I finally broke down and decided to get a house pet. A neighbor was giving away his 55 gallon freshwater fish tank and we took it. It had 5 Angelfish in it and a sucker fish (plecostomus catfish). Unfortunately the Angelfishes didn't make it a week. Only the Pelco made it. We found out our tap water had high Ammonia and Nitride in it using a test kit. You can also get a free water test at any PetSmart or PetCo store.
I also 'cleaned' the filter, which I learned later was probably a bad idea since I killed good bacteria that is needed to absorb the Ammonia from the fish waste. So I had to wait for the filter to regenerate itself before adding fish. I could not wait so I purchased Nitra-Zorb which will absorb ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. It seem to work, within a day of placing the pouch in my filter all 3 items measured zero. Now I first added 2 Clown loaches to the tank. We had pond snails growing like crazy so I read that Clown Loach would eat them up and they did. Most of the snails disappeared after a few days. A few days later we decided to stock the tank and added 2 Crayfishs, 2 Blue Botia Loach, 2 Blue Mbuna, 2 Yellow Labs, and 2 Red Parrots.
Here is a picture 4 months later with my Lytro camera.
