Getting Tanked ~ Aquarium Style

Ever since Neil moved to Texas, I had been hard at work at de-cluttering the house.

Last week I worked on Neil's room, having filled up about 30 large garbage bags.

Yesterday I worked at the room at the top of the stairs (also known as the plant room or the sun room). While I did not fill up as many garbage bags as I did with Neil's room, I still made considerable progress.

I filled up at least 10 garbage bags and packed as many boxes.

Today I didn't get a chance to do the extensive cleaning that I hoped because I was waiting for the real estate agent to stop by with the Comparative Marketing Analysis on the property. I didn't want to be in the bowels of the basement, absorbed in a bagging blitz and not hear the agent when she came over.

Instead I stayed downstairs, focusing on a cleaning task where I could easily be distracted from the task without risking great loss of momentum.

So, today's task was to drain the aquarium, siphoning most of the water into jugs so that when 'Miah takes the tank and sets it up, he'll have some of the original water, with the friendly bacteria that fish like, from the tank.

After draining the tank, I took out the pebbles and put them into 3 separate colanders, which I then brought outside to hose down. At that time, the Big Brother/Big Sister truck filled up to pick up the 21 bags of clothing that I put out by the telephone pole yesterday.

The driver came up to bring me my receipt and said, "With all these bags of clothes, you're not going to have any more clothes left in your house." I explained to him that we were relocating to Texas, so we were getting rid of a lot of stuff.

By the time I finished hosing away the schmutz from the aquarium pebbles, it was 1 o'clock ~ the time that Mary Beth, the real estate agent, said she would be here.

Until she showed up, I decided to give the aquarium a cleaning.

I was cleaning away for about half an hour when Mary Beth showed up. And it figured that she would show up just when I was taking apart the water filter, which had a foul smell, much like rotten eggs.

And of course, we had to sit in the kitchen ~ with the water filter in the sink ~ to go over business. Fortunately the smell had dissipated. Or so I thought. I caught a whiff of that rotten egg smell. But by then our business was nearly done.

After Mary Beth left, I tackled the water filter. And soon that foul smell was history.

Now, the tank is nice and clean. All the accessories are in boxes. And everything is all set for 'Miah to come and pick up.