If You're Gonna Have X, You're Gonna Have X Problems

It's been a challenging week. Recently, Arya became enamored with the idea of having an aquarium. She saved up money for her agreed-upon share of the start-up costs and off to the aquarium store she and Beth went. After consulting with the local fish experts, she and Beth bought a little 5-gallon aquarium and began the slow process of readying it for fish.

From the start, there were some surprises. One of the plants turned out to have transported a little hitchhiker in the form of a trumpet snail that soon received the name Slimy Tom. The water was fresh out of the tap, so we weren't sure of the snail's odds of survival, but Slimy Tom did just fine. So fine, in fact, that we soon had a couple of baby trumpet snails sliming around the tank. Turns out, 85% of trumpet snails are female and they can reproduce in the absence of fertilization. Slimy Tom the snail remains, but the snail is definitely female.

We added a second, larger snail, named Chubchub, and that went swimmingly as well. Arya found it delightful to watch the big snail ooze up the side of the aquarium with surprising speed and then dropping down, down, down through the water to the bottom - a maneuver apparently known by aquarium owners as "parasnailing".

Our troubles didn't start until we tried adding fish to our fish tank.

Four neon tetras - absolutely beautiful little fish. They have this little blue stripe that reflects light, and even in small numbers they form a little school. They loved to swim towards the water jet and then let it push them across the tank (we have since learned that this is a stress response to being in a new environment; essentially, they think they've been washed downstream and are fighting to get back to the pool they were in). A few days later, one of them mysteriously vanished. Like, we have a plastic castle (what aquarium owner doesn't?), but that didn't seem to be the issue. Eventually, we figured out that it was at the bottom of the filter/heater side of the aquarium, which wasn't a place the fish were supposed to be able to go. Despite our frantic efforts with inadequate tools to rescue the little fish, we were forced to give up. The next morning, we discovered a tiny fish skeleton on the proper side of the wall and an extremely satiated Chubchub (these snails aren't carnivores, but they'll dispose of dead fish).

This was a little bit heartbreaking? Arya was surprisingly chill about it, but as parents, it was kind of a sucky moment to deliver to her, you know? Two days later, while we were still absorbing this blow, before we had figured out how this could have happened or how to prevent it, it happened again. We had, however, armed ourselves with a tiny net, so we were a little better equipped to catch the renegade tetra, but it was still dead within seconds of extraction. Apparently, tetras belong to a category of fish that can die for no real reason at all.

It was at this point that we discovered we had made an error when assembling the water jet that left a small opening, which was how half our fish population had escaped to their deaths. Having fixed that, we figured things would be okay now.

Reader, they were not.

A day later, we found one of the remaining tetras swimming around upside-down, which didn't seem like a good sign. A few hours later, it was dead.

Beth and I are cat people, and although we've had to say goodbye forever to a few cats in our lives, these events are rare. Three times in a week seems like a lot, especially when we could so easily blame ourselves for the first two.

There was another trip to the fish store, and this time they returned with two more neon tetras and three chili rasboras. We lost another tetra a day or two later, although we never recovered a body (but there's a suspiciously large volume of snail poop in the tank). Doing some research, we determined that the flow of the water jet was probably causing our fish difficulties; they were fighting the current (and continuing to die off daily). We picked up a cheap filter sponge, which promptly solved the problem of excess water flow.

The chili rasboras seemed super happy with this state of affairs, at first, but then we realized the water wasn't moving at all, which was a different but potentially equally bad problem. It needs to be agitated to deliver the oxygen in a form the fish can absorb. This was confirmed when one of the chilis abruptly died. We experimented with directing the jet at a wall to at least circumvent that problem.

Despite this, over the course of a week we've gone from six fish to a lone chili rasbora (who is still alive as of this morning). We have a family outing to the aquarium store planned for this afternoon. Our plan is to not introduce any new fish until the end of October, although we might experiment with a spray bar, which is a contraption for making the incoming water fall into the aquarium like a fountain instead of being shot into it like a pool jet.

So far, the snails are having a great time, and despite our terror that she's being traumatized by all this, she's been quite happy watching those scoot around the tank.

While we were managing all these fish problems, William's computer abruptly stopped playing or recording sound, and it quickly outstripped his ability to fix it. I got in there to start troubleshooting and quickly discovered that he had a wall of Windows updates that hadn't been applied, likely because the hard drive where Windows and all the app data live had less than 7 GB of space remaining.

After uninstalling several apps and moving a bunch of files and folders to the roomier storage drive, I had about 50 GB to work with. Tried to run all updates. Failed. Tried running Windows Recovery. That downloaded, installed, rebooted, and then failed. Confirmed that anything irreplaceable was safely on the D: drive, took a deep breath and attempted to run a full Windows reinstall. Also failed. Exhausted, I gave Beth a chance to try a few things. Nothing she tried worked, either. I was already pricing a new computer before Beth reminded me that computer repair shops are a thing that exists and are generally way cheaper than replacement - especially for a desktop. Her father used to tell her, "If you're going have a computer, you're going to have computer problems."

So, off to the shop it went, with hope that it will be functional again early next week. In the meantime, William is bored. What's more, he's a bored, lonely extrovert. His computer is his main connection to friends and his primary source of entertainment. He's absolutely crawling the walls - begging us to play board games, watch movies, and go places with him like a tiny fish that's trying to swim upstream to its familiar but nonexistent pool. Teenager though he is, he likes hanging out with us, but he also likes doing his own thing without Mom or Dad needing to be involved. It's a perfectly normal pattern of behavior in an adolescent, but the (temporary) loss of his computer has thoroughly disrupted it.

And, like, I get that. I'm so attached to the laptop I haul around that my friends call it my teddy bear. It's my main connection to a significant fraction of the people I interact with regularly, my preferred means of accessing information, news, and entertainment, and the only device I own fit for working on my writing projects, the last of which consume more of my time each week than anything other than sleeping or my day job.

I have files on this device that have passed from hard drive to hard drive going all the way back, in some cases, to high school and college. I have every draft of every freelance assignment I've ever had, along with partial drafts of novels and RPGs, as well as random poems and journal entries. My laptop in no small way contains my entire history as a creative person, and as much as I identify myself by my creative output, it's no exaggeration to describe it as part of my identity, an extension of myself, as the cliche would have it (but accurate in this case).

On those occasions when I've needed to send my laptop in for repairs, I have absolutely spent that time climbing-the-walls bored, along with the adult guilt at not being productive. I want to spare William that sensation as much as possible. Also, while binging Severance with him has been fun, I'd like to be a less urgently needed source of entertainment.