The Beginning

So to catch everyone up to where I am now, I'm going to condense everything up to just recently into just a few posts. They might be long, so bear with me.

On my 16th birthday, in the very last days of 2009, I got a 5 gallon Marineland Eclipse Corner 5. It was my first tank that I'd ever gotten, though my dad had a 55 gallon and some tanks before that when I was younger. I really had no clue what I was getting myself into. I set everything up and let the filter run for three days like the people at PetCo said to do. We went to PetCo and got two little GloFish, as I was fascinated by their fluorescent colors (and they glow under a black-light!).

The next day, we went to PetsMart and got two more of the little guys. They all seemed to be doing fine. So the next day, we went to Wal-Mart and got two more. When I put the bag in to float them, I accidentally squished one of the other ones against the side of the aquarium. I left the five be for a while, then went to PetCo about a week later and bought two emerald green cory catfish. They died within the warranty thing, so I took them back to the store and the sales clerk said that the ammonia was REALLY high in my water.

So, I went home and did a few water changes, waited a week, and bought two otocinclus catfish. Of course, they were dead by the next morning. So I took them back and did another water change. A few more of my GloFish had died, and I replaced them like any amateur would. I started taking a water sample every other day to have it tested for ammonia, and after about a week, I decided to do an 80% water change, and by the time I woke up the next morning, every single fish was dead at the bottom of the tank.

What made me want to keep going? I was determined to figure out how to do this. My dad finally broke down and told me to give the tank two weeks before adding any fish; he was tired of wasting money and time on my new hobby. And so I waited. This time I got three neon tetras. I let them have the tank for a week, and got two glowlight tetras and another cory catfish. Then I found a 10 gallon tank in the basement. Once I moved the fish from the 5 into the 10, I got a betta named Gary to take up residence in the five gallon.