Quite literally. No, I’m not pregnant. Allow me to explain.

I’ve had some stalks of lucky bamboo for a while now. I’ve never found my lucky bamboo to be particularly lucky and it isn’t really even bamboo. It’s actually a common houseplant called dracaena and it looks like this:

My lucky bamboo is super duper healthy and happy. At least, it used to be before I moved. There’s lots and lots of bright, indirect sunlight at my new place. Way more than at my old house. More light is nice, but it means algae. The algae that’s been growing on my lucky bamboo has made it not so happy and not so healthy.

For the last year or so, I’ve been waging war on algae and my lucky bamboo and I are losing the battle. I’ve cleaned out the pot and the rocks a million times and the algae always grows back within a week or so. Damn algae. So, I noodled on the intertubes for solutions to my algae problem. Other than putting it in a darker room, there’s not much I can do about it.

I thought, well, what keeps algae from growing in nature? Water aeration and movement. I thought about getting a fish tank filter and putting it on my plant pot, but that’s pretty silly and I couldn’t figure out how that would work anyway. Instead of trying to put a filter on a pot that was never designed for that, it seems much simpler to just get a pot with a filter, which you may recognize as something called an aquarium.

Yes! A fish tank! I can plant the bamboo at the bottom and have the tops sticking out. Perfect. So, this weekend, I bought a little fish tank and so far, my lucky bamboo seems pretty happy and algae-free.

After I got it all set up though, my lucky bamboo forest seemed rather lonely. There was something missing from my fish tank. I couldn’t put a finger on exactly what it was…

It seemed rather ridiculous to have a fish tank without fish. It’s a pretty small fish tank, just over three gallons, but there’s definitely room enough for a fish in my little dracaena forest. It is a fish tank, not a lucky bamboo tank, after all.

But, what kind of fish should I get?

Um, der, a goldfish, of course! So, I went back to the store and now I have an actual, real-life goldfish all because of stupid, snowballing, mountain out of molehill algae problem. Stupid algae. Fuck you, algae.

Here’s where I need your help though. What should I name my new goldfish? Please, leave your suggestion in a comment below. Maybe there will be a prize for the winning name. Or maybe not. Maybe you’ll just get bragging rights to say “I named Goldfish’s goldfish!”

I’ll try to remember to take a picture of the actual goldfish tonight for inspiration. Here’s hoping I don’t kill it before you’ve named it.