Our Goldfish And Chanukah

Nearly a full year later and our goldfish are still alive and seemingly quite happy. I have finally got over my fear of waking to find a floating fish and have started to accept that they can indeed live longer than the two weeks which was my previous fishes' average life span. In case you don't know about our fish here is a short clip by Rafi with a full introduction to them :

Anyway, people are generally of the opinion that fish are not much more exciting than a pot plant and I must admit that until I had some 'long' surviving species of my own, I tended to agree, but lately DH and I have come to the conclusions that our fish most definitely have their own unique personalities.

First of all Big Boy is the quintessential "big fish". He is large and has a large dominating manner. He is not afraid to push Swimmer out the way to get at the food and he has marked the tunnel in the tank for his own exclusive use. He sleeps there every night without fail. Quite what he is sheltering himself from I have not yet ascertained. They say that goldfish have a 3 second memory. Bless poor Swimmer he was gifted with a one second one. When they were handing out goldfish brains, Swimmer was in a different queue altogether. He makes Dory from Finding Nemo look like a genius. We first noticed this trait in the morning when we put the fish flakes in. Whereas Big Boy darts around eating as much as possible, and gets excited as soon as he sees me lift the food bottle, Swimmer takes a few minutes to realize that the food is there. Once he remembers that the flake stuff is food, he stalks up on it and then aims and pounces. Inevitably he misses and the small wave he generates causes the flake to float away. He will chase one piece of food around like this for a long time, ignoring all the other more accessible flakes before it begins to sink. On other occasions he will ignore the real food completely and chase the filter bubbles instead with a look of surprise when they have no substance in his mouth. But the strangest thing he does is swim into the corner of the tank and try to swim through the wall. He spends ages just swimming up at the corner over and over. They say watching fish is soothing and therapeutic, but watching my silly albeit cute fish try to swim through solid glass day after day makes me more agitated than anything else.

On other topics, we went to the annual Chanukah party in Double Bay. I met a friend there who has four boys of her own, two of which are the same age of my two so they had great fun. It was not as well attended as last years and the cost of all the rides had gone up exponentially. The boys had a ride on the ferris wheel, we watched the Jewish Boy Scouts erect a huge Menorah made out of wooden poles and ropes, popped quite few sword balloons and the boys went down a slide which was erected on a crane. There were also pony rides and a petting zoo, dodgems and jumping castles. All the normal coconut shy things were there too with the odds still firmly stacked against the competitor. We missed the actual lighting of the Chanukiah as it was getting dark and the longer we stayed, the more I was getting nagged about more and more rides.

Tonight is the last night of Chanukah so we will be having latkes again. DH believes that any festival is a good reason to have latkes. So off I go to grate some potatoes.