I've now had 5+ years in keeping bettas. I started with males, because I was told females were ugly and they (bettas) were very hard to breed, so I didn't need both. I finally found some brightly colored females at Wally-World (rescues!) and bought 4 and housed them together. Every once and awhile I'll pick up some bright males from Wally, but I am getting hopelessly depressed at the methods of fish keeping they display.

Back almost 6 years ago, I started up a fresh tropical fish tank. For almost a year, I keep 15 fish happy and healthy in a 20 gallon tank. Until a hurricane struck, I lost power/water/everything for 9 days. I left, heading to my parents home and when I returned, the whole tank was dead. I packed up everything and put it into storage.

In January of 2003, I was laid-off and gotten very depressed (and worse). Since I was on unemployment, I spent most of my time at home, bored and getting more depressed. Then one day, my BF figured I needed something to do and "poof", we went and picked up 2 goldfish and 5 guppies. Bought a new 5 gallon tank, along with everything I could remember needing.

And cried myself silly the next week when all but one fish was dead in the tank from ammonia poisoning. This was the start of my crash course in Proper Fish care.

Back on late 1999, my cat (a cream torrtie on white) named Mooka was DX'ed with cancer. Within 2 months, I had to put her down. I was grief stricken. By the next day, I had found a woman who was selling "Siamese kittens" for $50. I called her and she showed me her kittens. They looked like Siamese, but had little white toes. I had to get a new fuzzy kid before I went home to an empty house. I bought Drizzit, and 5 years later, the fuzzy b#$ch is still living with me.

And now for birds. I studied up on them over the years, and had bird friends tell me so many stories about them, we (me and my love) were at Petsmart picking up some fish stuff and he asked if we could get some birds. I explained a few things about it and agreed. $100 later, we left with a complete set-up and two paired Zebra finches.

I learned a lot about the birds, they now have a larger home, more things to do, better food and so on. I switched to keeping females only because I couldn’t stand another accident like what Happened to Cheeper (see the Bird cage page).