When the hobby started one of my favorite fish was porcupine puffers, burrfish and sharp nose puffers. I still love tham but can't put them in my reef. Those types of fish, especially burrfish have a great personality. They wag their tails and seem to smile. They are also voracious eaters and will eat anything meaty, shell or no shell. They particularly love live crabs which I used to collect to feed them. Triggerfish have their eyes set way back so the crabs don't puncture their eyes while they are being eaten.
Occasionally one of my burrfish would get something wrong with it like a tumor and I would have to operate. For some reason they are prone to tumors inside their bellies.
After the operation they are reluctant to eat, I can understand that so I used to take them out of the water and hand feed them. When they are lifted out of the water they suck in air to inflate and it is easy to hand feed them that way. But they also swallow air which prevents them from sinking so you have to "burp" them.
Burping my fish made me the talk of my town, usually a wierd talk.
But I would just hold the fish underwater tail up, and gently squeeze. Of course you know what would happen. Then I would hold him head up and squeeze and the remaining air would come out their mouth. If you don't do this the fish may die because they don't have a mechanism to eliminate air.
I never lost a fish by doing this and they always fed. They were probably deathly afraid I was going to burp them if they didn't. :eek2:
Those types of fish were not particularly expensive either which was good because as I said, I didn't have much money.
Speaking of money, when I was 12 or 13, two years after my Dad died a neighbor gave me a job in his junk yard or more correctly, his auto wrecking yard. Grand Auto Wrecking.
It was a huge place in NYC and he taught me how to cut cars apart with a torch. I would remove rear axels, engines, transmissions and mount tires. I loved the job and got paid $10.00 for 12 hours work which was very good money for a 12 year old in 1960. A 12 year old today would burn his head off if you tried to teach him how to use a torch but I picked it up right away. I was always street smart.
That is how I got my experience working on cars. I eventually got a job as a mechanic for Oldsmobile. On friday night I also had a job cleaning up a fish store. Not a LFS, a sea food store. I would remove the ice and scrub the counters and cutting boards, scrub the floor and put the fish away.
I got another 6 bucks for that (plus a piece of fish to bring home to my Mom) so with $16.00 in my pocket, I was a virtual millionaire. Remember the movies was 75 cents and so was a haircut. Sneakers were also about a buck. At that age I didn't have a car or girlfriend that I remember so I was on my way to financial freedom.:smokin:
This guy I caught myself, so he was free
