A small tragedy

A couple of weeks back, we discovered Wanda the goldfish's tank had been leaking. After removing the tank and cleaning up the mess, we put Wanda in a mixing bowl in the kitchen while we mulled over what to do.

Our hesitation: why pay £20 for another tank when we'll be leaving the UK in five months, and we're not taking the tank, or Wanda, with us?

Wanda was not very happy in her mixing bowl, it seemed. Rather than swimming all around, she stayed still and subdued. The next morning I went to the kitchen and looked in the bowl and saw ... nothing! Wanda wasn't there. Oh no. I looked all over the counter and on the floor, and then I saw her, next to the recycling can. Solemnly, I told Anne what I had discovered and took her to the body. Anne was upset.

But then we noticed that Wanda was moving. She wasn't dead! Who knows how long she'd been a "fish out of water" but she hadn't expired yet. I picked her up and dropped in her back in the bowl. She floated there awkwardly, but then struggled to right herself. After "coughing" a bunch of lint from her gills, she seemed to improve. Now what?

We decided to buy a two-gallon plastic storage container for £5. That way, if she died, at least we'd have a storage container! We brought it back, filled it with room-temperature water, added the filter, and dropped her in. She seemed to be doing OK, actually, though she wasn't strong enough to resist the pull of the filter, so we turned it on only sporadically.

So we went to bed thinking that tragedy had been averted.

But the next morning I got up to head out for my trip to Dagstuhl and discovered Wanda was dead.
Anne was upset again for about 5 minutes, but has since forgotten all about it. She never really paid much attention to Wanda anyway.

While in York at the beginning of the week I noticed that the proprieter of the B&B where we stayed had a really cool screen saver of a fish tank. The fish and the water effects were quite lifelike. I think I'm going to look into getting one ...