Huckleberry Fin

No, that (the title of this blog post) is not a misspelling. Although Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses a different spelling, "fin" is appropriate for the name of Suzanna's new fish.

Yes, today we bought a Betta fish for Suzanna to keep in her bedroom and care for. Her teacher had an aquarium in the classroom this year that she was willing to part with at the end of the year (she's retiring), and Suzanna expressed interest in it. I, however, expressed a strong lack of interest in inheriting a multi-gallon fish tank to store somewhere in the house and to stock with fish and to maintain and to clean up after whenever reckless children knocked into it and overturned it onto the carpet, etc.

However, faithful readers will recall that I used to own a Betta fish myself (read this), and we still have his little Betta-sized fish tank. We told Suzanna that she could stock that tiny tank with fish and keep the pet fish in her bedroom provided that she keeps her bedroom clean (something that she doesn't consistently do). So Suzanna dug out the Betta tank and set it up, and this afternoon Susan brought home the fish from the aquarium that she has had in the library at school this year. They put the fishies into our Betta tank . . . and they all promptly died.

Suzanna was in tears, but I promised that we'd go buy an actual Betta for the tank, and we did. She chose a male with a red belly, blue body, and long, tassle-like fins. She also got Betta fish food and two plastic plants to adorn his tank. After carefully considering many options for his name, Suzanna settled on Huckleberry Fin: "huckleberry" because he's dark blue, "fin" because he's a fish, and the combo because it's a literary allusion, and that's how we roll in our house.

So far he has been very well behaved and, best of all, he has remained living. Let's hope he keeps that up. Here are some pics: