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Addicted to Cichlids
Posted by Ebonykrow , 17 October 2009 - 05:48 PM
Enough said.
LOVE THEM. TO DEATH. Sweetest things ever.
Anyone else have cichlids? What do you think of them/what are your experiences with them?
LOVE THEM. TO DEATH. Sweetest things ever.
Anyone else have cichlids? What do you think of them/what are your experiences with them?
Experiences to Date
Posted by Ebonykrow , 26 January 2009 - 03:17 AM
Instead of making a topic, I decided to make a blog to use as a reference for later on (since no one really posts on my topics anyway :P). So, this is a "list" of detailed experiences I have had, that I can remember, from square one. The ages and dates are an estimate (as I SUCK at remembering ages/dates, I swear), so don't think I'm trying to insult your intelligence if one or two things don't match up. I've tried to go over it as much as possible to make sure it's near perfect, but I don't know how close I'll get to it.
I'll begin with stories that involved my dad's old house. The only background I'll provide you with, right now, is that the house was over one hundred years old, and that it served as a general store for the majority of its existence. It was remodeled when my great grand parents bought it and turned it into a home. A few more rooms were added on later, as the family expanded. It was an eight room home (a mudroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, laundry room, three bedroom, and a living room), but easily held up to ten-twenty people at a time. Being a rural Kentucky family, it was common to share your house with... everyone else.
Approx. Thirty Years Before Birth:
Gray Lady Legend -
About four years ago I learned that our family had a "legend" of sorts, or so my brother went on to tell me. My brother is currently fifteen, his name is John (for future reference), and he prefers to stay on my dad's side of the family because, well, he just likes to stick around with the crazy drunk men that are my half-brothers and father. Because John does so much with my dad, and I don't, I guess you don't need an explanation as to why I didn't already know about it. Quite literally, I haven't seen my dad for more than three days straight in eight years!
My brother heard from our half-brother Tim (who heard from our uncle Denis) that every member in the family has witnessed a young woman in a gray gown at least once in their lifetime. This statement holds true to this very day, as after learning about that, the two of us set out to ask who had and hadn't heard of it. Even non-family members that lived in the home long before I was born claimed to see a gray woman, but no one knew who she was. She was always the same: Tall, gaunt, very pretty, curly hair (or in a bun), with an elegant, long dress or gown.
Master of Mischief -
Whether or not the gray lady was responsible, things had a habit of disappearing in that old house. Set up: Just after my mom had married my dad, they moved into his home (his mother moved into the house below the hill) and shared it with several other people. My dad had two boys from a previous marriage that came to live with him (Tim and Jeff, approximately teenagers), while some of their friends would frequently sleep over. Mom and one of her sisters (Cathy) came to live there too, with her husband. On average, about eight people were living in the house on any given day.
On one particular day, my mom and Cathy were shucking corn for dinner. After they finished they put the corn on a plate and sat it in the freezer. As suppertime approached, they went to get the corn out to fix it up--but there was no corn there. Estimate about twelve ears of corn for seven-eight people, that had gone missing. They immediately questioned the boys, but Tim and Jeff had no idea. Though they're the type to mess things up, they're not the type to completely screw with dinner. My aunt Cathy told me that story, and she went on to say that they never found those twelve ears of corn--at all.
Bad Feelings -
Though numerous people lived there, no one truly felt safe (learned later after the house's destruction). Even people that got a fleeting glance of the home felt threatened. My senior year in high school we acquired a new library assistant, and to my complete surprise, she was a family friend. Her husband happened to be incredibly close to Tim and Jeff (and one or the other was best man at their wedding), so she had the chance to sweep by the house on occasion. One day in class (as I had been chosen to take a library class both semesters) the topic of ghosts popped up, and Ms. Alexander promptly told me a fascinating story (or, so, I felt it was anyway). She told me when she hated going to pick up Jack (her husband), because of this overwhelming weight about the house. After she mentioned the feeling, I immediately knew what she was talking about. Even before the divorce of my mom and dad, the house had an abnormal atmosphere to it--so now I knew it wasn't just the separation.
