Gone fishin’ ?

Who knew getting a goldfish would be so much trauma …

After 5 years together and after living together for 4 of those years, the G/f and I decided at the weekend to get a pet.
Now we live in rented accommodation so we’re rather limited in our pet prospects … it was a choice of either something in a cage (i.e. hamster or gerbil) or some fish.

We opted for the fish due to their calm and soothing watch-ability, and the fact that they’re low maintenance.

Well, we thought they were low maintenance … got that bit slightly wrong.

Off we trotted to a local purveyor of fish type pets, only to be confronted by a mind-numbingly huge array of swimming things along with tanks, feed and all manner of gear. We collared a member of staff to talk tanks and find out exactly what we needed.

He showed us a few tanks and advised us on the stuff to get to treat the water properly so our impending pet would live a happy and comfortable life.
We’d need a tank, filter, water treating stuff (to remove all the chlorine and crap that the water company leaves in our tap water), some more stuff to add nice bacteria to the water, a little net and some food (bit of a no brainer that one) However the range of tanks they had on offer were slightly larger than we’d intended and as a result slightly pricier than we’d anticipated. After grabbing a free fish leaflet we thanked him for his help and left him to feed the piranhas.

We decided to head to a local garden centre that had a branch of a well respected aquarium company within it’s walls on the way back .. and with luck that had tanks that were the size that we were looking for (and as a result a more agreeable price too). We looked around for another member of staff to aid us in our quest for aquatic based lifeforms and eventually found one ….

Our initial thought was get tank and filter, choose fish, get home, set up tank, add water to tank, add fish to tank, job done …
Oooooooh no … nothing that simple.

We were told that we needed to leave the tank setup and running for at least 5 days before adding the fish to give the pump and water time to acclimatise for the fish after adding the water prep. stuff.

This did not please the G/f unit who was rather looking forwards to the calming influence of a couple of small finned fellows swimming around in a glass box. It also confused me slightly as the chap in the previous place and the leaflet we had in the car both said 24 hours but the sign in this store (cunningly located at knee level at the cash register) and the staff member both said that it’d be at least 5 days. We purchased the tank, filter and various water treatment chemicals along with some fake plants, a rather fetching fake tree stump thing and some very cool black and purple gravel and headed home without any fish

So after spending 20 minutes or so getting rather wet, we now have sat in our lounge a rather nice looking fish tank … with no fish in it …..

Like I said at the top …. Who knew getting a goldfish would be so traumatic …