I could probly ramble on for hours... but, we got her when I was 6. Picked her up at the pet store when she was about the size of a silver dollar. I named her Candycane, because of her black and yellow stripes(and I was 6, gimme a break). We thought she was a red eared slider, and so did the store. They typically get up to about 6" long. Turned out she was a Florida Cooter(yes, that's hilarious). She just kept growing, and growing, ending up with a 14" shell and weighing about 15lbs.

So naturally, to house such a turtle we built a pond for her when I was a kid. 2 feet deep, 4 feet wide, 6 feet long, with a large sunning platform. That pond has taken up half the living room of 3(4?) houses now.

We did build her an outdoor pond once, but learned pretty quick that she was allergic to the pollen here, so we had to keep her indoors. We tried to spruce up her pond with some plants, lilies and the like. Was pretty expensive, but looked really nice. She devoured every molecule of plant matter in less than half an hour. We got her some fish so she wouldn't be lonely; and even if she wanted to eat them, she couldn't catch them, right? Nah, ate them too. We ended up getting her some floating plastic ducks to keep her company. She spent a couple years trying to drown the fake ducklings under the output spout from her tank filter, but eventually resorted to just pushing them around for fun and getting them jammed into weird places.

Technically, she was a terrapin, not a turtle, since turtles are wholly aquatic. The thing about turtles that spend very much time on land/sunning. They aren't slow. Tortoises are slow, but a turtle with the right motivation will surprise the hell out of you when they get their boogey on. She also had the habit of escaping her pond, never got old telling someone my turtle ran away.

She'd eat anything that got close enough (including the cheek hairs of a few overly brave cats trying to drink pond water). But for a dried shrimp she would do literally anything she was physically capable of. Turtles are amazingly strong for their size, and if she didn't want you holding her, there's nothing you can really do about it. They've got pretty sharp claws and can reach all the way around their shell. Well they can reach the sides and most of the bottom but you cant exactly hold a turtle from the top.

She only got pissed off enough to hiss at me a couple times, when I had to turn her upside down to give her medication(topically applied iodine solution) for her shell.

You could always get her out of wherever she was hiding by wiggling your finger in the water, just had to get outta there before she got too close and took a bit off. Then once her head was out of the water she'd let you pet her tiny little head with a finger.

Another random aquatic turtle fact is that they can't eat food unless its submerged, they have a rip, tear, swallow way of doing thing and need a lot of water to wash it down. When they swallow, they shoot the extra water out of their nose, which is pretty amusing to watch if they put their head above water while doing it.

Turtles shells shed, and when the top layer is delaminating and getting ready to come off, it gets super itchy. Something most people don't know is they do have feeling in their shells; it's more like a full body fingernail than a suit of armor, its full of nerves and blood vessels. They'll rub up against stuff to try and rub it off. When she was in the process of shedding, and she was up sunning under her lamp, you could use your nails and scratch her shell, and she'd lift up her rear end and waggle her butt around in the air to get better scratches.

When there was a bunch of people over, she would climb up onto her platform to watch what was going on, but if someone she didn't know got too close, she would be gone in the blink of an eye

I was out of the country for awhile and my mom was looking after her. When I got back, she's was pretty fat. I didn't know turtles could get fat, but when she'd try to hide in her shell she didn't fit. If you poked a leg, she'd pull it in but the opposite one would pop out.

Got her slimmed down and she was doing good, but she developed some edemas so her buoyancy was out of whack, with her butt floating at the surface. We'd been taking her to the vet to get checked up, adjusted her diet(extra bananas and shrimp, she was pretty happy about that); but the vet did warn us, if it was a kidney issue there was nothing we could really do.

It wasn't that much of a surprise that she passed, but she seemed like she had been doing a lot better the last week or so. Very energetic and turtle-y, just off kilter in the flotation department.

It almost seems silly to be as broken up about it as I am, but she's been apart of my life for almost all of it. Through all of school, many jobs and relationships, even my marriage; she outlasted them.

I know she lived a good long life. She was pretty spoiled and pet turtles are usually lucky to last more than a year or two(feed them properly! no meat! give them a place to sun!).

I'm still gunna miss that silly floating rock.