Children -
Not as common as everything else, there was the rare occasion when someone would claim to hear a child scream or cry when there was no one there (when, in fact, there was no children in the residence at all).
Approx. 3 - 10 Years Old
Gray Lady Legend -
The very first time I saw her, I had woken up on a Saturday morning. Everyone else was already awake. The sun was coming through the blanket that we kept hung over the big windows in winter to keep the cold out, and I sat up to rub my eyes and wake up. As I did so, I looked up, and between the vanity and the closet stood a very pretty woman. Her hands were clasped and she was looking at me, as if pleading. (At the time, I had lost an iguana in the house, and my first thought was that she was wanting me to catch the thing and get it put back up so she wouldn't have to worry!) She had very shinny, short blond hair, very bouncy and curly. She was very, very young, and in what I would have called a wedding dress. I smiled at her and went back to sleep. We found the iguana soon after in a pile of dirty clothes and promptly put him back in his terrarium.
Master of Mischief -
Before the divorce, my dad had bought tons of new cabinets and kitchen furnishings that he had planned to put in for years. They sat in the attic room for ages, and even after the separation he didn't do anything with them. One day after school, possibly during my eighth grade or freshman year, I was sitting in the living room watching Ripley's with John. In an instant we heard a massive bang come from upstairs, that sounded like one of the cabinets had fallen down. We both ran out to get dad (as he was in the garage), and he ran up to see what had happened. Nothing was out of place.
Sounds weren't common, but feelings very much were.
Bad Feelings -
When I would have to stay with my dad on Wednesdays, I felt so weak and depressed and just... horrible. I wasn't myself in that house, no one was. So many dreadful things happened inside the house that would have never happened anywhere else. Among them, my dad prepared to commit suicide, and there were many fights and many tears that sprung from nothing.
The house was alive with conflicting emotions, always. As a child, there were very few days when I was truly happy.
There were two rooms upstairs, one we loved to play in, and one we didn't. Our play room was sometimes used as a spare bedroom, but no one really slept up there unless they absolutely had to (because the living room could get quite crowded with four separate families sleeping there). When I was little I used to play with all of my action figures up there, and draw on the walls with markers and make little towns and buildings out of things to play in. The only bad thing about that room was it was continuously filled with dead bugs. All sorts, you name it. It soon became a chore to play up there because it filled up so fast, but you would never find a dead bug downstairs. Later, we were finding live wasps, and stopped playing up there all together.
The room opposite it, a completely different story. Absolutely no one liked going up there, even though it was a curtain tug away from being in the same area as our play room. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and the only thing in there was barrels filled with old clothes and a moth-eaten chair. It was a heavy chair, one of those giant old ones that took four people to move if you decided to scoot it to a new corner in the room. It was massive, it was old, and it was smelly.
My brother, a few cousins, and I got a grand idea one day to go in that room and play with things. John took a notion to climb onto the chair (which was situated in front of the window covered in red plastic, above). The chair tipped over and nearly threw him out the window. It broke right out of the window and fell to the ground where it shattered. Because of the quick thinking of us kids, we pulled the chair back down and saved him from going out too.
Needless to say, we didn't play in there again.
Children -
On Fourth of July sometime in the late 90s, a couple of us kids had gone upstairs to get away from the fireworks. We looked out of the windows to watch them, but it was too noisy outside. We were telling stories (ironically, ghost stories) when my cousin Catie (first daughter to Cathy) came running in completely out of breath. We asked what had happened, and she said while she was walking back from the garage she heard a girl scream in the field. She said it was way too loud to have been a little girl, but didn't know what else it could have been. If it was as loud as she claimed, one of us would have heard it too (as we had a good view of the field to begin with, and sound carries quite well in an old house). But no one else heard it.
