What do you do when you don’t want to take on a needed task? If you’re like me, Queen of avoiders, you procrastinate. I do this with all sorts of jobs, especially scary ones.
In this case, it was related to my fish tank. After having my fourth goldfish kick the bucket from some mysterious parasite, I needed to strip down the tank to its bare glass and hopefully clean walls.
Only one hitch– I still had a resident remaining there: a cata-whatever. I can never remember or pronounce their names, but they are handy at cleaning by sucking on the glass.
After removing a good deal of the water, I started taking out the decorative sculptures, behind one of which, the little guy hid out. Since he hadn’t moved for twenty-four hours during my procrastination period, I felt a guilty dread he had expired. But no, upon reaching down to remove his hideaway, he shot away so quickly, it seemed like he’d disappeared from sight. He was actually on the other side of the tank. For some time, we did a side-to-side dance till I finally cornered him and placed him in a bag. Whew! Then I delivered said bag to the pet store after being warned of his need for filtered water.
Upon returning to my task, I dedicated myself to removing grungy rocks containing the required bacteria as well as the parasite yuck that took my fish out. I placed them in a double layer of garbage bags within a trash can. You can’t imagine how heavy that was. It was going to take some serious effort to load it and take it out to the garbage tote.
In the meantime, I still had a small amount of water and a large amount of slime to remove at the bottom. A turkey baster would be perfect, I concluded. However, I discovered after a trip to several stores, that this was an item not available except at Thanksgiving. A polite young male employee helped me find a substitute–a squeeze bottle for ketchup. It worked, but ever so slowly, as I squeezed and sucked the yucky water out, standing in a back-breaking position.
In a moment of final exasperation, I grabbed a rag and wiped out the remainder of the grunge. Now, some swipes with a fresh rag, using a solution of diluted vinegar; my tank looked almost new–bare and clean. Hooray!
It had taken the majority of my day, what with procrastination, trips to the pet store and other places for supplies, in addition to the actual cleaning.
So, now I need to decide if I want to start over again with more fish. I think I’ll procrastinate for a while on that decision.