When I was a little kid, my grandpa and uncles had some beautiful tanks. Everything from pirahna to tetras. I remember spending a lot of time around them back then. My dad had what I think was a 20g in our house. I remember thinking the angel fish were the coolest things I'd ever seen. We never really knew how to take care of it (I think, I was pretty little), so it soon became an iguana habitat. But when we made the trek from Chicago to Wyoming, the tank didn't go with us.
So, some 20yrs later, I bought a 30g FW for my family when we lived in SoCal. I started with peaceful fish and a goal of having a pair of angels. Unfortunately we still didn't know what we were doing, and my wife was obsessed with cichlids. So, other than my eel, my peaceful fish perished.
We then moved to Wisconsin, and the tank did not make that journey with us.
I travel a lot for work and back in November I returned late one Friday night from a trip to Boise and wasn't feeling so good. A couple of days later I ended up in the hospital with internal bleeding. Spent a week in the ICU and basically came real close to kicking the bucket. I'm not an old guy, so this was a pretty big deal for my family.
Anyhow, death didn't want me, so I came out of it craving more hobbies. I wanted to do more meaningful things with my time. First I bought a new DSLR camera (actually did that on my laptop from the bed in ICU). Second, I went and got myself a 20g starter kit. I was so engrossed in it that I got my wife a 37g (it's now a cichlid tank, imagine that) and got my kids each a 10g starter kit. Then my brother saw how into it I was that he gave me his old 55g out of his garage. It had a leak and needed a reseal. Well, it's freakin winter, so I can't do a reseal in winter without having to leak test it in the garage. So I hit the Petsmart $1/g sale and got a 55g to use with all of the accessories my lil' bro gave me. The rest is history.
I am now an addict. By this summer I should add the other 55g, and we'll have 2-55g's, 1-37g, 1-20g, 2-10g. AND I'm planning on doing a 5g Betta bedside tank by June. My sife is also encouraging me to keep an eye on Craigslist for a good deal on a 125g, but she says that I have to re-do the floors upstairs first. LOL! I just can't get enough of this hobby. Oh, and count on more tanks, because my daughters guppies are fixing to multiply!!!!