Author: Anna

Aquarium Diary: August 2025

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It’s now September and the aquarium is doing well! Steve the mystery snail had a rapid growth spurt, likely from the heat wave we’ve been experiencing. I haven’t seen Bob the bladder snail in a long time; I believe he has passed. Though Bob’s hundreds of children, the Bobettes, live on to carry his legacy. The shrimp are seemingly happy, mindlessly munching away on algae, veg, and bug bites. They have all successfully molted multiple times which is encouraging.

This month I did light maintenance. I didn’t add liquid plant fertilizer, root tabs, and kept the water changes to a minimum, to let the shrimps adjust in peace. Since my aquarium has a large amount of filtration (bacterial, mechanical, plants) I only do a small water change about once a month. I spot cleaned occasionally with a turkey baster covered in a net (so I don’t alien abduct the Bobettes). I also cleaned up some hair algae with my hand (it’s easiest to roll it into a roll to take it out) and scrubbed the glass with a magnetic scrubber.

I do want to start working on the aquascaping part of my tank. I gave the plants 2 big chops this month. Well, mostly I trimmed the Jungle Vallisneria. While I love these plants, the 5 foot leaves are a bit much for my 10 gallon setup. I’ll think I’ll just keep one around and sell the rest for now.

I think I’m getting the hang of using my camera (Canon Powershot G16), some of my photos are actually in focus!

Tiny Tweaks #3: Removing Clothing Tags

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I’m an Autistic adult and this is a small thing that makes my life just a little bit better.

I have some sensory sensitivities around clothes. Some are constant, and some come and go depending on my capacity that day. A constant one that bothers me is clothing tags. I just can’t stand something lightly touching me on my back of my neck.

Fortunately it’s an easy fix. I use a stitch ripper, a tiny pair of scissors with a sharp point, and tweezers to take them off as needed.

If a piece of clothing has specific instructions I need to follow, I just take a photo of the tag and put it in a folder on my phone.

This sensitivity is one I’ve always noticed, I just didn’t do anything about it. I think it’s because I wanted to fit in, and everyone else seemed to tolerate tags just fine.

Plus it just felt wrong to cut the tags off. Or when I did, bits were left behind and felt even worse (hence the tweezers! You can get all the bits!).

If You Think Your Plant is Dead, Try Moving It!

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I’ve had this happen 3 times now; I thought my plant was dead, put it somewhere else, and voila! Now it’s thriving.

I’ve read countless forum posts where people banish their “dead” drama queen plant to the back porch and it comes back and thrives, seemingly just to spite them.

In my case, it has been with ferns. A maiden’s hair fern, rabbit’s foot fern, and a Pteris fern to be precise.

My main problems have been with light and watering. I have 2 places I can put plants in my house; a south and a west facing window. At the south window, depending on where you position the plant, it either gets blasted with light or near complete shade. The west has privacy glass that filters the light, but the light varies a lot depending on the time of year.

I started with the ferns on a shelf just below the south window, where they were behind and underneath some other plants. That was WAY too much light still. Plus, there is a heat vent right above there and they were drying out faster then I could keep up with.

I tried putting them in the full shade spot, but that wasn’t enough light.

So now they had dead or damaged leaves, and at one point I thought each of them might be dead.

Some people banish their “mostly dead” plants the back porch, I banish mine to my laundry room with the west window.

And they ALL came back! And are the happiest I’ve seen them. I honesty wasn’t sure what was going on with the Pteris fern, because it was getting covered in little black spots and the new growth looked awful. Turns out it was also too much light.

I’m definitely leaving them there for now. I’m curious to see if they will like it all year round there, as I think they will get a loss less light in the winter.

My rabbit’s foot fern and Pteris when I bought them, verses now on the right.

Should have moved them sooner, but I honestly forgot that window existed. I just banish my plants there because that’s where I keep all my gardening supplies.

