R.I.P. Dusty's Rhodes's Balls

So yeah, yesterday, we took the new cat to the shop to get his sexy parts removed. It came in at a cost of roughly $231 more than any previous cat neuterings I had known of had cost, but eh, Dusty's a good cat, and worthy of only the finest in ball-removal. He was pretty much wiped out for most of the day yesterday, but he's back to normal now, albeit a few grams lighter.



Meanwhile, Crackhouse still don't cotton to him none, so she's getting the run of the rest of the house, while Dusty stays locked up in here. We gotta try to get her claws capped pretty soon, but that's a terrifying proposal, so we're dragging the shit out of our feet on that one.



Meanwhile, there's fish-related goings-on, but first, a horrifying look into the world of the currently fishless 14-gallon tank. (Once again, R.I.P., two nameless otocinclus catfish) The other day, along with pulling out two fairly large Argentine swords (or were they Amazon swords? Or was one Amazon and another Argentine? God damn it.) for use in other tanks, (more on that in a second) I trimmed out this much dead plant material, plus a few handfuls more that went either in the kitchen or bathroom garbage cans:



And after all that, the damn thing still looks like this:



Off the top of my head, that's got one (massive) Amazon sword, one Argentine sword, three dwarf lillies, one absolutely goddamn gigantically huge aponegeton, (when I pulled it out to trim it, it was a good three feet from root to leaf tips) and an assortment of aponegetons and an anubias (I think that's what it is) tossed in as reclamation projects from other tanks, past and present, that don't have whatever sort of voodoo plant-growing magic that this tank has. Gotta be something in the water.

But yeah, the big stuff. Sarah finally got a couple of her underwater friends over here from the old homestead in Ada.


First, there's this five-gallon tank, featuring Boris the crowntail betta:



This picture doesn't really do him justice, because he is the goddamn craziest-looking fish I ever saw. He looks like something from one of those old 80's heavy metal album covers, all flying through the sky with lightning around him. Like he's something Dio would have to sword to death in a music video.



Yeeeeah. But anyway, he pretty much acts like he looks. He is like GODDAMMIT: The Fish. Like all he does is thrash around and eat worms and HATE. It is insane.

But the real coolness is this; a scheme that Sarah hatched months before we were all chillin' up in the same crib, but has finally come to fruition, with the addition of her two gallon tank and my shelves:



THE BETTA SHELF. Constructed from a bookshelf, three two-gallon tanks, one of those grow light things from Walmart, a handful of screws and tacks, and a chunk of that black cardboard backing that used to be attached to the back of the bookshelf. A finely tuned engine of animal husbandry if ever there was one.



On the left is Picasso, my damn-near year-old regular veil-tail betta, who's shown up in a few posts before; just scroll down, because I update like once a year, so if I last spoke of him in September, it should still be on the page. He has a little bulldog-face and is awesome.



On the right is Maurice, (The Fightin' Frenchy) Sarah's half-moon betta she picked up here a while back. He's awesome and looks like a watermelon under certain conditions.



In the middle is a brand-goddamn-new fish that Sarah got me as an early birfday present, Rufus. That's not a really good picture of him, because he's turned hella-pink ever since we got him out of that cup he was in, but I'm tired of messing with fish photos, so that's what you people will have to live with. But yeah, you better listen to this dude, because he knows what he's talking about. And remember to wind your watch.



In other news, I got an absolute shitload of photos and happenings over the last few decades that I've been meaning to throw up here, but never have. If I can ever figure out how to add one of those "click to read the rest" links to a post, I'll do some sort of massive clearinghouse sort of thing. Until then, I'll leave this with no explanation:

About time

I have a bunch of photo-related stuff to post, mainly from clearing out my closet full of crap and heading down to Ada for a couple days for Sarah and her mom's college-type graduation of fancy book-learnin', but for now, here's the one that I can get done in a few minutes with a handful of pictures. I'm lazy; that's how these things work. But anyway, I finally got some fish for the 14 gallon tank.

Freaking out in the bag

I'm still undecided as for what'll be the main featured fish in there, (leaning toward guppies, but that's subject to change) so for now, I went and got myself a cleanup crew. These two are otocinclus catfish, basically the freshwater fish keeping world's perfect engines of algae removal. Unlike the plecostomuses, (plecostomi?) which are mysterious poop-factories who never seem to actually eat algae, (or even algae wafers) yet are constantly taking a dump at all times, and more often than not turn into tank-busting behemoths, these dudes eat algae like crazy and stay small. And unlike Chinese/Siamese/etc. algae eaters, (usually just labeled as "algae eaters" in the store) otos don't grow into vicious little shits who'll suck a hole in the side of any fish big enough to get a grip on, and pretty much work and play well with others.

