Questions Aquarium Newbies Ask

It's a sad scene, to see an aquarium newbie in a pet store. Of course we all started out somewhere, so we don't want to rub it in too much for these poor, unknowing souls.

Still, it's kind of funny (not laughing to their face), some of the things they ask:

Does the pet store sell water?
Is water part of the kit?
Do the fish need little air tanks?
What keeps them from drowning?
Can I add a room if they get too big?
Am I supposed to put their food on a plate?
Do fish use napkins?


We want to roll our eyes and say "O Brother!" But that wouldn't be nice. So we just answer their questions with a straight face, and they go home none the wiser that they've made several newbie boo boos.

Cutting Out Fish Butts

I'm moving.

That's a strenuous process.

I'm in the process of loading books into boxes. It's surprising how many boxes it takes for one bookshelf.

I've got a bunch of U-Haul boxes, which have flaps that need to be sliced in two places to fold them over.

The slicing, coming as it does right at the end, reminds me of cutting the butts out of fish when you're cleaning them. It's basically the last thing you do before tossing the fish into some cold water.

A Night For Salmon

It reminds me of the Seinfeld where Kramer was making a link between Salmon Rushdie and salmon the fish. That's what I've been thinking of.

Tonight was a night for salmon. I was at the store and saw some frozen salmon in a bag and it didn't seem like too much, so I got a bag.

It's frozen but thaws out pretty fast in some lukewarm water. And it cooks fast under a broiler. The pack says five minutes but I let it go longer than that, plus I flipped it over.

It was good. I had two filets, leaving me two left in the bag. That's something I don't eat very often. I believe I had it only once before, out of a can. This was definitely better.

A Color Aquarium

Having an aquarium is a beautiful thing. It's like having a color TV with fish in it.

I remember when I was a kid, we just had a black and white set. But things have changed since then.

The fish are more beautiful in color.

Toilet Troubles

We've had toilet troubles for a few days, and it may predate the death of that fish the other day, as in being slow, but it's been so slow as to not actually be flushing.

I had said something about the flushing of the fish (I wasn't the one who did it), but I was really only joking, since I figured it actually went down. But we've been plunging and plunging, trying to get it unplugged for days. I have a worn spot on the heel of my hand from plunging. Nothing did any good. I read on wikihow how to fix a slow toilet. Water went down OK from a bucket, so I was cleaning the holes. Then sometimes it wouldn't work and that was mysterious. So I was plunging some more, ever more plunging, to little profit ... until ... I felt a good suction ... and then ...

I saw it, what looked like the fish, black! I tried to retrieve it with a big spoon but it only pushed it back in there. I tried other tools, to some avail, but not much. What this needed, unfortunately, was the human hand. That's bad. But what do you do in an emergency? In went the hand, and fumbled around with it, although it was somewhat wedged in there. I could feel the prickly big fin that sticks up, so I finally got ahold of that, and through some doing, got it retrieved. Now it was with a tool, to put it in the garbage.

Now with the holes cleaned, thanks to wikihow, and the obstruction out of the way, it's flushing with good authority. Back to normal and better than normal because of the better water flow with the holes being cleaned.

This is a disgusting task. I was just kidding about the fish plugging it up. Imagine how interesting it was to tell that other person, oh, by the way, it WAS the fish. Of course it would sound like I was kidding, since we were joking around about it earlier, but I stressed the truthfulness of the situation and it was believed on the second telling. Because it's true.

Death Of A Fish

When fish die, you don't really notice or care. Unless they're in your aquarium. Then you at least notice. It's nothing that you get too broken up over. Probably if it cost $100 and you bought it yesterday, that'd be a different story.

We had a big fish that was dead today. By big I mean relatively big, five inches or so. It was called a Talking Catfish. I never heard it say anything, but this other person says she heard it croaking out a few syllables of some sort.

It wasn't a fish I noticed very much. Whether it hides or just stays in the background somewhere, it's always something of a surprise to see it at all. But yesterday it was swimming toward the top of the tank, like it was sucking air out of the surface. I called attention to it, that something funky was going on with that fish. Maybe it was dying. Turns out it was two years old.

Then today I looked and it was dead, at the bottom of the tank. So it was retrieved and flushed down the toilet.

When they catch fish -- I saw it on TV -- they catch them by the millions at a time. Then they're sliced and diced and iced, bing bang boom. No one cares about the individual fish. But each single fish is definitely, obviously a single little life. So it's something at least that they live and die.