You know how everything seems much bigger when you’re a kid? When my age was still in single digits, we had a 35-gallon tank full of all sorts of fish we got from the pet shop. It was a lake to me.
I used to love staring at the aquarium in the living room except when it started to get too green. It was then that all my fish friends turned to enemies because we had to catch them all, put them in a bucket, drain most of the tank, vacuum the gravel, get the temperature balanced and put them back in.
My unofficial job was fish wrangler because the last few would always be too quick to be caught in the net (or in the case of the plecostomus— which felt like it was made of sandpaper, leather and broken glass— too large). Thus, they had to be caught by hand. I would then watch to make sure the cats didn’t figure out what was in the bucket and that we didn’t have any suicide attempts (you always get one or two who hop out of the bucket to suffocating freedom).
This routine would take the better part of two hours to complete at least once a month. My Roku has a high definition screen saver of a fish tank that occasionally makes me nostalgic for the real thing. Then I remember, even though that eel will never change the way it pokes out from the rocks, I don’t have to stab my hands into surprisingly cold water multiple times to get that slippery sucker into a bucket.