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March 2, 2008

25+ Gallons of Saltwater in My Living Room - Almost

By: The Dude on the Right
I normally don't blog as much I have been lately, but there weren't many movies I wanted to see over the weekend, even though I probably should have caught up on a few from the week before, and after seeing "Semi-Pro," I actually wasn't in a movie-seeing mood.  But I did need to do some cleaning around the Dude-Pad so I opted for that, and in the process almost had 25+ gallons of saltwater soaking in to my living room floor, probably resulting in the killing of my kids.

Yup, my kid's house needed some cleaning and maintenance of its own, and part of that was re-installing a protein skimmer that, well, it's a long story, but I took it off some time ago, but with my hoping to buy a new anemone for the tank, I knew I needed to get it going again.  So I put it back together, hung it off the back of the tank, fired it up, and at first things to be going well, until, thankfully, I heard a dripping coming from the back of my fish tank.  At first I thought I just didn't tighten the locking collar enough, but still the connection at the bottom of the skimmer kept dripping (and not a slow drip, either).  So I had to yank the contraption from the tank, take it to my kitchen, and investigate.  What did my investigation find?  Well, low and behold the o-ring was dried up and showed cracks when it was stretched a bit.  At first I contemplated "How does an o-ring go bad, and since when does that cause a catastrophe?", but then I remembered that the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was caused by an o-ring that failed.  I guess o-rings have been something I have taken for granted as part of my fish tank set up, and used to be something Space Shuttle engineers took for granted as well (at least some of them), but now I realize their importance again.  I could see Steve, Ashley, and Bamm looking at me like "Dad, what the hell were you thinking?", but as I said, thankfully the dripping was landing on something that made noise, as apposed to if it had just been dripping on the carpet, because then the timers would have shut off the lights on the tank, I wouldn't have noticed the water level dropping, and then I would have woken up in morning to find three kids flopping around, or dead, with my living room carpet soaked.

The Dude pad is almost clean, my kids are still swimming around, I have to find some new o-rings, and as I have had bad dreams of my accidentally tipping over my fish tank and hysterically trying to save the life's of my kids, my worst nightmare, a slow leak of my fish tank, almost came to life.

And you thought having a dog as a pet was difficult.

That's it for this one!  I'm The Dude on the Right!!  L8R!!!

Posted by Rightdude at 7:01 PM | Comments (0)