Many years ago, probably when I was about six, Tim and his three children were staying the night. I was sleeping in he water bed in mom's room, with a clear view into the living room (save for a recliner that sat in front of the door way). I woke up at about six o'clock (when mom and dad had already woken up, but no one else had), and looked into the living room to see if anyone else was awake. I saw a little girl standing behind the recliner, looking toward the back door. She had short curly hair, cute overalls and a flowery shirt (but no color). She looked exactly like my niece Skylar. I asked, "Skylar, what are you doing up?" and the girl looked to me and dissolved from her feet to her head. Worried, I got up to see if my little niece was asleep. She was, laying on the floor with her brother.
Animals -
When I was very, very young I got my first cat. I named her Blackface, strangely enough, because she was a brown tabby with a very dark face. She had her first litter soon after we got her (we could barely afford cat food, let alone vet bills, but my mom couldn't say no to my babysitter when she offered the kittens to us). After supper, it was my job to take scraps out to feed to the cats, and even though it was dark I still loved to. I would take them to the far end of the house and dump them by a stump. I can remember on one particular trip I nearly tripped over a gray kitten that scrambled beneath my feet, but when I got to the stump there was no gray kitten there. As I was walking back to the house, I recalled we didn't have a gray kitten at all. In fact, all of Blackface's kittens were brown tabby with white, and not one shade of gray. Even in the darkness I could make out their colors, but this cat was one solid streak of gray blur.
Much, much later, I dug around an old pig sty we had in the back yard. I found numerous cat skeletons underneath the trough, but they were much too old to have been any of our cats.
The True Living Dead -
If you've inquired of any paranormal experience I've had, then I have told you of the zombie woman I saw when I was ten. It's a difficult story to tell, because it still scares me eight years later, but I am cursed with remembering it as if it happened yesterday.
This happened soon after the divorce, so it was only my dad, John, and I living in the house at the time. My cousin Coba was staying the night. I had one cat, a horse, and there were dogs that sometimes ran loose in the community. But none of this explains what I saw.
At about ten o'clock, PM, I decided I had had enough playing pool with the boys and wanted to go to sleep. I started out to the house, just down the driveway that was less than fifteen yards from the garage to the front door. It was a very, very short walk, in other words. As I strode up to the front door, I happened to look left into the field. Just there, peering over the knoll, was what looked like the decapitated head of a long dead woman. Her hair was long, stringy, greasy and black, as was much of her skin. I would compare her to the modern day zombie, in every way I could. But, despite the fact it was a horrific sight, I didn't pay attention to it. I thought, "Oh, what the Hell, it's 10PM and I'm sleepy." So I turn in through the front door and before I even have a chance to close it behind me it's there again. Right in front of me, hovering above the floor of the laundry room.
Thankfully, I have been graced enough to provide you a picture with the area in which this happened:
(The picture is old, and at the time this happened the door had fallen down and the little boy to the left was then four years older.)
I ran as fast I had ever ran in my entire life, back to the garage to get my dad. Though I shouldn't have made a scene in case I scared the boys, I couldn't help it. I screamed, I was on the verge of crying, and he grabbed his gun and followed me back to the house. He searched it up and down, loyally, and told us there was nothing in there. Though I had never been so scared in my entire life, I slept in there that night, and have never seen anything like it sense.
The End of it All (So We Seriously Hoped) -
In 2001, the house burned down.
My brother and I were staying with mom that day, and dad had gone out to take a load of pallets to Lexington (he was a trucker). Thankfully, he had also let the cat out before he left. Our neighbors called the fire department, and also called Tim. He called us that morning and told us what had happened. The firefighters investigated the cause for several weeks, first blaming a dryer, then faulty electrical wiring. In the end, they admitted they had no idea what had caused the fire, but did determine it started against the east wall where there was but one outlet and one electrical appliance that was not being used. Neither appeared to have faced the maximum amount of damage one would assume if they had been the culprit. From the sound of their analysis, the fire started of its own accord along the wall itself.
