“Carppy”

There is no such thing as a free lunch, even if it looks free. We went to Metro (like Costco) to get a bunch of things for the holidays. Apparently if you spend too much they give you a free bottle of champagne and Carp... yes, the fish... it’s a Christmas thing here. So the attendant scoops out “Carppy” form a huge vat of writhing fish upon fish out of water struggling for life. Water wouldn’t have helped them, it was freezing, they would simply have been Carp-sicols. Our fish is tossed in a plastic bag and handed him to us. He flaps and our guys go wild with excitement. We have a few more hours of shopping to do elsewhere and figure the “fish slapping” in the trunk will end before we get home.
So, we get home and the apparently frozen and dead fish is in the words of the Wizard from the Princes Bride - “...only mostly dead, which is different from all the way dead.” So, falling back to Slovak tradition we try to resurrect the poor beast and put him in a tub of water. Guess what - he jumped up to 80% alive! The guys loved it, named it, and were checking on him minute by minute (think: overly attached children to the Passover lamb on the way to the slaughter). The boys went to bed and the fish went to fish heaven (by natural causes... I swear!) So, not that his is all the way dead I had to do the fatherly thing and “clean it.” There is nothing clean about this process... especially in your bathtub. I quickly realized that I had never really cleaned a fish, especially at 12pm at night in my bathroom (kitchen was occupied with Christmas baking stuff). So, the moral of the story - ask for two bottles of champagne and leave the “free” fish behind!