A Snake, A Spitty Fish, and a Head From Spain

First of all, I received my Iplehouse Cherie head from Spain today. Nanyalin did her faceup and shipped her to me before she went off to the LDoll festival to debut her own line of dolls, so I was pretty excited. Cherie is not a "realistic" sculpt particularily--she looks like a doll, and so she was perfect to finally make Headless Merry into Merry Cherie. She is also extremely cute, and will be fun to load up with ribbons and flowers.

It was also Fish Moving Day 2. The koi had gotten far too large for my bathtub sized pond (the biggest one was approaching 12 inches) and I was worried that soon small koi would appear. But Tony the Contractor has his own pond liner in, the waterfall and some extra bubblers and pumps ready, and rocks set up to foil raccoons, so yesterday he came and netted the fish and carried them away in buckets. He already has over a 100 fish of various types in tanks around his house so he was quite skillful at netting them, though the biggest koi was apparently heavy to lift (I just held the lid to the bucket while he fished). He came by again today to pick up a few more rocks, a spare net and an extra filter since he discovered how much electricity the waterfall pump used, so he didn't want to run it around the clock.

Since the pond was now empty, I went out this morning and bought myself a "Spitty Fish" fountain statue--I hadn't been willing to do this while there were fish in the pond-- because it's really easy to have the tubing fall off the spitty fish and then the pump would pump the pond dry in a couple of hours; and you know the first thing the raccoons are going to do tonight, is to pick up the spitty fish and shake it. Here it is, with plastic morning glories trying to hid the tubing..next year I will plant some little plants there to hide the tube, or place it directly in the pond on a rock:

Finally, Stripey has decided she is going to be Adventure Cat, and was once more harassing the garden snakes. This snake has his head under his tail, hoping Stripey will go away. Instead I put a whiskey barrel over him so Stripey couldn't poke at him, which annoyed her immensely. She loves string, yarn, and apparently snakes. It's a good thing she doesn't go out much.