even if it was broken, there's not much you can do about it. can't splint a frog leg! the meds have brought down the swelling in his leg, but it does still randomly seem to bother him from time to time. there is a high chance that this will just be a lifelong thing, possibly an injury or issue during his juvenile development stages. hard to say! he is still mobile and it doesn't hinder his movement or climbing when it goes into that 'locked' state, so the vet isn't too worried about it in the long run. i learned a lot from my vet trip though, it is truly humbling to be a client for unfamiliar species, and he is a super cool and knowledgable man.

other stuff i've been up to; i'm trying very hard to get back into reading again, as it's been sooo so long since i enjoyed a book properly. winding down in the evening with 30min minimum of reading has meant i'm absolutely tearing through books i thought i'd never finish. my friend had dragged me into an admittedly really good tiktok based musical about the oddysey, of all things (EPIC: THE MUSICAL, you can watch a whole playlist of the songs and animatics right over here!) and i actually really, really love the oddysey, so. i'm re-reading my fagles translation, and i went and bought a new translation i've never read before that i'm going to read next.

REJOYCE, FOR SHE HAS ARRIVED!!!

i have never shipped a fish to me before. this was an absolutely insane concept to me, but, i saw this pretty fish online and just had to have her. her name is tobiko! following my sushi theme i've always had for my bettas. she's a koi halfmoon plakat, and only very young! i've never had a female betta, nor any short fin species, so this is all firsts for me. she's very active and curious, i'm so happy with the choice i made. but i believe that is it for this long ass blog post! it was a delight to set this tank up, i'm excited to have a long running tank of bettas in the future :)

just a little short of the 3wk mark today and i have to say, i am thrilled with how things are progressing here. my plants are absolutely thriving, the roots on my frogbit are almost touching the ground! the pothos i experimented with are growing roots in the tank water, and all of my shrimp are still alive! i actually saw a moult just a few days ago, so they're growing too.

i added in 4x more plants this week - some dwarf grass for ground coverage, and three mystery plants that didn't have names for up the back. they're delightfully leafy and dense, and i saw roots growing out of the tops of the stalks, which means easy to propogate later down the line if i want more. i got one very tall one that was growing out of the surface of the water in the pet store. the two bushier compact ones i got for the middle of the tank are these beautiful red toned leafy things that i hope will maintain their colour without a co2 system. i did also have to soak them in a very diluted bleach solution to rid them of any snails, since i saw a few of them in the plant tank.

i have unfortunately had to pluck two snails out of this tank so far and i am not happy about it. there's not much i can do given the shrimps in there, so for now, i am going to hard limit the shrimp food and only feed them every 7-10 days and let them forage on their own. ideally, whatever snails did manage to sneak in there will eat the very limited algae that's in the tank and eventually die out with no food left. i don't want to kill them off because they are good for the tank in a managed population, it's just that managing a snail population is borderline impossible. nto catastrophising yet, though! nothing is wildly out of control at the present moment, so i can hold out for another week or so and see where we end up.

happy new year everyone!!!! I hope everyone had a good night, be it sleeping or enjoying explosions

personally I headed out to the beach at midnight to watch the the city's firework display with a bunch of other rowdy drunk people and it was a delight. I love new year so much there is just something special about everyone gathering to celebrate another arbitrary lap around the sun and collectively deciding to mark it as a fresh new start together. joy and whimsy. also I love pyrotechnics

I did a lot in 2024 without really even realising it. I saw concerts and got into the local live music scene, I went to local theatre productions, I met my two best online friends a handful of times and we all met in person together for the first time in 8 years! I had a major promotion at work, which wasn't always a good thing, but really did test my skills in both nursing and management skills. I threw myself fully into some cases and got really involved, there's some Im really glad I followed through to the end. I went to Japan with my best friends! That really challenged my ability to adapt and learn, and I came out of it with a better knowledge of the language which was awesome.

I have a lot of faraway plans going into the new year both in personal life and in terms of creative projects (+ my site!). I think last year I really grew into myself as a person and I spent a lot of it working fervently on bettering myself. I'm a little short of the goals I wanted to achieve but I'm close enough that I dont want to go into 2025 with that rise n grind mindset, yknow? This year is about taking it slow and appreciating the moments, spending more time creatively and appreciating the little things.

site-wise i think I want to further my technical and coding skills and really work on making this place clean and streamlined and learn WHY we code the way we do rather than just pasting in something from stackoverflow because it works. i originally started this site because i wanted somewhere to talk about my life and interests, but i'm really, really bad at maintaining physical journals. i'd seen a friend blogging about stuff on wordpress or something, and i thought that was such a neat idea if i could think of a way to compile things into their own sections. and so this site was born! it has truly been such a valuable outlet for me to ramble about whatever i want on here without having to bother everyone in my life about it. it's original purpose was to talk about my taxidermy and yap about my day to day life, and it has become so much more than that in the few short months i've been maintaining it. I'll have to accept that I'll never be happy with the layout because I simply can't settle! but that's the joy in a personal web page I suppose, it'll only grow and change with me. I also really want to work on my side project site that I haven't really told anyone about and that's why it's so slow going, I think. I need that pressure of being perceived to really work on anything!

good things ahead, I believe!! 🩷