Hello from Auburn, WA

[bmw]

Got back into the hobby during the COVID quarantine. I used to keep fish when I was a kid, but wasn't very good at it--most fish died, other than a ginormous pleco that would never die and ate the flaked food upside-down from the top of the water and grew to take up my whole 10-gallon tank . When I was very young I loved watching our family aquarium and my first word was fish (pronounced "ish"). I'm up to three tanks (plus one 2.5 gallon grow-out tank with some shrimp and a bunch of algae that I don't count), all in my home office. I'm working on my wife to let me put a bigger tank in the family room. I'm trying a 35-gallon container-pond in the back yard this summer, but so far it isn't going too well. My favorite fish are danios.

Edited May 29, 2021 by bmw

[lefty o]

welcome back to the hobby, and to the forum.

[Colu]

Welcome to the forum nice tanks

[sudofish]

Welcome back! I returned this year as well. Man when I was a kid ~1986ish there wasn't much advice to be found. Mom took me to the fish store and the only advice we got was to fill up jugs of water and let them sit out overnight because any chlorine will dissipate by then and then I could add fish and be good to go. No advice at all regarding the nitrogen cycle. So that week we got a betta and some kind of guppies, but they weren't the pretty kind you see nowadays I think they were feeder guppies. Well the betta killed them all and then proceeded to die in the next few days due to the water conditions. Mom got mad and took everything back to the store and I never kept fish again till this year lol.

[bmw]

20 hours ago, sudofish said:

when I was a kid ~1986ish there wasn't much advice to be found

Yeah, I'm with you there...who sells a common pleco to a kid with a 10-gallon aquarium? I didn't know anything about the nitrogen cycle and I mostly just bought fish based on how they looked without any knowledge of their temperaments or requirements.

[GameCzar]

Sounds like me in the 70s!   I had no clue what I was doing and looking back I feel terrible about how mismatched my old 10 gallon was!