Finally Got Everything Together

to reassemble the 35-gallon aquarium that has been languishing in our living room since we moved in.

It is an integrated unit with the filter, heater, and lights hard-wired into the cover. The lights are on a timer whose control panel was not working properly and had to be replaced. It could still turn the lights on and off okay, but the buttons to adjust the time and the on/ off timing were dead. I bought the thing in Saudi Arabia, and in my search for a new timer, found that this model aquarium was never sold in the States, and is not supported here. I ended up having to buy the timer from a Canadian source. The good news was that one of the filters that I thought needed new parts, only to find that the model is completely discontinued and no longer supported anywhere, actually worked fine when I plugged it in.

The battery-operated auto-feeder still works, with a food compartment that rotates once or twice a day at designated time(s), allowing food to drop through a slot whose width is adjustable.

Then I went to Jefferson Feed, Pet and Garden Center for rock, which I had kept when we moved, and some water conditioner. I wanted to buy as close to home as possible. They didn't have any fish I wanted, though, so after getting the rock in place and rinsed, and getting the water dechlorinated, it was off to the Petsmart at Elmwood.

Since it will take several weeks for the biological filtration to get established, all I wanted was a pair of janitors. The sucker-mouthed algae eaters and even catfish can get aggressive, so I was looking for some plain bottom-feeding catfish of the genus Corydoras. After browsing through over 100 tanks and not seeing them, I was approached by a friendly sales person who asked if he could help me. I told him what I wanted, and he said he didn't have them and had never heard of them. A few minutes later, my wife spotted them, in tank number 106. So we bought a pair of them, and a couple of live plants to accompany the low maintenance plastic plants we have.

The water turned murky the next day, but it is starting to clear up. In a couple of weeks it will be ready to start gradually adding a few fish at a time. I plan to get a bunch of tetras: neons, black neons, cardinals, rummy noses, glow lights, and others in that family that stay small and get along without fighting, fin-nipping, or feeding too aggressively.

In a month or so, I should have pictures.

Okay, all you dog and cat lovers probably don't think much of tropical fish, but as W.C. Fields said, they are the perfect pet - don't make much noise and they're easily subdued. My aquarium has twice the filtration of most its size, and the auto-feeder, so it is ultra low maintenance. I could leave for a month's vacation without worries. Try that with a dog or a cat!