Four funerals and a COVID case

November 06, 2022

Four funerals and a COVID case

Well, this past week has been unfortunate. Every weekend by our house, there's a local farmer's market where they sell flowers, plants, pottery, as well as pet fish or turtles that you can 'catch' and bring home:

Gemma 'fishing' for fish

We've taken Gemma a couple times to 'catch' fish for fun, but we never brought any home. Finally last Saturday we decided it would be cool to have Gemma experience her first pet, and it might as well be a fish since those are 'easy' pets, right?

So off we went to the farmer's market and Gemma successfully caught 3 fish! We bought a tank, air filter, and got everything set up at home. Gemma was delighted:

Neither Dan or I have much experience owning fish--my family had 4 goldfish when I was like 4 years old but what do I remember from back then..??--Anyways, we spent most of that day googling how to keep fish alive. We were pretty invested. I'm now convinced I'm a soothsayer of sorts because I literally had a dream that night that Dan woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me one fish had died. I woke up and was relieved that it was a dream, and went to check up on the fish. Except...there was only 2 fish left and 1 was missing. It was nowhere in the tank. I tried to look for parts of the fish, tried to look outside the tank and all over the counter to make sure it hadn't jumped out, googled whether fish can be cannibals, etc. We were equally stumped and creeped out. As we were about to leave the house, Dan picked up a reusable bag with books that we were going to return to my friend, and while he was making sure all the books were inside, he caught sight of..the dead fish inside. I guess the fish had jumped out pretty far and then flopped all the way to the edge of the counter and fallen into the bag. 😰 No one warned us that fish sometimes hurl themselves out of the tank. I figured this might be the case if we had left the tank dirty for awhile, or didn't have an air filter, or something else terrible. We had owned these fish for less than 24 hours and given them nothing but a clean tank and fresh food! What more could they ask for?!

Instead of traumatizing Gemma with the truth, we told Gemma the half truth, like good parents, that the fish jumped out and went back to his former casa. We're not wrong. The fish did go back to his old casa--Mother Earth. Gemma seemed to think that was a very reasonable answer. We all have previous casas to go back to.

I took Gemma back to the farmer's market on Sunday and picked up two more fish to compensate, and Gemma was again very happy with her catches. Except that night upon careful observation we noticed that one of the fish we got from the previous day was a huge bully. He kept nipping the other fishes' tails and they would scramble swim away from it whenever it got close to them. This made more sense of why the first fish jumped out, maybe he was getting bullied too much. We were not about to wake up to more dead fish in our belongings the next morning. Long story short, we worked through so many moral dilemmas of what to do with this bully fish as it kept nipping the other fish and they did not seem happy. Finally, after way too much time deliberating the life of a fish, we had to say goodbye to the bully fish (will not disclose how we did it but just trust that we did it in the most humane and ethical way we could think of, though it still haunts me), in order to save the other 3 fish in the tank from being bullied. It was a real Sophie's Choice moment.

However, half way through the week, two of the fishes also died. Basically within hours apart of each other. WHY DO THESE FISH KEEP DYING??? I thought fish were easy pets! Who knew! I have never googled so much about fish biology and fish maintenance in my life.

A couple days after our mass fish death (there's one still alive), Gemma got a fever, I got flu-like symptoms, and we took Gemma to the hospital to take a PCR test. Turns out...she has Covid once again! I didn't get the PCR test, but I'm just going to assume I also have it again. We are now quarantining and watching tons of TV together. But--thank God after 2 days of fever Gemma seems to be doing better and not showing much symptoms. I am a little slower on the recovery, but also on the mend.

Well folks, as the old saying goes, when it rains, it pours. However, even with this highly disappointing week, we are still doing well overall, and I am saying that because outside of virus and fish-dying days, our stress-level is still fairly low. Who knew I would prefer debating how to ethically kill a pet fish over full time work? Also, big news, Gemma has gained a new friend at school! It is the cutest thing ever. Here are some recent highlights to close out this entry: