If you're looking to save money during this recession, here is one way not to do it. Do not try to clean the air bubbler in your fish tank. If it is so covered in algae that it is hardly producing bubbles, just throw it away. A new one only costs about $3 at Petsmart or Walmart or even less if you get the under-the-gravel time. I don't care if you have to dig under you car seats and the sofa cushions to find the change to do so. Just don't take a toothbrush to it.In case you couldn't tell, I took a toothbrush to mine last week. I was trying to save a few bucks. Big mistake. Huge. Around 4 a.m. this morning I woke up after dreaming that someone's car alarm was going off, only to find out that it wasn't a dream, and it wasn't a car alarm. The series of beeps were real. I just didn't know where they were coming from.
After fumbling around in the dark to turn on the Sylvania light bulbs in my room and locate my glasses, I got up and slowly walked around the house. I wanted to find the source of the beeping and annihilate it. If that meant taking a hammer to a malfunctioning smoke detector or pounding on a neighbor's door in my pajamas, so be it. Luckily, I didn't have to do either of those things, as I quickly realized that my wake up call came directly from the fish tank and from that air bubbler to be precise. I spent the next 30 minutes sticking my hand in and out of the tank as I twiddled with the bubbler, trying to find a beep-free position.
Around 4:40 a.m., I finally found it, or so I thought. When I woke up at 7 a.m.--I had to get up and touch up carpet before the 11 a.m. showing--I discovered that my tinkering had made matters worse. Whereas before the bubbler was producing a series of beeps, followed by a few seconds of silence, the bubbler was now creating a constant chirping. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that a blue bird had flown in the door that the incosiderate realtor had left open the other night, built a nest in my fish tank, laid some eggs, and flew away when those eggs hatched this morning.
So guess what I got to do today when the showing was complete? (Yes, the realtor actually showed for once and left a nice message about how nice my house was inside on the back of her business card. Now why couldn't I have had her as a realtor?) I got to go to Wally World and buy a bubbler, something I should have done days ago.
Moral of the story: Sometimes it's better to spend money than to save it, especially if the former gets you a few extra minutes of sleep.
