Oh! The Pressure!

Well…I’m not sure what is going to happen over the next few weeks. The pressure is overwhelming. Now… I’m not one to feel the stresses of everyday life, but I think you will agree with me when you hear the level of responsibility that has been placed on my shoulders…ahh…

My mother has left town for 3 weeks and I am responsible for feeding the fish. I’m extremely worried that one is going to die on my watch. This was never an issue in our house growing up. We didn’t have animals…well…I guess we did, but I don’t remember having to feed them and they definitely weren’t right inside the house where we lived. There were some chickens, a cat (or 5 or 6…not sure), a bird (that died when the house got sprayed by a skunk and my sister opened the window over night so we could breathe!), a pheasant (that also died from what I can remember…other than that time my father put it in the oven as a joke and put it out on the table to reveal it as “Pheasant under glass” and the heat had somehow healed it for at least the 30 seconds it took to fly out of the pan onto the table), a gerbil…I don’t know what happened to that thing…but I remember an incident with a pet mouse that got lost in the house and then found in the middle of the night in my bedroom months later…(it was much faster at that point after having run free for so long and catching it was a chore!)…anyway…Obviously I’m not an animal person. There are outdoor pond fish flakes, indoor fish flakes (orange label), another container of upstairs indoor fish flakes, a container of fish flakes that are no longer used because they may cause the water to cloud up…we got jumbo fish, tiny fish, fish with fishy fish, orange fish, pond fish, …fish with lights, fish with a side nightlight, fish without a light, …There is also a simple math equation that my mother gave me for feeding them all. It is 3 flakes per fish per day…Oh Gosh!…one, two, three, four…crap…one, two…darn…one, …

I just recently potted 4 of my plants at my house into one pot for a plant pleth-flora party. That’s about my speed on the living things in a single-family dwelling. I only have to water it once a week or so. I remember because I’ll be working out and drinking a glass of water and think, “hey! That plant looks wilted. I wonder what it needs?” I look at the water in my hand and remember exactly what it needs and I give it a drink. See that? It’s much easier. I’m never walking by wilted fish eating fish flakes. I’m just going to do the best I can with these things. I hope this cat doesn’t eat them….wait a minute…where the heck did this cat come from. Darn it Mom! A freakin’ cat?…in a house?…aaahhh….whose feeding this thing and how many flakes does it get?