My Lips Are Sealed

Can I just say that goldfish are dirty and disgusting? Okay, thank you. That being said, my child has four. Well, a Shubunkin (translation carp) and three small black Moors (translation goldfish cousins). And I have no idea how they can turn a tank full of clean water into a yucky murky mess in an hour, but they do. With gusto. It's almost as if they take pride in how quickly they can dirty their living space. Not unlike some small children. We had a plecostomus (algae eater), but he went belly up. Literally. I failed to realize this at first, because the stream coming from the filter had a sort of animatronic effect on him, so he looked alive. He was yuppin' and yowsin' (my brother J's phrase for jumping around with gusto, or being animated) in such a way that he appeared to be swimming under his own power. After watching him slam himself into the pirate ship a few dozen times, it occurred to me he might not be captain of his ship after all. So I scooped him. And flushed him. If there's one thing I know, it's how to dispose of aquatic animal carcasses. Sometimes they get tossed in the garbage, or down the disposal (ewww, right?) or flushed. It just depends on my mood, really. I refuse to feed them to the cats, because I'm fairly certain I don't want to be the Eve to their Adam. You know, giving them a taste of the forbidden fruit? That would just create problems for everyone. Mostly me. And I'm all about minimizing my list of problems.

In my previous attempts to keep the tank water somewhat clean, I have resorted to sucking the yuckiness out with a turkey baster. We don't have a need for a turkey baster in our kitchen, because J fries our turkeys. J can sense if I'm even thinking about roasting a turkey, and he'll appear out of nowhere and say, "Wouldn't rather have me fry that instead?" And yes I would. Because that's some good eating right there. Have you tried it? You should. But make sure you THAW the turkey before dropping it in a vat of hot oil. So there's my cooking tip for the day. No need to thank me...

Anywho, the baster worked fine, but it was a slow and messy process. I finally gave in and decided to procure a gravel vacuum. I had two choices. Pay $30 for some fancy you-don't-have-to-work-to-get-it-to-siphon number, or pay $8 for a length of plastic tubing and a plastic cylinder you connect to the tubing. Sold. As I read the instructions on how to get the siphon action started, WyoBaby said, "You know, my little friend has one of those, and he just sucks on it a few times, and that gets it going." To which I replied, "Well, your little friend is a boy, and as such, may not have many qualms about placing his lips in a situation where there's the slightest chance they might come into contact with yucky fish water. If Mommy did that, I'd have to scrub my lips with Clorox, and we both know that's not safe. Plus, if Daddy found out my lips had touched nasty fish water, he might not want to smooch me anymore, and that would be a bummer, because I kinda like smooching Daddy." And she replied, "Gross Mom, that's more disgusting than dirty fish water!!! Eww. Eww. Eww!" She has a flair for the dramatic. I'm pretty sure she learned it from her father.

Armed with a mop bucket and the little gravel vacuum, I set out to clean the dirty buggers' tank this morning. According to the directions on the package, I was supposed to pump the vacuum up and down in the water a few times to get the siphon going. I guess I wasn't pumping the right way, because it took more than a few times to get it working, but when it did? It worked like a charm! It was sucking that gravel clean like nobody's business. But I wasn't really paying attention to how quickly it was sucking out the water. That puppy was movin'! I'm pretty sure the fish were saying "Whoa. Whoa! WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA WHOA!!!!! WHERE THE HECK IS THE WATER GOING?! HEY YOU, YEAH YOU, THE ONE WITH THE DEATH TUBE!! SLOW DOWN LADY!!" Have you ever read The Water Hole by Graeme Base? It takes about 15 pages for the animals' watering hole to shrink down to nothing. I did that in about 30 seconds. Excellent book, by the way; the illustrations are phenomenal. He's also the author of Animalia, another beautiful book. You should check 'em out if you have kiddos. Fortunately for me (yeah, the fish too), I stopped just before my mop bucket overflowed. I added clean water and changed the filter (turns out I might have put it in backward the first time), and we were good to go. Best eight bucks I've spent in a long time. And I didn't even have to touch yucky fish water to my lips. Lucky for J, eh?