Fish Sitting

Meet Champagne.She is the newest member of our household. But, she is not ours, we are merely looking after her for our friend Elyse while she is back in Lethbridge for the holidays. She is a very spirited fish. It's crazy, but true. She responds to you when you talk to her, she'll follow your finger around the bowl, come up to nibble on it if you put it near the top of the water, dive down to re-arrange the rocks at the bottom of the bowl or even ignore you if she's mad. And believe me, I've made her mad.

On Sunday I was changing her water I had her in the pitcher with the new water while I was washing out her bowl and placing the rocks and the plant-thing, and when I was pouring the new water in she--maybe she was just so excited?--made a little jump for the bowl and totally overshot it. Right over the bowl, past the counter, onto the kitchen floor! Now, floors generally aren't the cleanest places in the world, being that we walk on them, and seeing that this is a fish and it is not supposed to be on the floor, I was freaking out. I scooped her up and was frantically wondering if I should rinse the dust, hair and granola bits off of her or just put her in the water, but then I was considering the chlorine in the tap water and how would I hold onto her and rinse at the same time? (This was all happening very, very quickly for those of you wondering.) So I just dumped her in the bowl--hair, dust, granola and all. She was very still for quite a number of hours and I was scared. Oh, she was mad at me. She would still come out to play with Craig though.
But she seems to be over it now. I seem to have bribed her because I made Craig promise her that he wouldn't feed her anymore. That's right, I'm not past begging, even with a fish.