Burnout

I never thought I would get burned out on my fish hobby, but I think it's beginning to happen. It's not fish in general; I certainly still love my bettas dearly and want to raise some spawns. I won't dream of taking down any of my "pet" fish tanks, either. I think the real problem is not having enough time to maintain a breeding program. And I don't intend on selling off any of my equipment. But I'm considering taking some of it ... well, offline for now. I have the guppy rack that.... well, has suffered some casualties due to I am assuming the lack of water changes.... with the empty tanks (not all of them, just some), I could migrate my bettas into this and have just 1 rack. I will still have the barracks, as I cannot house the bettas in the 10 gallon tanks. I was planning to build a drip table for juvenile bettas but I am going to withhold on this for now. The barracks is again beginning to stop up so it requires a very thorough cleaning and flushing, and this will be a huge undertaking I haven't had the time to do yet. I had to remove several boxes from the wall so I could arrange all the fish under all the available dripping emitters; the rest do not drip at all right now. They were all going strong when I got the emitters, but debris has undoubtably gotten in the way of the rest. I don't know how I will clean out the hoses yet, but I must do so. I guess I'll have to take all the emitters out and flush water through the lines when all the fish are off the wall, on a table or something, for a while. I suppose I could put a fish each in the old gallon jars in the basement for up to a week while I work on it. With the hurricane, losing 1 job due to the closing, and getting a new job, I have just been too preoccupied so far for about the past month now. :>

So yeah, maybe I am going to slow down a bit on the fishing for now, if only I could figure out how. I can't exactly stop the barracks, and it's the biggest hassle right now. :E And there's *no* way I could maintain jar changes again if I didn't have the drip system. Maybe I will just take down a few tanks, and breed very few fish for a while. It's not a hobby I'm going to tire of anytime soon, so I should just take it slow and keep a handle on the rest of life first, for now, I guess. :P

Grindal Worms

Wheeee! Once again I have a multitude of grindal worms. Steph revived her old dried up block of what was once worms and was inspired to write up a Word doc (which I still have yet to check out! I always forget from home, and I don't have it with me at work, ack). So I decided that maybe I should try my cultures again. I had to let them die down due to the sickening invasion of fruit flies. The cultures began to stink after a while so I just let them go. I let some of them dry up (the stinky ones), and I just stopped feeding some of the others that'd had the fruit flies and/or mites in them, to see if the baddies would go away. They did and I saw a worm or two. Man, those things survived for a month or two with no extra food in the dirt. Which I guess really is not a big surprise after all, considering they're worms and that's what worms do, heh.

So anyway, we went to Applebee's this weekend to eat. I got something to go in this really cool domed shaped bowl with lid that's maybe 8 inches across and I'd guess about 6 inches high. Shaped kinda like a UFO, heh heh. So I filled it up with dirt and slapped a bit of moistened food on top, and sat down 2 of the collection plates from my other now-overflowing cultures (quite literally! they were crawling all the way out of the tubs and into the rubbermaid!). I bet soon that thing will be filled up too.

Yay, maybe I can start selling grindal cultures soon in addition to the microworm cultures. :D ACK!! That reminds me that I forgot to ship out 2 cultures today. I didn't forget, really, I just didn't pack them last night while I still had time AND remembered.

Update

I discovered that the yellowtailed damsel died not due to the conditions at all. No - instead, it was killed by one of the blues. Apparently they are pretty territorial in there already! I took the other 2 in and traded them towards my next purchase.

I bought 25 pounds more live rock a week or so ago and added to the tank. Conditions were looking good so I bought some shrimp this weekend. Darned buggers aren't cheap, so I only have 4. I also picked up a few more of those cute tiny blue legged hermit crabs. They're the only ones that will stay nice and small and not harm other inhabitants so I figured a few more wouldn't hurt. It's so cool to see them come into the tank, find a new shell they're happy with, and change almost immediately. I'm sure the rest in the LFS tank must be unhappy with theirs too! They're not provided with shells. I'll let the girl know who upkeeps that dept; she's knowledgable and would do what she could I'm sure.

I can't wait 'til I can get some starfish! I don't think the tank is ready yet, at all, though. No detrius.

Oh yeah, the shrimp I have are:

2 Camel Shrimp:
http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_Display.cfm?siteid=23&pCatId=690&TopCatId=525

2 ... well, I don't know what they were. They are a pale orange color.

Fish Shipping

Today was a very happy fish day for me!

Got my reship of the black coppers. They are beautiful, and just the same coloration as the original pair, so that is great. I also got another extra pair with this box. :D I'll post their pictures later.

Also got a box from BC Betta today. It is always great when a full box has 0% deaths.

It was a great day to just so happened to have decided I needed to call in late to work for a couple extra hours of sleep. I ended up taking 1/2 day off when I remembered the fish (usually Pete attends to new arrivals for me) which was because I heard the doorbell, heh heh. Working only 1/2 day was very refreshing! :D

The Pains of Cycling

Lost a yellow-tailed damselfish overnight last night. Am surprised this is it so far, really, though. No apparent cause so I am assuming it died from either the nitrites or nitrates, as there was pretty much no ammonia present and those two levels have been up for a few days now. Ahhrrrgh, the pains of cycling.

Weird Worm Things

I posted this at FJ but I'll write it here too. I found some weird things in my barracks tonight and I don't know wtf they are. I am worried they might be parasites. I'm trying to find out from web research what they might be but it's so hard to get a crisp, clear shot of them so it's hard to do. I guess I'll have to keep trying.

In the meantime, I cleaned a lot to remove the things from the barrack gutters. And I'll have to of course now stop feeding the worms to the fish. I don't know what to feed them on a regular basis! Frozen worms I guess. The bloodworms don't float out but I hate to use those as the nearly primary food source. Live worms were great since they sank.

Another Day

Another weekend passes, and another round of fishly chores is behind me. This weekend, the laundry and vacuuming (and really almost all other housework) got neglected for all the stuff I had to do. These are self-appointed chores, mind you, but they're work, all the same. I went and bought live rock for my saltwater tank, and today also got 3 yellow-tailed blue damsels. Also I got two little snails and three even smaller crabs. I dare not add any shrimp or starfish yet, though I am going to definitely be doing that in the future, after cycling is done. I may lose everything in the tank, so this is IT for a while, so I wanted to get a little bit of a cleanup crew going. The only thing I am going to seek to add is a few plants, once I do some reading and see what I want, and have the fish store buy them. I went to a LPS I don't usually visit often anymore out of the blue, and was pleasantly surprised that the girl "in charge" of the fish (and pretty much everything live in the store, she said) knew a good bit about fish and has a lot herself. We chatted for a few and as with everywhere I tried to pick up a few pieces of info from her to add to my growing arsenal.

The 3 fish from earlier this week sure look a lot happier with some company in the tank now. And the new fish sure as heck look happier to be in such a bigger tank. :)