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Taurasi the 89 Cent Goldfish Has a New Home LbNA #26364

Owner:Hez, Grumpy and Mona
Plant date:Oct 7, 2006
Location:
City:Portland
County:Middlesex
State:Connecticut
Boxes:1
Found by: Nairon
Last found:Mar 26, 2023
Status:FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Last edited:Dec 6, 2015
I'm adding this info from Travlin Turtle who has been to the box in Sept 2014. I hope her update will help you find the box. I haven't been there to check it in awhile, so I imagine things have changed since I planted the box. Hope this helps.

Take the trail to the RIGHT of the water would help. It looks like you're walking into the neighbors yard. :-). That trail in the middle of the ponds is very tempting. Oh, there are also 4-5 5 sisters with one dead before you get to that one. Mentioning a huge one with a huge slab would help. :-) Thanks!

This is an old box that's been relocated, you may already have the image.

Taurasi the 89 cent goldfish
Planted on 10/7/06 By Grumpy, Hez and Mona
Carved by Hez




This is the story of Taurasi, the 89 cent goldfish. Once upon a time Grumpy and Hez moved to a new home, a rundown fixer upper kind of new home. They weren’t busy enough working at their jobs, working on the new house, taking care of their daughter and four dogs, they felt they needed one more thing to take care of and worry about. Having always had an ark load of animals, being down to four dogs left a void in their lives that they needed to fill. Enter Taursai. Little tiny golden Taursai. Sweet little Taurasi, named after one of the toughest and best women’s basketball players in the country. Eighty nine cent Taurasi.
She came home wrapped in a soft plastic bag filled with water. She was slowly immersed into her new little home, where she was carefully floated until her little bag of water was the same temperature as her new tank, then set free. How little and lonely she looked as the weeks passed. Hez and Grumpy felt sorry for her, but her tank was very little and they didn’t think there was room enough for more fish.
One day Grumpy and Hez took a trip to visit friends in New Hampshire. The friends had a 50 gallon fish tank they really wanted to give away. Taurasi needed a bigger tank…sooo, home they went with the new tank. Now Taurasi looked even smaller and lonelier than ever. A trip to the fish store was decided on to get Taurasi a new friend. We should have known better, you can’t just get one new friend. We bought several. Should have been no problemo. Wrong. No one told us about nitrates and nitrites and other horrible things that happen to fish when there are too many in one tank. At one point we had what Ed the fish guy told us was an algae bloom. (Ed was to become our new best friend.) This means that your tank is so dark you can’t see your fish. One day our new next door neighbor came over, saw the tank and said “Whoa, what ya got goin on in there?” We said “We don’t really know, but we’re getting help.” Somehow Taurasi and her friends manage to live through the winter despite spending most of it in algae bloom and surviving numerous partial water changes.
Hez would take a break from working on the new house by sitting in the kitchen with Mona in her lap, drinking coffee and looking out the window. As sometimes happens, great ideas come along, and so it was with Hez. Wouldn’t it be nice to put a pond in the backyard right next to that blueberry bush? One with a waterfall would be really nice. Grumpy was totally on board with the project and so the dreary winter months were filled with gathering information, visiting pond shops and watching pond building videos. Looked like this was going to be a piece of cake.
Spring finally came and the project was begun. The video said a pond the size of the one we were building should take a weekend. Right. Four and a half weeks later, one almost trip to the divorce lawyer and working in monsoon rains the pond was done. Not half bad either.
The pond was ready for Taurasi and her friends. They all looked so little in that huge pond that we ran out and bought more fish, expensive Koi fish. The videos never said that the pond has to cycle and get some good old bacteria going on before it’s a great place for fish to live. Ed the fish guy knew, but we never thought to ask him. Needless to say, we lost all of the fish except Taurasi. We finally figured out how to get the pond up and running and were able to get Taurasi more friends, who got so friendly with each other that they married and had babies, lots of babies, hundreds of babies.
So the moral of this story is…no fish is really eighty nine cents.
The fish really cost us:


Taurasi-00.89
First Friends-25.00
Pond Kit-2,500.00
Pond Supplies-300.00
Landscaping-180.00
Labor-We Won’t Go There
New Expensive Friends-130.00
Rocks-yes, we had to buy rocks-425.00
Sending Ed’s kids through college-we haven’t gotten the bill yet.
Fifty pounds of fish food-20.00
Total-3580.89
Sitting by the pond watching the fish-Priceless.

There is no ink, bring markers for this box.

To find Taurasi's new home make your way to the Helen Carlson Wildlife Sanctuary in Portland. If you are coming from route 17 to South Road, parking is a pull off which will be on the right just before the water. The sign for the sanctuary is off the road and hard to see.

15-20 minutes to find and stamp in, round trip.

To find the trail which isn't marked, pass by the red kiosk and sign, cross over the two bridges, one right after the other. Stay on the trail, always bearing left and staying along the pond. Look for a five sister tree, one sister is dead, on the left side of the trail. Go behind the tree and look on the right side, under the edge of the rock behind it, under a flat rock. This is a pouch, so please make sure it's put back on the rock it was sitting on.

Have fun!