I used to be such a fish tank guy!
I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t have at least one tank either in my bedroom or somewhere in my apartment when I moved out. I’ve always loved fish, but for some reason in the last couple of years my discipline for maintaining them has significantly faded.
Case in point – I haven’t fed my fish by hand in … two years? … because after buying one of those automatic fish feeders for going on vacation, I came back and said, “Why spoil a good thing?!” and just let the robot take over what I as the responsible pet owner was supposed to be doing all of that time!
Hey, in my defense, my care had started slacking at that point anyways, so at least the robot would remember to feed them every single day!
But that said, I’ve been seriously thinking about getting rid of the tank in my office – it’s all green and nasty, and most of the fish that were in it are now dead, and when I’m too lazy to keep it filled, the filter starts to get really obnoxious once enough of the water has evaporated from it.
It’s not just me – Sara’s tank has been sitting out in the garage since we moved into this house and that was two years ago! We actually talked about turning her tank into a Lego fish tank with blue bricks on the bottom for water and various fish swimming all about. That technically never happened, either, but it would’ve been a neat idea.
The problem is, I enjoy fish in passing, but I have no desire or discipline or time to actually do the upkeep required to not have a green and nasty fish tank sitting in the room. And that’s sad because it really shouldn’t take much – I’ve got a super nice filter that should rarely need changing if everything is maintained right, and with the auto-feeder on food duty, really the only thing left is to occasionally scrape algae off the sides and dump five gallons of fresh water to replace whatever has evaporated from it every couple of weeks.
…both of the latter of which, I do not do.
So earlier today, I was finally ready to just pull the plug. Sara even asked me about it a day or two ago if it was time to just admit that we weren’t fish people anymore, so when I was sitting here trying to write and the incessant sound of water dumping out of the filtration pipe because the water level is down 6″ in the tank had pushed me to my last nerve, I got up and instead of grabbing the bucket to get more water, I just flipped the power switch to turn everything off.
Mind you, there’s still an algae eater in there somewhere … I actually think that he’s the only one left because the other two died recently … and we saw him enjoying their remains at his leisure. But I honestly didn’t really think much of it, that is until Cleo came running into my office a little while ago, stopped dead in her tracks, and made a bee-line for the darkened fish tank where it was pretty clear that she knew something was up…
For some strange reason, Cleo has always liked my fish – I guess when we adopted her, she became a fish person, too – but she would always come in and put her nose up to the glass, and I eventually put a little storage box there for her to step on so that she could see better into the tank. She didn’t really care for the other ones, but that algae eater for some reason … we ended up nicknaming him Cleo Fish just because she would get so excited when he was out and about, and so mad when he was hiding in his cave and she couldn’t see him!
I guess the TL/DR of this blog post is … I need to become a better fish tank owner because I’ll never hear the end of it from the dog if I euthanize that one stupid fish. 😕