Chillin'

I've needed something along these lines for a while, because with all the excess plant-growing goodness that my fancy $25 gravel put in the tank, the algae has been running wild like Hulkamania, and while I can scrape that stuff off the glass, it's not so easy to get off the plants. And the shorter plants in there have been looking nasty lately, all with the brown algae from starting the tank and these gross little worms that apparently dig on said algae, but not enough to actually remove any of it. And an oto is gentle enough of a suckerfish to not shred your leaves when they take algae off a plant. Real service-oriented fishes. For the worms, pretty much any normal free-swimming fish out there will polish those off, so they'll get theirs in due time.

NOM NOM NOM NOM

Overall, though, I'm having to be cautiously optimistic at the most for these two since I added them to the tank, because there's one huge problem with these fish: Otos die like crazy. The way they catch them in the wild screws them all up, they acclimate to a new tank really badly, and half the time, they're starving in the pet shop's algae-free tanks. I'm hoping for the best, because the place I got them from is a way more seriously fish-oriented place than the normal chain stores, where they seem to actually give a shit about the fish and know how to take care of them, and these two fishes I got seem to have too much of an algae-gut to have been starving. Still, I'm holding off on naming them for now, to make it less of a bummer if I have to flush one of them, although I can guarantee that if I can ever tell them apart, one should end up being named Otto.

Anyway, check back in a week or two for an update on the alive-ness of these two, plus possibly pictures from a quarantine tank full of their future neighbors.

I just spent like an hour scraping algae out of the fish tank.

And there's still some in there, but I think I need to seriously start thinking about putting a fish or two in there. Meanwhile, in the 2-gallon, it's business as usual.

Current status

New 14 gallon tank, within a day or so of water being added:

A couple weeks later, fluorite dust starting to clear:

A week or so ago, fluorite dust giving way to tank-cycling bacteria cloud:

Today: Almost there~

Ammonia reads 1 ppm, (parts per million, duh) Nitrates are 5 ppm, and Nitrites read 1 ppm. I figure it'll be fish-worthy in a week or so. The fancy expensive gravel seems to be doing the job, because every plant except the lily that got screwed up by Methylene blue in the last 10 gallon disease outbreak has damn near doubled in size, and the original lily bulb that broke off of that plant is re-sprouting a new one. I'm pretty good at fish tanks, as long as there aren't any fish inside them. Hopefully, this tank doesn't turn into a death-trap like the last one.

2009 Omnibus Blog Stimulus Post

Okay, haven't posted since the last week of February, so I figure I better update on the happenings and goings-on. Busy month.

- Remember that post about how I cured fish disease by just letting the tank go and letting the fish get all unstressed and such? Yeah, so it ended up being kind of bullshit in the end. Without getting into the sad details, adding two new barbs to the tank stressed everybody out, everybody got sick, and this time, even with a hospital tank coming into play, everybody died.

So now, the ten gallon pit of disease has been abandoned, a new 14 gallon tank has started up, and hopefully, it doesn't turn into a pit of despair like the first tank did. R.I.P. Larry, Darrell #1, Edgar, and Bubba.

- Gonna mess with some website-based stuff, so this might look all weird for a while. Right now, it's running where I type stuff in at Blogger.com, and then it posts to my website. Thing is, you lose a whole lotta capabilities and bells and whistles that way, ("Older/Newer Posts" links) so I'm probably going to just go back to hosting this page at Blogspot. You'll have to deal with their stupid navigation bar at the top of the screen, but eh, you're not paying for this shit. And I'm not paying enough to be able to install my own blog software on this site, (and I wouldn't know how to anyway) so there you go.

- I put a bow on my cat. I don't know why. But whenever that thing is on there, she acts all chilled out, like some sort of reverse Mr. Hyde serum, so on it stays.

- Mastodon put out a new album, and it's the first time a CD has pretty much blown me away since the last time Mastodon released an album. Unfortunately, this is also the second straight time that a new Mastodon CD has made me all but forget about the existence of a pretty good new Sepultura CD.

- I'm still doing occasional Chicago Bears-related posts over at the Armchair Linebacker blog, and maybe when it's easier to do stuff like that, I'll put a link to it somewhere on here that's not just part of a blog post. The life of a Chicago Bears fan is a life of pain, but for real pain, check out Neil's posts there. He's a Lions fan. Yeah.

