I Used to Live Next to a Herd of Cattle.

Hey guys. I'm going to tell you a story that makes me really angry and annoyed on the inside, but on the outside I'm going to laugh and joke about it.

So you may not know that my family moved in December, right before the winter solstice, back to the house that I grew up in. We spent a very brief amount of time living in the country before then, and it was nice and splendid and fun. We had one neighbor, who lived about 100 yards away from our house--and I didn't mind her one bit because in her backyard her brother had a herd of about sixty cattle, and I found them fun to watch. I named one of them Pieface. 

However, that is completely irrelevant to my story.

I used to have a beta fish. He was purple and white, the colors of my favorite college and team, K-State. I named him Colin, because in my household the rule is that you have to name your pets from the lengthy index of Harry Potter names.

I took terrible care of Colin. Terrible in the case that yes, he got fed every day, but his water bowl only got changed every about three weeks. Plus, I let cats jump up on the table where he lived. Probably not the best idea in the world.

Believe me, I loved Colin the beta fish a lot. And I can take care of animals pretty well; I'm not hopeless. But Colin sort of became a minority in the back of my mind. He was easy to feed, and really pretty to look at. He represented my favorite team.

When you have horses and cats and dogs and rabbits and goats to feed, you forget to take extra-special care of the one animal who doesn't need loved or petted or groomed all day.

One day I was feeding him really quickly--like usual--right before I was going to go milk the goats, and I noticed that a large portion of his tail was missing. Remember that I allowed cats on the table where he lived? Well, apparently one of the cats had reached their head into the bowl and tried to eat my fish.

Unfortunately, his tail didn't mend and he died three month later. Considering how bad I treated the poor fish, I was surprised he lasted as long as he did: one-and-a-half years.

When I found him floating at the top of his bowl, I was a little relieved. In any other situation, I would have been upset, but we'd recently been evicted from the house we were living at, and since he was dead, that meant that that was one less living creature we had to move.