This post is a part of 20SB’s Looking Back Blog Carnival, and Ben & Jerry’s is awarding free ice cream to lucky bloggers and readers!  That’s right, they are giving away free ice cream and Dan’s birthday is coming up. He really loves Ben & Jerry’s. I really love not having to buy him an expensive birthday present. Read more about the Blog Carnival here. 

The original post was my 30th post, from July 2007.

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Cory told me that he was worried about my sanity since I had a blog about our kitties. I told him he only had to worry if I blogged about our fish. Well Cory, you are now allowed to officially worry about my sanity.

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We have three fish. That is present tense-we have previously had many more, but I am a fish killer. Part of it is because it took me awhile to figure out the delicate balance of passive vs. aggressive fish. The other part of it is because one of our fish is a bully. That fish is affectionately known as Pudge.

 

Pudge received his name when he was a scrawny feeder goldfish that I won at the State Fair. I won 3 fish at that time, but two of them could not stand to be in my care and died within 24 hours. I was so excited that Pudge managed to live that I immediately went out and bought him a 10 gallon tank. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one feeder goldfish in a 10 gallon tank before, but trust me, it looks ridiculous. So, I went out and bought more fish.

 

None of them are still alive.

 

I have gone through quite a few fish, all with Disney names. (Pudge is from Lilo and Stitch. “Pudge controls the weather.” Nemo is from, you guessed it, Finding Nemo. Although, he is so large that he is not hard to find. And Lighting is from Cars. I named him Lighting because we were running out of name options and Lighting is red.)

 

We now have a 20 gallon tank, and I keep trying to talk Dan into buying a 10 gallon one as a quarantine tank for when we are cleaning the big one. He says no, because he is convinced that I will put Pudge in his own tank and then we will have to buy more fish to fill the 20 gallon one. He’s right.

 

This past weekend, we rolled up our sleeves and did a deep clean of the fish tank. We managed to get a brown algae infestation that would not die, no matter how many different chemicals we attacked it with. This convinced Dan to let me buy new decorations. While we were there, we decided to buy a new filter too, just in case the old one was the cause of the problem. This also led to brand new gravel.

 

This is the old decor. You can barely see it because of Pudge. Note the electric blue gravel. It was supposed to resemble water, but when you place it in real water, it seems really fake.

The waterwheel moved from the air bubbles. It was way cool. And you can also see the brown algae attacking the aquarium glass right under Pudge’s mouth.

Our new tank decor, pre-fish. Dan laughed at me because I made the back column balance on the rocks, and then I wiggled the tank so it would fall naturally. Martha would be proud. They seem happy. It gives them more swimming space.

I lucked out and caught them all swimming nearish to each other. Normally Lighting avoids the other two and Pudge bullies Nemo into hiding. This way you can see how different they are in size.

I love our fish. I am so abnormally attached to them that I plan on taking a day off from work if they die. Not “when” mind you, “if.” I firmly believe that Pudge will live forever.

Knock on wood. I’m not taking any chances.

My mom recently complained that she is developing a bad trait courtesy of Dad. He replaces words with other words and continues talking as if he has not swapped a major noun for another in the sentence. For example, “don’t forget to turn off the dishwasher” really means “don’t forget to turn off the lights.” And “when you stop by, make sure you pick up the rooster your mom is giving you” means “when you stop by, make sure you pick up the cookbooks your mom is giving you.” It’s been going on for years, so we’re all pretty used to it.

Now Mom is doing it too. She calls me by my sisters’ and aunts’ names before she finally gets to mine. And she kept calling “Soaring Over California” all sorts of things for our entire Disney trip. It was “Adventures Over America” and “Flying Over Disneyland” quite a few times. My Auntie ‘Rita and I made bets on if she’d get it right at all during the trip.

I am doomed to develop these mild senile tendecies, thanks to genetics (aka Mom and Dad).

When I mailed something to my Dad, I had nice little labels printed up with his address and my return address. I had doodled on the box with little stars and swirls. Everything was securely packaged and taped. All in all, I was pretty proud of myself for boxing it up so nicely. Fast forward to 2 days later and the package I had lovingly sent to my father was sitting on my doorstep. I had placed his address as the return address and mine as the destination… When I told Dan, he just rolled his eyes at me. When I told my family, they all laughed hysterically. Why doesn’t anyone concerned that a 27-year-old is losing it?

After spending almost an hour this morning on the phone with tech support, they got the blog working again.

I mean…my genius level computer skills managed to figure out the problem. All by myself.

When I tried to back up all of my blog posts, I managed to corrupt the database. I’m not sure how and tech support couldn’t figure it out either.

I’m *THAT* talented with computers. Even tech guys can’t keep up.

So anyway, I lost all of my saved blogs and drafts. My blog counter is starting over at zero and all the Google searches that lead people here are no longer saved for my amusement. The design switched back to the boring grey default, but I was able to easily correct it to the current theme.

I am going to try and rewrite the blogs this week. I’m also stealing some cute blog themes from Jen Z’s Facebook posts. At least I’m up front with my blog topic stealing, right?