When The Fish Tank Leaks, Go With the Flow

I had a pretty good handle on everything—lawn, garden, preparing for the upcoming major family events—until the fish tank leaked. Someone in this family awoke yesterday morning to find several inches of water in the top drawer of their dresser.  You know what top drawers hold, right? Yep, there was a laundry emergency as well as a flood emergency.

Our aquarium is the 30 gallon one, so there was lots more water waiting to leak still in the tank. Thankfully, I had another tank, smaller, along with all the proper aquarium do-dads, unused in the basement.  (Pack rats, you know, live for days like yesterday, when their habit of keeping every single thing that might come in handy someday actually comes in handy for a day.) But you can’t just plop tropical fish into a just-now-set-up aquarium. They need the water to be just the right  temperature and something has to be done about the nasty chlorine in freshly run tap water. 

Since the fish had to stay in the leaky tank until the new one was safe for them, I put 9x13 baking pans in the drawer to catch the leaking water, and then emptied them every hour until the temperature was right in the new tank. All the fish made the move to the new tank quite nicely, and none have died yet, although they do keep banging into each other and panicking. They’re country fish, I guess, and not used to overcrowding.

Then came the bailing. You can’t just lift up a 30 gallon tank and carry it outside to dump the rest of the water out, you know. Nope, you’ve got to bail, which is not a very pleasant job, no matter how clean you think you keep your fish tank. The fish tank still isn’t cleaned out; that’s on my agenda for this afternoon.

Monday, oldest son will look at the tank to see if he can fix it. He is a glazier by trade, so he’s done it before, only for pay.

While we’re on the subject of oldest son and pay: He’s been doing contract work–communications, they call it—for the Yukon Literacy Coalition. He’s set up a new website for them, which you can look at right here; and updated and edited the Yukon Literacy Guide. This weekend is the annual literacy summit, so he’s been putting in 16 hour days getting ready for that. Things should slow down for him after that, and then he will have time to catch up on things he’s been neglecting, like his dormant blog and my fish tank.

As long as I’m already a little off-topic, I’m going to just continue with the flow. Speaking of Yukon web sites, Urban Yukon, an aggregator and guide for “the best Yukon-related blogs written on a variety of topics” has been redesigned with a snappy new design and some new features, including random photos from a few Yukon photo feeds. Right now, it seems a little heavy on embarrassing old photos from this family, but I’m sure it’ll move on to subjects of more wide-ranging interest shortly.

Oh, as long as we’re covering fish and Yukon blogs, here’s a Yukon fishing blog called Fish on Yukon. 

Do you like everything you read to be in tight little organized packages? My advice to you: Skip this post.

Comments

[Geof Harries]

Rebecca, a little late to the party here, but thanks for the comments on the Urban Yukon re-design. As for the photos, yep, they were a little heavy on the Stark family (Andrew owns half of the photos feeds) but hopefully this will grow over time. I actually had to remove the photos for now until I get some bugs worked out; they were slowing the homepage down too much.