Confessions of a Fishkeeper
Monday, January 28th, 2008I bought my first aquarium when I was 10 years old. It was one of those “everything” for $8.99 deals, where you got an Ambassador 10 gallon tank (trimmed in slick black plastic), an air pump, an inside filter, 2 feet of airline tubing, a packet of fish food and a plastic bag with 10 lucky souls paroled from the feeder goldfish tank. I remember it like it was yesterday. From the age of ten on, my obsession with the hobby grew rapidly. I think I graduated up to a 30-gallon six months later, and had already moved on to saltwater and reef tanks by the time I was fifteen. I had some sort of large, impressive display reef tank in my life pretty much continuously from fifteen to thirty. In 1998, I moved out to the Bay Area from New York, and the hobby was left behind.
About 2 years ago, on a whim and maybe because I was feeling a little optimistic, I dropped $80 on one of those “out of the box” 5 gallon kits, at Ocean Aquarium on Cedar. Justin and Aidie are just a few blocks from us, and have been a big part of my return to the hobby. I put the sweet, little tank on my desk (right beside my monitors), but it never thrived. For all my experience keeping fish back in NY, I was really not invested in it this time. I went with freshwater because I wanted it to be easy, you know. I wasn’t really interested in returning to the hobby in any fanatical sense. I just wanted to look at fish. As you would expect, I sacrificed many lives casually and carelessly in 2006. It wasn’t until a year ago, when my wife and I moved up a block higher on the slopes of Nob Hill (from Post to Sutter street), that I became interested in making my fish tank succeed.