Wednesday is Blue

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I’ve always associated numbers, letters, and days of the week with colours. I didn’t realise until recently that not everyone does this or understands it.

I was showing someone a meme, it went along the lines of “What do Halloween, 7×7=49, 7:00 pm, and Thursday have in common”.

It makes absolute sense to me! But the person I was showing it was genuinely confused. For me, most of the items in the meme made me perceive the colours of Halloween.

It’s the reason I do my laundry on Sunday. Sunday is a grey-lavender colour. I associate it with linen, so I do laundry on Sunday. Same with when I water plants, take care of my aquarium, or clean the bathroom.

While I do strongly associate colours with numbers and letters, for me it doesn’t really go beyond that. Though I’ve read about people who can use it to memorise things like names, phone numbers and math equations.

From what I understand it’s a type of synesthesia and it’s certainly something I want to learn more about.

Things I Collect (As an Autistic Adult): Digital Photos

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I’m a late diagnosed Autistic woman and I’m starting to be more aware of the things I collect.

Not all of them are physical items, like what I collected as a child (Disney princess toothbrushes and toy horses). My biggest collections now are actually all digital!

My laptop, tablet, and especially my phone, are low on storage. Like my phone barely runs low; because I have so many photos and videos.

At this moment, my phone has 948 photos and 46 videos of my pet aquatic snail Steve. And that’s just the ones on my phone. I have more on my camera and other devices.

That’s just one folder. I have dozens of organised folders of photos on my phone.

I notice I keep a lot of photos that other people would delete. I don’t care if they aren’t perfect. Each captures a moment or memory and that’s what important to me.

I’m currently in the process of slowly uploading my photos to a cloud, where I do have a lot of storage free. That way I can go through them easier on my laptop and reorganise them. I think I might also put some USB sticks so I have the security of second copies.

It’s really hard for me to delete photos, but I definitely need to get rid of some. I think one of the reasons this collection is so huge is because taking photos is (mostly) free.

Crocheting a Hand-Spun Yarn Blanket

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A couple years ago I learned how to spin wool into yarn. Since then, I’ve had all this bulky weight yarn I didn’t know what to do with.

I couldn’t use it for anything that sat against my bare skin because of my Autistic sensory sensitivities.

I bought some new yarn in fun colours recently. I started playing around with them and my hand spun to make granny squares. Once I figured it, out I started to crochet… and didn’t stop for 5 days straight.

I got into a hyperfocus flow where all I wanted to do was crochet.

I lost some skin on my tension holding finger, got a blister on my thumb, forgot to eat multiple times, and probably had several more important tasks to do. But I loved doing it and it felt good.

Below is 1 and 1/2 days of work.

After another day and 1/2 of work, I finished adding all the colourful borders and joined the squares all together.

I spent the next 2 days weaving in all the ends. So. many. ends.

I love it and it makes me happy.

(P.S. Sorry for any weirdly focused photos, I’m learning how to use a better camera than my crappy phone one. I don’t always realise until later the photos weren’t focused right!)

Planted Aquarium Diary: July 2025

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July 9

I’m learning to use a different camera, so bear with me as my photo quality… varies (I accidentally made the ISO too high, oops). I learn best by doing.

I finally got a lid. It doesn’t fit perfectly and there’s a large gap, but it does reduce evaporation a lot. I was getting pretty tired of always topping up the water level.

I trimmed some melting leaves on my amazon sword, and gave it a root tab.

July 19

The large val plants are blocking the light so I’m giving them a hard cut back.

I also gave it a small gravel vac. I cover it with a net to prevent sucking up the bladder snails.

July 29

I GOT SHRIMP!

I finally got shrimp! They’re the whole reason I got into planted tanks. I’ve been obsessed with them for the last 2 years.

I ordered 5 Bloody Mary Neocaridina shrimp from AquaFloraCanada and I’m so happy with them! They even sent extras! One didn’t make the trip and ended up being a travel snack for the others.

