Asymptomatic

I've been doing a lot of things lately. Getting out of the house is becoming more common for me. And as I look forward to presentations at the PHP meetup at the end of April and PodCamp Ohio at the end of June, I've been attending little gatherings here and there as time allows. There are a couple trips in particular that require more elucidation than what effort I want to put into this seating, but I did want to write about something simple that strikes me every time I venture into the city for an event or meeting or whatever.

As I've observed in the past, you always take something with you when you visit somewhere like a major city, even if you're mostly retracing your steps. I've gotten in the habit of taking the R5 from Malvern to Market East on the instructions of folks whose company I enjoy but much less frequently these days than I like. On that route, I manage to walk through a good chunk of the Gallery, a kind of "train station meets three story mall". It is in this place that I've encountered one of my favorite Philly oddities.

It's just a matter of so many odd things being in one place at one time that strikes me, not that any one of these things in particular is odd. First off, I think that mall-on-station is probably a great idea commercially, but is still a tad strange. But then you add the fish and meat market. I think this is the only shopping center I've ever been in with a regular old Radio Shack, a bookstore, a CVS, a Game Stop, a standard food court, and... A fish market. Ok, maybe that's not weird, maybe it's just me. But then......

Recently Berta got the idea to pull the twenty-gallon fish tank out of the guest room and clean it up so that we could once again use it to contain fish. The tank still had little rocks in it left over from our last functional tank, but in addition to the dried scum that seemed impossible to remove from the glass, that's about all we had.

As it turns out, a little vinegar will remove all of the scum from the tank. She removed the rocks into a little plastic trash bin (which sat like some kind of modern art sculpture on our kitchen island for a while) and proceeded to scrub the tank to good effect.

Of course, we needed to get supplies if we were going to restart the tank, since the only thing we had were rocks. A trip to Pet Smart yielded a small bounty of fish items - clean tank rocks, an over-the-edge filtration device with extra filters, an in-gravel aerator, and a heater of a size suitable for heating our tank....