This is Sammy:
Yes, he’s a fish. Why am I writing a story about a fish? Because it’s worth telling!
For the last three years, we’ve been raising children, not pets. Hubby and I have discussed at great lengths the idea of a pet. But cats make me sneeze, and I just don’t like them. I love the idea of a dog, but #1- I already have 2 littles around the house that I have to stress about bodily functions with, and #2 – I’d much rather carve out space in my budget for diapers than for dog food. So, no, on a dog. Birds are too noisy. The idea of keeping mice or other rodents just doesn’t work for me. And don’t even get me started on the idea of a snake.
So that left us with one good choice: fish.
We’ve had fish before. But we haven’t had any since we moved out of Euless. So two months ago, we finally decided to buy a tank. Hubby came home with a nice 20 gallon set up and we filled it up.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited for that stupid thing to cycle. See, the thing is, if you just fill a tank up with water and dump in some fish, they will die. You have to wait until you have enough good bacteria for the water to be healthy.
After 6 weeks of waiting, the tank was finally ready. An last Saturday we headed as a family to the store to pick out our pets.
An hour later (after a 30 minute screaming fest, courtesy of ‘Lil), we had our selections in the tank. We picked out 2 neon tetras, 2 male guppies, and 1 glofish. All species we had experience with. And all was well.
Until we realized that the glofish was a bully. He chased those guppies everywhere. He wouldn’t let the other fish eat. And he just was a nuisance. We’ve never had that problem with fish before. After thinking about it, we decided it was because the glofish wanted someone to school with, and we needed to buy more. But those silly fish are $5 each! (they were on sale the week we bought them, but of course not now!) Slightly grumbling, we decided to go pick up one more that day. After we made the decision, that dumb fish was just bugging everyone else so much (and the other fish were starting to appear sick), I decided to take it out of the tank until it had a friend to play with.
I grabbed a large bowl, filled it with tank water, and grabbed the net. Anyone who has ever actually tried to catch a fish in one of those nets will be able to visualize the scene that occurred next. Eventually, I emerged victorious, dumped the stupid thing in the bowl, and went to tell Hubby what I had done.
I sat down to try and eat breakfast for the third time that day. Hubby came into the room and looked in the bowl.
“Where did you put that fish?” he asked.
“In that bowl.”
“What bowl, there’s no fish in this one.”
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN there’s no fish. I put that glofish in there.”
“There is no fish in this bowl. Did you check the net?”
“Of COURSE I checked the net. I put the fish in the water, and he was swimming around like crazy, totally hyper.”
“Well, there’s no fish there now.”
“What did it do, jump out?”
We looked on the floor. We looked in the bowl. We looked back in the tank. Eventually we found a small puddle next to the bowl, and a track of water leading . . . back behind my awesome dresser!
Sammy the suicidal fish had jumped ship.
At this point we were both worried about the smell of a decomposing fish more than the idea of a rescue. After all, it had been about 5 minutes since he’d jumped out of the water. Adding a 20 gallon tank to the top of a large dresser made it very hard to move. Eventually Hubby succeeded, and much to his surprise, Sammy was still flopping around. He quickly put the fish back in the water, and to everyone's surprise, Sammy started swimming around like nothing had happened.
He doesn’t bother the other fish anymore.