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1.17.2006

I Need To See the Oracle


Tonight when I went upstairs to the family room to feed the fish, I heard the toilet in the adjoining bath running, running, running. We’ve been through this before. (Who hasn’t?) So I took the lid off and futzed around with the float, then flushed. Running…running…running… I futzed with it some more. Still running.

“Fart-knockin-piece-a-dad!” I growled. “I don’t feel like doing this!”...



After about ten minutes of this crap I absently twisted the filler tube and voila! It stopped running. How do things like that happen? I mean, nobody opened up the tank and turned that tube one-sixteenth of an inch in a clockwise direction just to make it run and piss me off.

Anyway, holding my aching head in one hand, I ambled toward the corner where the aquariums are and noticed that one of the plants in the bay window was drooping. I took it into the bathroom and watered it. Finally, getting to my original destination, I noticed that the large tank was murky and that the water recycler wasn’t pumping any water. Grumbling, I took out the old filter, took it into the bathroom and threw it away. I got a new filter assembly from the cabinet, poured the charcoal into the little mesh bag, clipped it shut, and was going to rinse it, but the plant was still in the sink. I took the plant back to the window and returned to the sink in the bathroom, where I rinsed the filter clean of any charcoal dust. When I put in into the filter housing, the water still didn’t pump through, so I took the actual pump/rotor/twirly thing out and to the sink to rinse it. It was full of pieces of plant. After I put it all back together the pump worked fine again.

WTF? Tanks, pumps, water… What does it all mean?