- On the 19th, me and my special lady-friend Sarah celebrated our one-year anniversary. Hopefully, she doesn't wise up any time soon, but if she hasn't gotten sick of my football card addiction, failure to consistently keep dishes washed, and general weirdness by now, I should be in the clear. Here's to many more years of lazy snuggling, trips to Souper Salad, and being able to tell people I'm not gay and having them actually believe me for a change.

In other news related to people in my family not being gay, my brother Jack and his wife Amanda just had a whole bunch of babies. Well, in the name of accuracy, she did most of the work of having them, and it was actually only two babies. But that's still twice as many as most people have, so it counts. Crazy shit. In my new-found role of Crazy Uncle, it falls to me the responsibility of teaching them how to do amazing things with boogers and fire. Hopefully, I am up to the challenge.

I've discovered the secret to curing fish disease

First, the bacterial/fungal/whatever shit broke out big-time in the ten gallon tank again, taking out Darrell #2 (The smallest of the three tiger barbs. Poor little guy.) in the process, and I finally got fed up. I just said fuck it, fuck bacteria, and if it's what's gotta happen to save the fish I still have, fuck the dang live plants. So I medicated the shit out of the tank, this time with stuff that's better for the fish but toxic to plants, as seen here:



After the dust cleared and the Methylene Blue faded, everything cleared up and things were great, aside from the near-death of my dwarf lily and a couple of my aponogetons. (The Amazon sword plant in there came through it awesomely, though.) For like a week. Then, Darrell #1 (Even if he's the only Darrell left, I'm keeping him numbered. I'm planning on the next tiger barb I get to be named Darrell #4, for the record.) started getting all white-spotty and eye-bloaty again, and in my frustration, I tried a bold new approach. I did absolutely goddamn nothing. I just let things go. And in the end, my gambit worked: After the initial disease breakout, I'm pretty sure the subsequent infections were sped along by stress from the tank's biological filter being killed graveyard-dead by all the antibiotics. So I just kept my water changes going, added some occasional Prime to neutralize the ammonia, and let the tank cycle again. Once the water stopped being cloudy, so did the fish. Larry and Darrell are as good as they've ever been, and it's all due to a strict regimen of medicinal neglect.
And it's kind of funny, because Barbs are usually the most gangster of small freshwater fish. I mean, they don't have the firepower to just chomp their neighbors in half, like an Oscar or something, but they will fin-nip each other and their tankmates into oblivion in the wrong conditions. Like they even tell you to keep tiger barbs in odd numbers, so that the odd fish out can hide and rest while the other even-numbered ones are bitch-slapping each other. But Larry and Darrell seems to be the best of pals now, even after Larry was a fucking bully to all the Darrells in the pre-columnaris era. I'm guessing it's because they've been to hell and back together, and have that same sort of bond that crippled Vietnam dudes have. Like I'll get a couple new barbs someday, and those two will swim up to them and be all "You wouldn't understand, because you weren't there! WE'VE SEEN SOME SHIT, MAAAAAAAAAAN." At least that's how I imagine it. In reality, they have brains the size of the head of a pin and just have thoughts like, "bubbles... bubbles... bubbles... food. Foooood, foodfoodfoodfood... bubbles..." But whatever. I got my fish back, and that's what matters.

Current Status

Haven't done this in like eight hundred years, so I figured I'd detail what's been going on in fish tank world. First, here's the ten-gallon I got in 2006, still going strong:


It's kind of a shameful thing right now, as I had a mysterious plant die-off a while back that spooked the shit out of the fish, so I had to put the plastic plants back in until things grow back to a decent size. The lily is still enormous and shooting up new leaves faster than the algae-eater can destroy them, and after he chewed the bulb off, it's starting to sprout out the beginnings of a whole damn new plant. But aside from the one in the front-left corner, all my various kinds of aponegetons that used to fill up the tank died back hard, with a few offshoots from the originals trying to make a comeback, and a couple tiny ones that have been there a while and probably won't ever hit any significant size. If all else fails, I'll just start gradually replacing the plastic plants with store-bought fully-grown ones. It's not as cool as growing your own from a bulb, but the plastic plants make me feel so dirty.

