Thursday morning. Time to bail again. This time, the Main Tank.
Actually, because of the rug, and with two of us to shuffle buckets, we siphoned the water off into buckets, removing specimens as we took the level down, and putting them into the buckets. At this point, catching the tang was relatively simple, but while I was at it, durned if I wasn’t going after the Murderous Pistol Shrimp, too. Read the rest of this entry »
Wah! I lost a post. I’d written this, I know I had, and when I brought it up, there was only:
Wednesday. Aquatic Dreams day.
That’ll teach me to try and work ahead. Of course, had I remembered to post some time in the last several days, I’d have discovered this sooner. My only excuse is, I’ve been working on covers…and been seriously into them. Staying up way late and getting on them as soon as I wake up. I’ll have some more slide shows soon, though none as cool as the Groundties and UpLink ones, because these are more and more from scratch and the layers aren’t near as developmentally cool.
Anyway…Wednesday. Aquatic Dreams. Read the rest of this entry »
My darling little fish, for whom I’d gone to so much trouble…was MIA. Read the rest of this entry »
Saturday.
I have an appointment to meet Sharon and Joan for my first ever manicure/pedicure. This wasn’t just an indulgence, but another Necessity: My fingernails were an absolute mess from all the stuff I’d been doing outside, and I thought I’d go check the place out, because someone I know has feet which could use some serious TLC, and this someone doesn’t trust people to mess with said needy feet. Joan and Sharon had set this up and I decided to go with the gang and check it out.
It also meant getting up at the crack of, after getting to bed sometime between 2 and 3 am, because before manicures happened, I had to get the tank’s “extras” up and running, Read the rest of this entry »
to yesterday’s post.
I forgot to mention…you see, even tho it was hard to see Sharon leave (but then, it’s always hard when one of your best friends ever leaves) it was, in the end, a Very Good Thing. Remember the title: Necessity’s a Mother. If she hadn’t left, we’d have done it the same way Carolyn and I did it before, which, while it worked, still placed a dangerous strain on the main sump tank. This way, we now have it set up so the removal of the pump is both (relatively) simply and most importantly, gentle on the sump. So…
Thanks, Sharon, for leaving. It was meant to be.
Huggies!
Ja ne!
Where was I? Oh, yes. I’d been deserted. Yes, deserted.
Oh, I don’t hold it against Sharon, not at all. There really wasn’t anything she could do, from her perspective. As she says, she thought it was just new pump time and nothing to be done until morning when we could get to the fish store. Besides she was gawd-awful tired (her work schedule is unbelievable) and had a lot to do before leaving for World Con on Sunday (this was Friday night) and I was in such a state of shock, I couldn’t even say “But wait! Read the rest of this entry »
Quick recap: took Carolyn to the airport, spent first day with plants and Joan, second day, went to Aquatic Dreams to get the RODI filter checked. Got home and began running water, with the idea of doing the water change before Carolyn got home, so it would be one less thing on her mind. Maybe do a little tank cleaning while I had the water level down.
Couple of little details I forgot to mention. I took the pump Carolyn said didn’t work, which I thought I had fixed earlier this summer, to AD to see if it really was dead…naturally, it worked just fine when he powered it up. Don’t ask me, but I don’t look gift horses, etc. And it’s worked fine since…which becomes significant. The other thing, and the one that probably prompted my notion to do the water change before Carolyn came back, was the presence of an adorable, plump tail-spot blenny at the store. Now, this is one of our favorite fishies, and we lost our previous one…we think to the murderous pistol shrimp. We hadn’t been able to get a replacement for over a year, so I didn’t want to let this one get away. Read the rest of this entry »
Of Carolyn’s absense was deceptively quiet. I got up very early, did some more in the back until ten thirty-ish, when I headed for our fish store (Aquatic Dreams) to get the RODI filter checked. This is the filter that strips everything out of tap water except for the H’s and O’s. Anyway, two of the four filters involved were, indeed, shot. This meant that all the top-off water Carolyn had carefully run before leaving was yucky, and probably the water throughout the tank was compromised. Solution? Waterchange. 20%. Four five gallon buckets to run, in addition to the 30 gallons of top-off water. Understand, this is pretty much running the water for two days straight.
