Step 3: Take Over the World

Or, A Story About Keeping Your Eyes on the Main Objective.

When I was chatting to Mum this afternoon she told me about this rather delightful chain of events and I thought I’d share it – it lifted my mood considerably!

10yo brother’s bedroom is at the back of the house and has a big north-facing window which catches a lot of sun and makes his room very hot. This means that he overuses his airconditioner trying to keep the room cool, and it’s upping my parents’ power bill. So, this weekend past, they finally decided to bite the bullet and build a pergola outside his room to shade the window and the wall.

Perth’s major hardware chain has apparently stopped supplying the right kind of wood to build pergolas, so Stepdad had to go all the way across town to a salvage yard to get some. But they didn’t have any really long beams, which meant that he had to put a support halfway across – right into the spot where they currently have a fish pond.

So, they decided to bite another bullet and finally build a huge fish pond they’d been planning on the other side of the house, and move the fish into that, so that they could build the pergola.

But the trouble is that there’s a drop of about half a metre from the path by the side of the house to the old garden bed where they want to put the new fish pond, and since we have lots of kiddies in our family and hopefully more to come, there was a risk of them falling in. So Stepdad decided to build a fence. The hardware didn’t have anything for fencing except for treated pine, and if you use that near fishponds the chemicals kill the fish (and are just generally nasty anyway). So he cut down a dead eucalypt in the yard and sawed up that for fencing, needing to buy a new saw in the process.

So he started installing this fence, and apparently forgot that the fact that the new pond is next to the bore tank meant that there are reticulation pipes under the ground. Shortly, there was a punctured reticulation pipe and it took quite a bit of effort, pipe and glue to fix it.

After this long and torrid day, in which they got to the point of a fixed pipe, a partly built fence, a partly dug pond, and no pergola, they (Mum, Stepdad, 12yo Sis and 10yo Brother) were mooching around the garden in the evening, just generally enjoying it, when Mum decided to feed the goldfish in the pond. She usually counts the fish as they come to the surface and feed, to make sure all seven are still there (we occasionally lose one to birds).

There were fifteen.

Our goldfish bred. I have never known this to happen before!

Once they got over the shock of finding eight baby fish in the pond, they were talking about moving the fish to the new pond once it was built, and about how they now wouldn’t need to buy more fish for the bigger pond. Then Mum suggested that after the new pond was built they should leave the old pond for a while to check that there weren’t any more goldfish eggs waiting to hatch.

Stepdad apparently gave her a look and patiently reminded her that they were trying to remove that pond so that they could build the pergola that had been the driving motivation for all of their efforts that day!

:-)