But alas poor Smokey...

We are mourning the loss of a family member today.

Smokey was a good fish. 


Loyal.

Friendly.

Resilient.

Okay, so "loyal" may be stretching it a bit.  It's not like he had a choice who his owners were.  However, he was definitely a friendly and resilient fish.

I never thought fish responded to people or showed any sign of personality before we got Smokey.  He actually came out of his little fish-bowl house and appeared to wag his tail for us when we would walk into the room. 

He was certainly a well-traveled fish, having made the trip to New Hampshire for summer vacation and most recently the 3,000 mile drive across country from Virginia to Washington.  He proved his resilience more than once.  The first occasion earned a Post-of-the-Week award for his tumble down the stairs. 

Smokey's Travel Fish-bowl

The most recent occasion I now realize I forgot to write about.  It was when we went on vacation in New Hampshire last summer.  The boys and I had recently watched What About Bob, and they got the idea of taking Smokey with us in a glass jar like Bill Murray with his pet fish Gill.  In anticipation of our upcoming PCS transfer to Washington, we decided to use the drive to NH as a test run for Smokey.  He passed with flying colors. 

Well... swimming colors I suppose. 

There was a close call along the way though.  When we stopped to tour the Valley Forge National Historic Park, we left Smokey in the car. 

It got a little warm.

When we returned to the car, we found Smokey on floating on his side near the top of his water jug, periodically twitching one of his fins like a toy whose batteries were worn out.  We manned battlestations-fish-resuscitation, cranked on the A/C and my wonderful wife held Smokey's jar in front of the vent to cool him off (but not so quickly as to put him in thermal shock).  He seemed just fine a couple of hours later.  No harm done apparently.

I suppose I didn't write about it so none of you would be calling the humane society on me for leaving a pet unattended in the car.

Along the way across country this month, he got to visit the Louisville Slugger bat factory, Mount Rushmore, and Yellowstone National Park.  In hindsight, I am wishing we had taken pictures of him at all those places.

Well, Smokey has gone to to the big fishbowl in the sky now.  This is a first time for my kids to deal with death first hand.  My eldest son (ES) seems to be taking it harder than my younger son. 

We asked the boys what they would like to do for a funeral for Smokey.  We offered the burial-at-sea-via-the-toilet or the bury-in-the-back-yard options.  ES didn't want either.  The toilet seemed to undignified, and he said Smokey wouldn't want to be buried in Washington because he's a Virginia fish.  We convinced the boys we should bury him here at our new home in Washington.

Actually, in order to calm ES down, my wife told him we would exhume Smokey when we leave Washington in a few years and head back to the east coast, and take him back to VA for a proper burial.

...Being a Virginia fish and all.

We're hoping ES forgets by then.

It was a spectacularly gorgeous day in Washington.  Here my wife and son dig a grave for Smokey in our back yard.

So long, Smokey.  You will be missed.

THAT got my heartrate up

Thanks for the Post of the Week honor, Hilary!

In my eleven years of marriage, I have never heard my wife scream with such terror as she did last night.

Wait a minute.

Where to begin?

Rewind a bit.

My youngest son just turned six. Can you believe it?

Both of my boys are obsessed with animals and wish they could have pets. Unfortunately for them, my wife is allergic to everything with fur, so that leaves the boys with their stuffed animal dogs that you see them take everywhere. However (comma), on the occasion of my son's birthday this week, all he wanted for his birthday was a pet.

We settled on a fish.

My wonderful wife took the boys to the pet store and got said fish Thursday.

We'll skip over the story about the eldest and youngest child fighting over what to name the fish in spite of two frustrated parents explaining multiple times that it was the YOUNGEST child's birthday and it was HIS present and HE got to choose the name.

Said fish came in a nice plastic "bowl" if you can call it that. It's a little bigger than a gallon milk jug, cylindrical, and has this fancy screw-on top with a built-in light, a carrying handle, and a hole to put food in. The boys have been carrying the fish in his bowl up stairs with them at bedtime and back downstairs with them in the morning.

That brings us to last night (the 4th night said fish has been in our family).

It was time for bed. I went upstairs to put on my pajamas while my wife and boys were feeding the fish sitting on the coffee table in the family room.

There I was, standing with my pants half-off in the master bathroom in the back corner of the second floor of our house. All of a sudden, I heard the most blood-curdling scream from my wife, followed by a loud and rapid

THUMPTHUMP-THUMP-THUMPTHUMP-THUMPTHUMPTHUMP!

As I yanked my pants back on, spun on my heels, and sprang forth out of the master bedroom with acceleration the likes of which Chuck Yeager never experienced, my mind imagined the worst. I fearfully expected to find the body of one of my family members in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.

