[irrelevant fish story]

Twenty-something years ago I hooked up with 3 women (nurses I worked on a psych ward with) and rented a 4-bedroom house in Boston. We were very excited by the setup for a while, but it didn't take long for things to go downhill -- we essentially divided up into two 2-person teams to fight over where the thermostat should be set and lots of other things.

On the other team was a woman I'll call Lisa. One of the passions she brought to the house was a 6-foot-long salt water fish tank that I could literally lie down in. After moving in, she spent a great amount of time setting it up before driving out Route 9 to Framingham to buy a large stock of fish.

But Lisa was what I would call a moody (bipolar seems to be the fashionable label) person. You could gauge the regular waveform of her moods from the fish tank. As the wave descended below the midline, we'd come home and find 1 dead fish. When the wave touched its lowest point, I'd come home from a night shift and find that *all* the fish were dead.

As the mood wave rose above the midpoint, Lisa would get some cash and drive to Framingham to buy a new fish family. And so this cycle repeated several times over the course of about 9 months until our lease expired...

[/irrelevant fish story]

My memory is that they were expensive little buggers and that they were very sensitive to slight fluctuation in water characteristics and various infections. When I see a big salt water tank in a restaurant or the lobby of a building and all the fish are happy, I just assume that those tanks are under the care of a professional service.