As for the actual fish, since the last mention of the tank, I think around the time ice storms forced me from my home, the betta I had in there died, possibly due to shitty tank maintenace and an overfeeding of those little freeze-dried worms that were all he'd eat. The rubber-lipped plecostomus (since christened Algae Crumpler) remains, which is crazy, seeing as how he's lasted two years after being thrown in an uncycled tank by a complete amateur who ended up sending countless guppies and mollies to their doom in unlivable water. Tap water, even. Now, completely cycled and free from ammonia and nitrites, I've got three tiger barbs in there, which in another case of me breaking my "oh man, I can't name a fish, because all they ever do is die" rule, have been named Larry, Darrell, and Darrell. There was a fourth, Darrell, but after a couple months, he got this really messed-up swim-bladder problem. If I had a forty, I'd pour it out for him. Anyway, tiger barbs are nippy little bastards, all into establishing a pecking order, where Larry, identifiable by bigger fins and a spot in addition to the usual stripes, is the clear leader of the pack. Every now and then, he gets in these little fishy roid-rages that leave Darrell running for his/her life while Darrell hides up in a lily pad. Of the other two, Darrell 1 is the other big one, who's fairly peaceful and may or may not be a lady, and Darrell 2 is the little one whose small-man complex makes him chase the other Darrell around occasionally and makes him usually be the first one to swim out in the open after the gravel-vacuum freaks them out and sends them to huddle in one corner. So these things have relatively well-developed personalities for animals with brains the size of a pin head.

Oh yeah, and I've also got this one now, a two-gallon:

Since she's awesome, my special lady-friend Sarah provided much of what you see here, like the two big plants, (and a third gigantic, awesome one that I accidentally snapped while moving stuff around, and it's finally fragment is that little tiny one on the bottom-right) the Buddha statue, and Picasso, the Betta you see swimming around in there. When we got him, he was this tiny little baby-sized thing with bleached-out, almost transparent fins, but now, he's fully crown, hella-colorful, and fucking pissed. He feels no pain and fears no man, and while the barbs run for the hills when I do stuff in their tank, he swims right up to my hand, and flares his gills like one of those desert lizards. He is the Charles Bronson of fish. He spends his time blowing those little bubble nests, challenging my finger to fights, and swimming around, which is something bullshit-artists will tell you that Bettas don't do.

Seriously, most of the crap they'll tell you about these things when they're trying to sell one to you is absolute, cruel, fish-murdering shit. They don't live in puddles in the wild; they live in damn rice paddies. They aren't stationary fish that love living in a goddamn pint of water, they swim the hell around, and in nature, they're in thousands of gallons. They need all the same shit a regular tropical fish needs, with a few differences. They don't need a huge tank or anything, (and depending on who you ask, putting them in a big tank can actually stress them) but I'd say they need at least a gallon, preferably between two and five. definitely not the little bowls and cups people always have them in. If the container is too small for a filter, it's too small for a Betta. And yes, unless you're good enough to remember to change out some water every day, they need to be kept at tropical-type temperatures, and they need a filter. Not a big ass powerful one, because it knocks them around, but one of those little air pump-driven Whisper ones works just fine, and if you know how to make a decent sponge filter, (I tried and failed, for the most part) that's even better. So if somebody tries to sell you a little fish bowl for a Betta, you should call them a son of a bitch, and if they try to sell you a "Betta vase," you should mercilessly beat the shit out of them. Fuck Betta vases. The plant's roots don't do shit to clean the water, and a Betta is a damn carnivore, so it can't live off the plant. The only reason a Betta lasts as long as it does in those is because it takes them a month to starve to death. So instead of buying a Betta vase, you might as well just buy the fish separately, get a couple little pieces of wood and a stapler, and just crucify the little sucker. It's basically the same thing as getting a fucking Betta vase. Fucking people.

But yeah, anyway, I sure hope the heater in there works.

I still have a fish tank

Yet still only one fish. But you know those little $2 packs of plant bulbs you get at Wal Mart that never grow?
Well, mine did!

Kiss my ass, plastic plants! Ha! And here's a close-up of my amzingly still-not-dead rubber lipped plecostomus.


I really should come up with a name for him, but I never officially named my cat, so that would just seem backwards. I shouldn't have wasted Kellen Winslow III on that guppy, probably. And that little brown rock looking thing next to the fake jaguar skull is a lily bulb that started to sprout, but never finished. I should probably scoop that out of there, because if it ever starts growing for real, the tank'll be completely choked with greenery.

Current Status

Plecostomus still only remaining living fish. He doesn't seem to mind. Not sure if it was that bacteria cycle stuff or what, but the tank has suddenly changed. The water looks a lot clearer, the plecostomus actually comes out in the open during the day for some reason, and algae seems to be growing on everything, thankfully not including the glass. Before, it never would grow on anything, despite the fact that I was constantly dropping the little wafers in there. Also, I gave up on the search and bought new algae wafers, which in addition to being a different brand are also a different color. So maybe now, the new green algae will mix with the old reddish algae that's already there to create some new greenish-red strain of super-algae. Or it could just kill us all, who knows. Hopefully the former.

Dead Guppies aren't much fun.

