How to kill your kid's fish...

It has not been a good month for pets in the Koda household. As many of you may know, the overly excitable lab/pointer mix known as Musa (Moose) has been the target of the wife's frustration in recent months.

New Years Day, saw an argument as to whose responsibility it was to get rid of the dog. It was her idea to get him, and so I just figure natural to expect her to do the deed, plus I was the only one who wanted to keep him. Apparently it worked because Saturday the new family came to pick him up. They don't have kids, so the knocking kids down and sitting on them game, which he likes so much, won't be happening. They also like the idea of an inside pet, and so he will likely no longer spend his days eating the white snow and making the rest of it yellow. The husband arrived wearing an AC/DC hat, so right away I knew he would be in good hands. They own a mid-size truck too, and he got to sit up front, between them for the ride home. Looked like king of the manor up there.

On to the fish... So Monkey the Second was being cleaned a few weeks ago. Somehow between him leaving the holding bowl and getting back into his normal bowl, he thought he'd take a look inside the garbage disposal unit. For my foreign readers... A garbage disposal unit sits in place of the drain on your sink. Food and stuff goes down, where it is then ground up into mush and mixed with water to continue down into the sewage system.

It was at this point that I got the phone call at work. My first suggestion was to pull the drain pipe off, block it and then fill the unit up so Monkey could swim out. The wife didn't want to mess with the pipes. Then I suggested pitting a hand down and trying to find him... Probably not the safest thing to do, but as long as no-one turned it on she would have been fine. It wasn't the steel blades or jagged metal pieces that scared her, but fear that she might touch the fish, which I thought was the whole idea anyway.

At this point, co-workers in adjacent cubicles started to offer advice - somehow they'd gotten the idea that he was just in the sink and needed to be scooped up. I offered a few more suggestions, following which I hung up to let the wife try them out, while using 2 hands instead of 1.

I got a call a few minutes later... The problem had been taken care of. Lily - Monkey's owner had come into the kitchen and my wife had explained what happened. Then to avoid suffering to the fish, and as my daughter looked on, she flipped the switch, and with a whirring sound, some gurgling and a hum, Monkey was teleported to the world beyond.

I don't think we're planning on getting any more pets for a while.