I Fix Stuff.

A day always comes with work of its own. I am seriously thinking about how to discard of Tolstoy, the fish. We have him in a 2.5 gallon tank and he is getting bigger and bigger and I really don't want to buy another tank. He is the invincible fish. Last summer they were dropping like flies and now this time Tolstoy comes along and lives forever. It's not that I want him to die. I just hate cleaning his disgusting tank. It is a see-through rectangle of rankness.

So I had "Clean the Tank" on the fridge for a week or so and the tank was getting cloudy. Real cloudy. Tolstoy's eyes were getting a little woosey and I could tell he wasn't happy in there. But he was otherwise healthy. I decided as I was waiting for my chicken to grill on low I would clean the tank. It is just a little tank. And the filter didn't work at all, so it would get down right nasty in there. I carried the stupid thing to the sink and did the job. The amount of gelatinous substance that smelled like a sea demon straight from the depths of a watery hell was a bit staggering. I actually pulled the filter out and unscrewed it to see if it was clogged. I hadn't done that before. And it showed, baby, cause black stinky jello plopped out and wobbled down the drain. It is the kind of stuff that would seep out of an ork if you had a mind to slit him open in the stomach. Vile, stinky, stuff.

I looked at Tolstoy in the bucket. I wished I could flush him down the toilet or dangle him before one of the tomcats outside, but I refrained. How would I explain that to the kids? Now I know what it feels like to be a farmer who thinks an animal is too much work and he goes out in the field to shoot it in the head. Tolstoy is pretty much just a parasite now living in a transparent box in my kitchen.

Over dinner I talked to Dear Sir about terminating him. He suggested that we take him to the lake down the street (we actually have a lake in our subdivision, believe it or not) and drop him in. But of course, I don't know if it is healthy. Dang, he is so hardy that I bet he would swim to shore, walk back home and knock on the door and demand that I clean his gelatinous mess until he dies naturally. Please no.

I'll tell you what though, the filter works now like a charm and I suppose that is what got the tank so dang cloudy and nasty in the first place. I need to unscrew the dealy from time to time to get the blubbery sickness outta there so it won't clog.

I guess I'll keep him.

But then I changed my mind again last night because I think one of the tank pebbles fell in the garbage disposer and when I ran it maybe it jostled something loose, I don't know. So when I opened up the cabinet underneath the sink to dig through the trash (another story for tomorrow---and we did not lose the allergy pills this time) I found a nasty, gelatinous puddle. Oh for Pete's sake, I cried. It reeked too, of course, and I had to pull out all sorts of stuff I store down there to see the problem.

I thought of calling the plumber, but then I thought, I can do this. Apparently the screws to put pressure on the gasket right underneath the bowl of the sink were either lose or gone. How that passed inspection last year, I have no clue, but it seems lots of things did. I tightened the two I could since they were there, but the third has vanished and I suppose I need to go to Lowe's once again to make a fool of myself and ask for some part I don't know the name of. It is some special screw, not a normal one. A bolt. But a special bolt, ok?

So I took some towels and wiped up the large puddle of fishy nastiness and now everything from under the sink is out and in the kitchen. Dear Sir turned around from his time on the computer and said, "You're fixing everything around here!" with a smile.

I have to say that I have never encountered a gasket before in my life. I have always heard the word gasket and never knew what it was until the piano tuner came on Wednesday and opened the pupper up and found a gasket. He chuckled, handed it to me still in its wrapping and said, "in all my years tuning pianos, that is a first. Need a gasket?"