Out of the bedroom I dashed, across the hallway, down two steps, spun around to the left and came to a screeching halt at the top of the stairs to survey the carnage.

There was such a huge mess, I wasn't exactly sure what I was seeing and it took my brain a few moments to catalog and register the scene.

Okay, self, first thing's first. Is your family okay? Are there any human bodies with protruding broken bones? Is there any blood anywhere?

No, none that I could tell immediately.

Alright, initial check of family okay, what is the mess before you on the stairs?

Orange.

Lots of orange.

Gobs of orange.

Orange everywhere.

This kind of orange...


Self, that looks like the orange sand-like stuff that was in the bottom of the fish bowl.

Self, there's the empty fish bowl at the bottom of the stairs...

Laying in a big puddle of water...

...and there's a fish on the floor.

As the fog of terror-induced adrenaline began to lift and my brain resumed processing the signals coming from my ear-drums, I heard my wife telling the boys to get a cup of water for the fish. YB showed up with the smallest cup he could find with about an ounce of water in the bottom. LW explained to him she needed a bigger cup and more water than that.

I went and quickly filled up a pitcher of water and brought it for the fish. The fish was alive and swimming around. Next we had to comfort the 8 year old hunkered and crying in the family room because he thought he killed the fish when he dropped the fish bowl down the stairs.

Now for the cleanup.

My wife told the boys to get towels from the linen closet. ES returned with a stack of every beach towel we own. Next my wife had them put the towels down on the stairs to start soaking up the water. At that moment in time, I didn't have the first clue what the best way was to attack this cleanup effort, so I didn't see any problem with what she told the boys to do. In hindsight though, I regretted the sequence of our efforts.

At first, I tried scooping up orange beads with my hands, but it was cumbersome at best. Plus, my wife said they were covered in fuzz from the carpet, so we probably couldn't reuse it with the fishbowl. Then the light went off over my head, and I said to myself, "Self, it's time for the shop-vac."

I brought the shop-vac in from the garage, and my very wise wife told me to take the filter out of the shop vac before vacuuming up water. Unfortunately, her dumb husband proceeded to open the shop vac right there in the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, thus adding saw dust from the past several weeks' worth of pinewood derby preparations to the water on the floor. Niiiiiice.

Even so, once I had the filter out, the shop-vac did a great job sucking up all the orange beads, water, and sawdust on the foyer floor with a very satisfying rattling noise as the beads battered the suction tube.

Then I went to attack the stairs. I lifted up the now-sopping-wet beach towel, and discovered half of the eleventy bajillion little orange beads were on the carpet, but the other half were stuck to the towel. The ones on the carpet were really easy to suck up with the vacuum. Each time I tried to vacuum some off the towel though, I heard this THUMP sound as the towel got sucked up to the vacuum. Along with that resultant THUMP noise, the towel flung orange beads across the foyer like a catapult.

As a result, my cleanup efforts sounded something like this:
Shhhhhhhhh (vacuum sucking noise)
Rattle Rattle Rattle (orange beads flying up the vacuum tube)
THUMP (vacuum catches towel)
Clatter-clatter-clatter (airborne orange beads bouncing on the hard wood floor in the foyer)
Shhhhhhhhh
Rattle Rattle Rattle
THUMP
Clatter-Clatter-Clatter
Shhhhhhhhh
Rattle Rattle Rattle
THUMP
Clatter-Clatter-Clatter
Shhhhhhhhh
Rattle Rattle Rattle
THUMP
Clatter-Clatter-Clatter

That got on my nerves pretty quick, so I ended up picking up all the towels and taking them to the bottom of the stairs. I didn't want to just shake the towels outside and have little orange beads everywhere on my lawn or in the street. I also didn't want to just put the towels in the washer and have the little glass beads clog up my washer. So I shook them out right there in the foyer onto the wood floor and then vacuumed them all up without the THUMP and clatter noises.

At one point, I thought to myself, self, you really need a picture of those beads to be able to give people an idea of what a mess this was. I grabbed my camera, and while taking a picture of beads, I could detect a tone of annoyance in my wife's voice as she asked if I really needed to document this.

Uhhh... is this a trick question, Sweetie???

Even when I had most of the beads vacuumed up, every time I set my foot down, I found another one with my bare foot. I suppose I should have put some shoes on, but then again, while it was uncomfortable, the beads weren't puncturing or doing any real damage to my feet, and it was helping me find all the little buggers.

Through the course of the day today, I kept finding little orange beads on the floor, on my socks, in my shoes... I wonder if this will be like the grains of rice we continue to find in our suitcase thanks to my wife's aunt putting rice in our suitcase when we left on our honeymoon over a decade ago?

Anyway, the fish seems okay today. I think it's safe to say the boys will not be allowed to carry the fish bowl around anymore.

Sleep tight... whatever your name is.