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I don’t know why, but anything having to do with money or paying bills or bank records or whatever, is extremely hard for me to do. It just exhausts me.

A few days ago, I got a water bill for my old house in Baltimore. Somehow they didn’t know I’ve moved. In order to clear it up, I would have to call. Ugh. I may as well have had to lift 800 pounds.

Yesterday morning before school, I finally called. It turns out they knew I had moved, but somehow the transfer hadn’t happened yet. The woman said she fixed it, but I’ll probably get one more bill before all is said and done. She said I shouldn’t pay it. I was glad the problem was resolved.

After I hung up, I sat in my desk chair and did nothing for a while. …a money issue… I was so… tired…

It’s a hefty bill

My classroom aquarium has some albino corydoras catfish in it. They are filling the role of “bottom fish”. (The tetras swim in the middle, and the guppies swim at the top.)

Much of the time, the corys are swimming around the tank, scouring the gravel for anything they might eat. When they want to rest, they go to the part of the aquarium where the water is still. It’s also a place where some java moss is growing. The fish like to rest in it.

When the corys rest, they’re very still. It’s starting to happen less frequently, but for a while, it seemed that every other day a student would urgently call me over to the aquarium to see the “dead” fish. Then it would move and they’d tell me to never mind.

In the morning at school, there are snails on the ground. They aren’t small.

Normally I would just ignore creatures like this, or maybe pick them up and chuck them into the bushes, but there is a parasite here called the rat lungworm. It’s called that because it’s regular hosts are rats, and it lives in their lungs.

Snails carry the larvae, and sometimes humans ingest the parasite that way. If a human gets the worm, it can cause meningitis, which of course is very serious.

I don’t touch the snails at school.