July 30

I found one dead this morning (RIP lil’ guy). The Bobette’s (Bob the Bladder’s babes) made short work of the corpse. I almost didn’t notice it. The remaining 5 seem very happy and healthy.

Besides spending a couple hours acclimatizing the shrimp and feeding, I haven’t touched the tank. I’m going to leave it be for a week to let the new lil guys settle in.

Tiny Tweaks #2: Eating The Same (Easily Accessible) Breakfast

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I’m an Autistic adult and these are little things that make my life a bit easier.

Since I was a child, I’ve really liked instant oatmeal (especially apple cinnamon). This year I’ve embraced it and now I eat the same instant oatmeal for breakfast every single day.

I’m not a breakfast person. My stomach is easily upset, especially before lunch time, but a small serving of oatmeal is something I can tolerate.

I’ve tried making my own (less expensive), but the results varied a lot. If I accidentally ran out of an ingredient it was upsetting. I’m also a noise-sensitive grouch in the morning and like quickly grabbing my food and hiding from other people.

Now I just put the packet in my favorite shaped bowl, add 1/2 cup of water, and microwave 1 minute. It’s the same every time. Consistent. It’s one less thing to think about; one less decision.

Plus I have meds I need to take in the morning with food. I eat my oatmeal and take my meds. These 2 things help remind me to do the other.

As long I remember to restock the oatmeal that is….

I Remember When I Started Masking My Autistic Traits (The Cookie Story)

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I’m a late diagnosed Autistic woman. This is about the first time I remember noticing that I was different and started learning to mask my Autistic traits.

I was really young, like maybe 6? I don’t remember where I was, or who I was with but I was at someone’s house with a group of people. It might have been a potluck.

I was watching the other kids, when a girl went up to an adult and left with a cookie. It was one of those hard oatmeal cookies you get at the store. I wanted a cookie too, so I went up to them and asked for one.

This is the first time someone gave me what I ominously call “The Look”.

I felt like I had done something wrong. Their reaction was not what I was expecting and I was confused.

I did get my cookie and went back to observing the other kids. I started to notice when they asked for things, their voices had a different inflection and intonation. They also added a lot of pleases and thank-you’s (e.g. “Can I pleEEease have a cookie?”). My voice was flat and fast; straightforward – “Can I have a cookie.”.

It was after that I started practicing speaking. Under my breath I would repeat phrases again and again with different inflections, intonations, trying to make my voice sound less “flat”. I wanted my voice to fit in.

This was also something people noticed, because I was walking around whispering to myself all the time. If I got a positive reaction, I would repeat it back to myself to memorise the tone. If I got a negative one, I would carefully listen to other people speaking and start practicing it again. Over time, I learned how to make my voice sound more “normal”? But sometimes my tone still came out completely wrong and people would misunderstand what I meant.

Now that I’m working on unmasking, I don’t worry about my voice so much. If something comes out in the wrong tone, I say so and laugh.

(P.S. I find it hilarious that I was just sitting watching everyone. Knowing what to look for now, I was so obviously autistic. I did play with other kids, but I didn’t know how to join in without being explicitly invited to.)

Tiny Tweaks #1: Lip balm

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I’m a late diagnosed Autistic woman and this is a small change that makes my life little bit easier.

I’m super sensitive to the texture of my lips and lick them a lot. If I forget to use lip balm, I end up stripping and chewing my lips raw. Which makes them a smooth texture, but then they really hurt!

Putting my lip balm, clearly visible, with my toothbrush helps remind me to use it. If I can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. It’s now part of my routine to use my lip balm every time I brush my teeth.

I can even tell if I forgot to brush my teeth by the texture of my lips. I’ll notice the texture of my lips, then the texture of my teeth. If my teeth have a bad texture then I definitely forgot to brush them. Which is now a funny little association to help remind me to keep up with that annoying bit of hygiene.

(p.s. It’s driving me nuts! I really want to spell it “lipbalm” which is apparently wrong?)