How to keep a goldfish alive

Here is our goldfish Goldie. She is 2 and a half years old. I've read on some of your blogs that you've had goldfish, but can't keep them alive for more than a few days. Well, I've decided to share with you my advice on keeping a goldfish alive. Really, it's probably not the greatest advice or the best care instructions, but it's worked for me and we have a 2 year old goldfish to prove it. Well, it's not really gold anymore, more of a creamy white goldfish. I'll explain the color issue later.

How to keep a goldfish alive:

1. Give the bowl a good cleaning, scrub down once to twice a month. Seriously, this is the only time I change the water. I move Goldie into another bowl. I dump out the old water, put the rocks into a separate container, clean out the bowl with dish soap and warm water. Then I rinse the rocks off. I usually squirt a little bit of dish soap in the rocks and then rinse them until the water runs clear (no more bubbles). I try to make sure there's no more soap on the rocks. Supposedly, you're not suppose to use dish soap when cleaning fish stuff, but I use it anyway. Then I dump the rocks back into the bowl, fill it up with cold water, and then let the water clear up a little bit. After the water looks clear, I move Goldie back into her clean, fresh bowl.

2. Feed the fish every two days or so. Sometimes I forget for like three days. I'm so bad! I feed it just one time the day I do decide to feed it and it's just a little pinch of goldfish food (the flaky kind). I think this is why I can get away with not cleaning her bowl very often. When you over feed a fish the bowl gets dirty way too fast.

3. That's it! I've been doing that for two years now and somehow our little goldfish has survived my terrible attempts at caring for it. So that's how you keep a goldfish alive. Well, at least it's worked for me. Back to the whole color issue. We did a little research online. They can turn white due to lack of sunshine or really dirty bowls. I think ours is due to the latter. But we do try to move her bowl into a patch of sunlight when we remember.