Instinct

I must join the fish story bandwagon Laura started.

When we were first married, we lived in a basement suite. There was an indent in the wall that looked like a fireplace was supposed to go there, but there was no fireplace, just a hollowed out area.

So for a wedding gift, Andrew, along with a bunch of other friends, got us a 30 gallon fish tank starter kit to fill this awkward area. The rule for fish tanks are 1 inch of fish per gallon. So we could have 30 1 inch long fish, or 15 2 inch fish, and so on. We stayed pretty close to the rule.

It took us a few years to get the fish tank ecosystem "just right". Sometimes they'd develop white spots and all die, or sometimes you have one big mean bugger of a fish who likes to snack on the small ones, and eats them bite by bite, day by day. It's painful. We had to flush it.

But my favourite story is about the fish named Salmon.

Poor Salmon. He was an interesting fish. He was in our lives when we lived at our next place: a friend's basement suite.

We don't usually name the fish because there are so many, but for him, we made an exception. You see, he actually THOUGHT he was a salmon. He had that natural instinct, only found in salmon. We have a filter for the tank that has a waterfall that recirculates the water from the filter to the tank. One day we were looking for it and couldn't find it anywhere! Then we heard some splashing around in the filter, and found Salmon in the filter resevoir. He swam upstream, like all salmon do.

It became almost a daily routine to check to see if Salmon was in the filter, and most of the time, he was. So we had to keep "fishing" him out.

One day he wasn't in the tank, and wasn't in the filter! What? Where is he? After a long time of looking, we found his dried up body on the floor behind the fishtank. He tried to swim upstream, but missed the filter and landed on the floor. Poor Salmon. Poor, dumb, Salmon.