The Woman Who Died -
It was a few months after the fire I learned our great great aunt had died in the exact same spot where the fire was believed to have occurred.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where Things Began Again
After the dreadful feelings and spooks we faced in the old house, we can only begin to compare it to the activity we all have experienced here, in our new home, of thirty five years...
I'll begin with stories that involved my dad's old house. The only background I'll provide you with, right now, is that the house was over one hundred years old, and that it served as a general store for the majority of its existence. It was remodeled when my great grand parents bought it and turned it into a home. A few more rooms were added on later, as the family expanded. It was an eight room home (a mudroom, one bathroom, a kitchen, laundry room, three bedroom, and a living room), but easily held up to ten-twenty people at a time. Being a rural Kentucky family, it was common to share your house with... everyone else.
Before Birth - Ten Years Old
Approx. Thirty Years Before Birth:
Gray Lady Legend -
About four years ago I learned that our family had a "legend" of sorts, or so my brother went on to tell me. My brother is currently fifteen, his name is John (for future reference), and he prefers to stay on my dad's side of the family because, well, he just likes to stick around with the crazy drunk men that are my half-brothers and father. Because John does so much with my dad, and I don't, I guess you don't need an explanation as to why I didn't already know about it. Quite literally, I haven't seen my dad for more than three days straight in eight years!
My brother heard from our half-brother Tim (who heard from our uncle Denis) that every member in the family has witnessed a young woman in a gray gown at least once in their lifetime. This statement holds true to this very day, as after learning about that, the two of us set out to ask who had and hadn't heard of it. Even non-family members that lived in the home long before I was born claimed to see a gray woman, but no one knew who she was. She was always the same: Tall, gaunt, very pretty, curly hair (or in a bun), with an elegant, long dress or gown.
Master of Mischief -
Whether or not the gray lady was responsible, things had a habit of disappearing in that old house. Set up: Just after my mom had married my dad, they moved into his home (his mother moved into the house below the hill) and shared it with several other people. My dad had two boys from a previous marriage that came to live with him (Tim and Jeff, approximately teenagers), while some of their friends would frequently sleep over. Mom and one of her sisters (Cathy) came to live there too, with her husband. On average, about eight people were living in the house on any given day.
On one particular day, my mom and Cathy were shucking corn for dinner. After they finished they put the corn on a plate and sat it in the freezer. As suppertime approached, they went to get the corn out to fix it up--but there was no corn there. Estimate about twelve ears of corn for seven-eight people, that had gone missing. They immediately questioned the boys, but Tim and Jeff had no idea. Though they're the type to mess things up, they're not the type to completely screw with dinner. My aunt Cathy told me that story, and she went on to say that they never found those twelve ears of corn--at all.
Bad Feelings -
Though numerous people lived there, no one truly felt safe (learned later after the house's destruction). Even people that got a fleeting glance of the home felt threatened. My senior year in high school we acquired a new library assistant, and to my complete surprise, she was a family friend. Her husband happened to be incredibly close to Tim and Jeff (and one or the other was best man at their wedding), so she had the chance to sweep by the house on occasion. One day in class (as I had been chosen to take a library class both semesters) the topic of ghosts popped up, and Ms. Alexander promptly told me a fascinating story (or, so, I felt it was anyway). She told me when she hated going to pick up Jack (her husband), because of this overwhelming weight about the house. After she mentioned the feeling, I immediately knew what she was talking about. Even before the divorce of my mom and dad, the house had an abnormal atmosphere to it--so now I knew it wasn't just the separation.
Children -
Not as common as everything else, there was the rare occasion when someone would claim to hear a child scream or cry when there was no one there (when, in fact, there was no children in the residence at all).
