There's plenty of evidence to indicate that I'm not an idiot. I got good grades in school, I went to college on an academic scholarship, and I work with pretty complicated technical concepts at work. The only thing is, I am an idiot. A BIG idiot.

This morning when I went into Alexis' room to feed the fish in the saltwater tank, I noticed a crab sitting at an odd angle behind the rocks. I studied it for a minute or two and when it didn't budge, I cleverly deduced that it was not a living crab. So I moved the rocks, scooped the corpse up with a net, and gave him a proper clockwise funeral. Flusherooooo!

I didn't say anything to Mr. Husband because I have found a shrimp corpse and another crab corpse in the past few weeks, and I didn't really need to hear him tell me that I need to figure out what is wrong with the tank. I ran every water quality test under the sun this morning and couldn't find anything wrong, so him asking me if I checked the pH, ammonia, nitrates, nitrites, calcium, iodine, buffering capacity, blah, blah, blah would have just annoyed me to no end.

We spent our day out running various errands, including important tasks like buying Strawberry Shredded Wheat so that Alexis doesn't fall victim to SSW deprivation tomorrow. When we got back home, I went straight upstairs to feed the fish and turn off the light for the night. The instant I dropped a couple of chunks of frozen fish food into the tank, I noticed a little claw come swiping out from under a rock. I stared at that damn crab for a solid five minutes trying to figure out how it not only returned from the dead, but found it's way all the way through the sewer system, across the hall, and back into the aquarium. I finally decided that it was either a ghost, or we must have had a crab in the tank that we didn't know about.

So, Mr. Husband came upstairs and I told him we have a ghost in the tank. He looked at the little crab and then said, "He probably just shed his exoskeleton."

Oh, yeah, that would be slightly more logical than a ghost crab returning to a crappy little tank in the afterlife, now wouldn't it?

Now I'm trying to figure out if anything ever died, or if I've been pulling out shed exoskeletons, obsessing for hours every day over water quality, and cursing the death of a bunch of over-priced critters for no reason.

I am an idiot.