But first, I had to prime the new filters with a few gallons of waste water (which I put on the plants, thank you!) I put the first filter in, started the water, and headed out to pick up mulch (and other necessities…like a water filter for the fridge) from Lowe’s.
Hah! Like I could get out of there at sale season without bringing home some plants. Actually, I did. But I headed down to Norwest Feed and Pet…can’t remember why, now, but they had killer sale going, so I didn’t get out of there unscathed.
Mind you, at this time, I envisioned the rest of the week to be pretty much devoted to running water and prepping it for a water change on Carolyn’s return, so I figured I’d have plenty of time to get some of these things done in the back. I got home, changed the filter, went out and planted some plants while the other filter flushed, then got the water going, before heading upstairs to watch the semi-finals of “So You Think You Can Dance”.
Does the phrase calm before the storm mean anything to you?
Ja ne!
ac
I don’t trust them. Never have, never will. Does anyone else share that aversion? Seems like every time I count on one for something important, it fails to go off and when I want the thing to shut up, it refuses.
Now, I realize, this isn’t the fault of the machine, but of its programmer. That, again, would be me. VCRs? never a problem. Computers? Ditto. Wiring a complex of electronic things together, sure, why not? But the logic of alarm clocks, especially the plethora of modern digital clocks, apparently eludes me. Read the rest of this entry »
…of many things.
We all deal with loss of a loved one in our own way. Some of us go silent. Some talk about anything and everything other than the individual. Some pick fights because they’re angry and they don’t know why, and they just have to vent or explode. Some of us bury ourselves deep in any project other than what we were working on when the news came.
That would be me.
For those handful of people visiting here who aren’t aware of it, my best friend, business partner and domestic partner, CJ Cherryh’s mother passed away recently. Carolyn, of course, flew down to Dallas for the funeral, but we really couldn’t justify the cost of both of us going down, so I stayed here and kept the house in order for her return. Alone, unable to participate again in the Celebration of Life of someone who was very important to me, I did just that, buried myself in the plants, the pond and getting the fishtank back in shape.
I realize (duh) I haven’t posted for a long time. That’s because (a) I was too wiped at the end of the day to do anything constructive and (b) with some of the things I got myself involved in, I was kind of afraid Carolyn would worry (about her fishtank!) if she happened to check up on my blog, which added stress she didn’t need, and (c) if I tried to make the details of those adventures in tank-sitting funny, it would be disrespectful, somehow, to Lois.
Funny how we rationalize our desire to just hunker down and avoid thinking. Lois would be all for anything that made those she cared about laugh, so… in tomorrow’s installment of Necessity’s a Mother, I’ll bring you all up to speed on the State of the Fishtank and the Pond.
Meantime, a word about mothers. The loss of a parent is hard, period. The loss of a mother…well, that’s just unique. Biologically-speaking, you’ve only got one to lose. Even for those of us who tended to be papa’s daughter/son, Mothers are special. In this day and age, we can exist without a physical father ever coming near us. We aren’t yet to the point where we don’t still need our human incubator. (and I use that term in the most loving and respectful sense.)
And that leaves a lifelong impression, no matter the subsequent actions of said “incubator”. Somehow, children find a way to excuse the most outrageous acts on the part of their mother.
And the good ones…well, there’s a simple little song my sister and I sang for my mom, back when we were kids that pretty much sums it up. To this day, I remember the words:
“M” is for the million things she gave me,
“O” means only that she’s growing old,
“T” is for the tears she shed to save me,
“H” is for her heart of purest gold;
“E” is for her eyes, with love-light shining,
“R” means right, and right she’ll always be,
Put them all together, they spell “MOTHER,”
A word that means the world to me.
—Howard Johnson (1915)—
With love, to all the mothers out there.
Ja ne!