Approx. 3 - 10 Years Old
Gray Lady Legend -
The very first time I saw her, I had woken up on a Saturday morning. Everyone else was already awake. The sun was coming through the blanket that we kept hung over the big windows in winter to keep the cold out, and I sat up to rub my eyes and wake up. As I did so, I looked up, and between the vanity and the closet stood a very pretty woman. Her hands were clasped and she was looking at me, as if pleading. (At the time, I had lost an iguana in the house, and my first thought was that she was wanting me to catch the thing and get it put back up so she wouldn't have to worry!) She had very shinny, short blond hair, very bouncy and curly. She was very, very young, and in what I would have called a wedding dress. I smiled at her and went back to sleep. We found the iguana soon after in a pile of dirty clothes and promptly put him back in his terrarium.
Master of Mischief -
Before the divorce, my dad had bought tons of new cabinets and kitchen furnishings that he had planned to put in for years. They sat in the attic room for ages, and even after the separation he didn't do anything with them. One day after school, possibly during my eighth grade or freshman year, I was sitting in the living room watching Ripley's with John. In an instant we heard a massive bang come from upstairs, that sounded like one of the cabinets had fallen down. We both ran out to get dad (as he was in the garage), and he ran up to see what had happened. Nothing was out of place.
Sounds weren't common, but feelings very much were.
Bad Feelings -
When I would have to stay with my dad on Wednesdays, I felt so weak and depressed and just... horrible. I wasn't myself in that house, no one was. So many dreadful things happened inside the house that would have never happened anywhere else. Among them, my dad prepared to commit suicide, and there were many fights and many tears that sprung from nothing.
The house was alive with conflicting emotions, always. As a child, there were very few days when I was truly happy.
There were two rooms upstairs, one we loved to play in, and one we didn't. Our play room was sometimes used as a spare bedroom, but no one really slept up there unless they absolutely had to (because the living room could get quite crowded with four separate families sleeping there). When I was little I used to play with all of my action figures up there, and draw on the walls with markers and make little towns and buildings out of things to play in. The only bad thing about that room was it was continuously filled with dead bugs. All sorts, you name it. It soon became a chore to play up there because it filled up so fast, but you would never find a dead bug downstairs. Later, we were finding live wasps, and stopped playing up there all together.
The room opposite it, a completely different story. Absolutely no one liked going up there, even though it was a curtain tug away from being in the same area as our play room. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls, and the only thing in there was barrels filled with old clothes and a moth-eaten chair. It was a heavy chair, one of those giant old ones that took four people to move if you decided to scoot it to a new corner in the room. It was massive, it was old, and it was smelly.
My brother, a few cousins, and I got a grand idea one day to go in that room and play with things. John took a notion to climb onto the chair (which was situated in front of the window covered in red plastic, above). The chair tipped over and nearly threw him out the window. It broke right out of the window and fell to the ground where it shattered. Because of the quick thinking of us kids, we pulled the chair back down and saved him from going out too.
Needless to say, we didn't play in there again.
Children -
On Fourth of July sometime in the late 90s, a couple of us kids had gone upstairs to get away from the fireworks. We looked out of the windows to watch them, but it was too noisy outside. We were telling stories (ironically, ghost stories) when my cousin Catie (first daughter to Cathy) came running in completely out of breath. We asked what had happened, and she said while she was walking back from the garage she heard a girl scream in the field. She said it was way too loud to have been a little girl, but didn't know what else it could have been. If it was as loud as she claimed, one of us would have heard it too (as we had a good view of the field to begin with, and sound carries quite well in an old house). But no one else heard it.
Many years ago, probably when I was about six, Tim and his three children were staying the night. I was sleeping in he water bed in mom's room, with a clear view into the living room (save for a recliner that sat in front of the door way). I woke up at about six o'clock (when mom and dad had already woken up, but no one else had), and looked into the living room to see if anyone else was awake. I saw a little girl standing behind the recliner, looking toward the back door. She had short curly hair, cute overalls and a flowery shirt (but no color). She looked exactly like my niece Skylar. I asked, "Skylar, what are you doing up?" and the girl looked to me and dissolved from her feet to her head. Worried, I got up to see if my little niece was asleep. She was, laying on the floor with her brother.
