untimely death and three deals

A few nights ago we hosted nerd night.  You should know I tend to freak out when company comes over.  I'm fine living with my own messes (for the most part) but I certainly cannot have others seeing them.  I scramble to rid the couch of cat hair, the mirrors of smudges, the kitchen of dirty dishes, the floors of dust, mud and more cat hair, the studio of clutter...  Though the last one is also the last thing on my list so usually never happens- I close the door instead, a quick fix.  You should also know that I start of with the vacuuming which requires me to wear those huge yellow hearing protector thingys.  This is important because our vacuum is terribly loud but also that I am so frantic I usually forget to remove the HUGE yellow things while I'm doing everything else.  Sometimes I don't even hear the (non-existent) doorbell as guests arrive.

None of this is relevant to my story other than it's setting the scene.

Recently, our guests were a couple that we are quite close to so the cleaning wasn't quite as frantic.  I dropped my goal of scraping the algae off the walls of the fish tank.  I wasn't going to be embarrassed.  These are my friends.  They won't judge me.  Everyone lives like this right?

We had a great time playing Pandemic with the expansion pack and actually BEAT the board!  We won one!  Whoo hoo!  But that is besides the point (and of interest I'm sure).

The fish tank is really quite the sight (I placed it too close to a window-the algae growth is out of this world) and is not something you can over look easily.  So it stood out (I am not proud of this fact).  My guests peeked in it before heading out.  I ran and got the fish food so we could all see them.  Only the fish didn't come.  Strange.  One of my guests admitted his glasses steamed up little when we had opened the lid to the tank.  The water was over 100 degrees.  The heater's thermometer had broken and the fish had boiled and my guests had discovered them.  Oh dear.  What a way to end an evening.  An untimely death.  I feel terrible and they will be missed, mostly by the cats who liked to "hunt" them, but missed none-the-less.

I also cannot take care of dead fish.  I mean I cannot look at them without squirming and getting the heebie-jeebies.  So the thought that I would have to fish their little bodies out of the tank was way beyond me.  I needed the mister to do.  But not for free.  He thinks I should learn to do these things.  No thank you.  So we struck a deal.  One deal card for each poor fish.  Three deals later and all the fish were removed.

The deals:
I will bake bread once/month until June 2011.
I will Craig'slist some of my roadside finds and a fish tank/equipment before December.
I will load all of my Mister's extensive music collection onto my computer/i-tunes.

DEAL!  Poor little guys.

note: For obvious reasons there aren't any pictures of the tank or the poor fish.