Now, I'm down to just the Plecostomus That Wouldn't Die. Stupid fish. Gonna change out about four more gallons of water today, and just let things sit empty for a while until I can buy more water and finish the total water changing process around Friday or so. And while I've always liked them, I'm giving up on putting guppies in there. I've already killed five, and that's more than I need on my conscience. If the algae eater decides to die in the meantime, I might just ditch the heater and go with goldfish, since those are also hard to kill, and new ones go for like a quarter.

Stupid fish. I should just have a tank with nothing but algae eaters and plants. Or maybe some snails.

Goddammit.

I think I'm about to give up on this fish tank thing. Kellen Winslow Jr. bit the dust this morning, and the dalmatian molly followed suit sometime between lunch and me getting home today, and the black molly won't eat or swim in any direction, even if you tap on the glass right next to him, meaning he's probably got a few hours left. The yellow guppy and the algae eater show no signs of any trouble right now, but aside from the black guppy with the mangled tail, neither did any of the other fish I keep killing. With hindsight, I should have just gone with the gangsta-ass Oscar tank, because that way, all the fish would still die, but they'd be going out fighting, instead of just floating.
Keeping fish might be the most depressing and infuriating hobby there is, outside of being a Chicago Bears fan.

r.i.p. black guppy

Bummer, dude. Not sure if I'm gonna go back to PetSmart for a replacement any time soon, but whenever I do go back there, I'm making sure the bitch that butchered his tail and eventually killed him isn't the one who scoops my fish out this time.

Return to the sea, little friend. *FLUSH*

current status

I'm worried about the black guppy. His tail fins got all screwed up somewhere between getting scooped out of the tank at PetSmart and getting dumped out of the bag here, and they seem to look worse every time I check him out. Also, he's just kind of hovering in one spot at the top of the tank most of the time, which is also kind of scary. He is eating though, which is never a bad thing. Everybody else is pretty much kicking ass at not dying, on a more positive note, and the hungry-ass dalmatian molly has cleaned up all the algae disks that the plecostomus won't eat.

current status

Added four more fish; a black molly, a dalmatian molly, and a couple more guppies, black and yellow. Decided to feed everybody, and all the new fish ate like crazy. K2 seemed horrified at the entire occurrence, hovering in the back corner and not eating, until the yellow swam up and they were all "aw yeah, you my nigga" and they're all schooling together now. The tank seems pretty segregated, though, with the mollies hanging out on the right and the guppies on the left, with the dalmatian molly running over there and scattering guppies every so often. The mollies appear to be way more gangsta than the guppies, which is troubling, since a molly is like the size of four guppies put together, but they aren't even semi-aggressive, so it should work out okay. Meanwhile, the rubber-lipped plecostomus remains unaffected by the festivites, and is still stuck to the back glass. Hopefully, everybody makes it this time, but I've put in about four gallons of the store-bought good water, so I remain hopeful. The black guppy did get his tail fins all screwed up somewhere in transit, but he did seem to be the hungriest and most active of the three in there, so things look good for now. Stay tuned for further details.

CURRENT STATUS

More than likely due to the ill-advised decision to use tap water and various chemicals, rather than the fancy store-bought stuff from downtown, I'm now down to one guppy. As such, I have decided to go against my normal policy of not giving fish names, (Because man, what if you use up a good name you could have given to a cat or something?) and he will now be known as "Kellen Winslow, Jr.", because he is clearly a fucking soldier. The algae-eater remains as well, but those hit a point where the only way to kill them is with hammers or fire, so he gets no such special treatment for now. Anyway, I bought the good water, and scooped out a little over a gallon of the old stuff, which is something I'll probably do on at least a daily basis for a while. Tomorrow (or later today) I might go to Petsmart to get more fish, because the way K2 swims up and down looking at his reflection in the wall as thought it was another fish is starting to depress me. Also, I got some new fake plants.

Current Status

Started small on fish tank; three random guppies and a rubber-lipped plecostomus. Plecostomus darted and hid behind heater, possible bad sign; guppies saw floating food and munched like no other, possible good sign. Water temperature approx. 78 degrees.

I know I could have gone big time and gotten some gangsta-ass Oscars or something, but I'm really into peace and harmony amongst fish, so I went with guppies. I'll let those guys flutter around for a while, and if the tank proves survivable, I'll go get some neons or those little frogs something, or possibly a betta, since their brains only fill up with murder when other bettas are around. I thought about those pink kissing fish, but my brother's is like the size of something you could totally eat now, and it's only a ten gallon tank, so that may not be wise. Also, I need more plants and something for nocturnal stuff like the algae eater to hide under.

A work in progress

Coming soon: FISH!