Animals -
When I was very, very young I got my first cat. I named her Blackface, strangely enough, because she was a brown tabby with a very dark face. She had her first litter soon after we got her (we could barely afford cat food, let alone vet bills, but my mom couldn't say no to my babysitter when she offered the kittens to us). After supper, it was my job to take scraps out to feed to the cats, and even though it was dark I still loved to. I would take them to the far end of the house and dump them by a stump. I can remember on one particular trip I nearly tripped over a gray kitten that scrambled beneath my feet, but when I got to the stump there was no gray kitten there. As I was walking back to the house, I recalled we didn't have a gray kitten at all. In fact, all of Blackface's kittens were brown tabby with white, and not one shade of gray. Even in the darkness I could make out their colors, but this cat was one solid streak of gray blur.
Much, much later, I dug around an old pig sty we had in the back yard. I found numerous cat skeletons underneath the trough, but they were much too old to have been any of our cats.
The True Living Dead -
If you've inquired of any paranormal experience I've had, then I have told you of the zombie woman I saw when I was ten. It's a difficult story to tell, because it still scares me eight years later, but I am cursed with remembering it as if it happened yesterday.
This happened soon after the divorce, so it was only my dad, John, and I living in the house at the time. My cousin Coba was staying the night. I had one cat, a horse, and there were dogs that sometimes ran loose in the community. But none of this explains what I saw.
At about ten o'clock, PM, I decided I had had enough playing pool with the boys and wanted to go to sleep. I started out to the house, just down the driveway that was less than fifteen yards from the garage to the front door. It was a very, very short walk, in other words. As I strode up to the front door, I happened to look left into the field. Just there, peering over the knoll, was what looked like the decapitated head of a long dead woman. Her hair was long, stringy, greasy and black, as was much of her skin. I would compare her to the modern day zombie, in every way I could. But, despite the fact it was a horrific sight, I didn't pay attention to it. I thought, "Oh, what the Hell, it's 10PM and I'm sleepy." So I turn in through the front door and before I even have a chance to close it behind me it's there again. Right in front of me, hovering above the floor of the laundry room.
Thankfully, I have been graced enough to provide you a picture with the area in which this happened:
(The picture is old, and at the time this happened the door had fallen down and the little boy to the left was then four years older.)
I ran as fast I had ever ran in my entire life, back to the garage to get my dad. Though I shouldn't have made a scene in case I scared the boys, I couldn't help it. I screamed, I was on the verge of crying, and he grabbed his gun and followed me back to the house. He searched it up and down, loyally, and told us there was nothing in there. Though I had never been so scared in my entire life, I slept in there that night, and have never seen anything like it sense.
The End of it All (So We Seriously Hoped) -
In 2001, the house burned down.
My brother and I were staying with mom that day, and dad had gone out to take a load of pallets to Lexington (he was a trucker). Thankfully, he had also let the cat out before he left. Our neighbors called the fire department, and also called Tim. He called us that morning and told us what had happened. The firefighters investigated the cause for several weeks, first blaming a dryer, then faulty electrical wiring. In the end, they admitted they had no idea what had caused the fire, but did determine it started against the east wall where there was but one outlet and one electrical appliance that was not being used. Neither appeared to have faced the maximum amount of damage one would assume if they had been the culprit. From the sound of their analysis, the fire started of its own accord along the wall itself.
The Woman Who Died -
It was a few months after the fire I learned our great great aunt had died in the exact same spot where the fire was believed to have occurred.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where Things Began Again
After the dreadful feelings and spooks we faced in the old house, we can only begin to compare it to the activity we all have experienced here, in our new home, of thirty five years...
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