Geoff's Hunting Stories and General Chatter: June Showers

Happy Father’s Day, it though somewhat bittersweet for me as my Dad is in the ICU recovering from multiple surgeries. He is doing well at last report, and for all the updates and the help she has been to Mom through all this my sister Gail is a hero.

I know it has been a long time since I wrote anything, but I have been so busy lately I just have not persuaded myself to write at all. I decided back in March I would need to go back to work, a few different reasons played into this decision… one being the length of the winters here being so long with so little to do while Andrea is working; I do enjoy ice fishing but to get to a decent lake takes about 3/4 a tank of gas each trip, not something my budget would support every day. Second, we have a few dreams we still wanted to check off the list before it was too late, the first being getting our motorcycle licences and buying motorcycles, we have the bikes –

Andrea’s –

Mine –

We will have finished our training courses by the end of the month and will be legal to drive. I will be adding a small windscreen and some saddlebags at some point.

We finally made it up to camp last Friday evening, we just wanted to make a plan to upgrade the insulation for hunting season and check the lawn mower. I got the mower going fairly easily and Andrea ran it dry cutting some grass. We wanted to go back this weekend to cut the rest of the grass and cut some firewood but we are suffering from our third day of rain so that idea went out the window.

Back to the job, I am sure blessed to have the friends in my life that have taught, mentored and finally acted as references that enabled me to secure the position. For those that do not know, I am now the Health and Safety Officer at Monarch Industries Winkler Foundry. There are a few videos on YouTube for those that would care to see more of what happens in the foundry and what is made there. I have worked there three weeks now and it’s an interesting, challenging environment. The people there are very welcoming and helpful so it has been a very positive experience to this point.

We are of course very happy to be out on the golf course, we are both playing leagues, I have a great partner and we are doing quite well as I am still very limited in the use of my left shoulder, it is coming along nicely though.

Of course the other big thing we have is a six foot 14 year old eating machine, I had to go back to work in order buy groceries for this monster…

At this point I will let Andrea write about her aquarium, it is coming along very nicely…

Well the aquarium is coming along nicely although now that the nicer weather is here, I have been only adding little bits here and there. I am hoping to place a coral order online as the local selection is quite limited.

I have had some fatalities, I no longer have any blue green chromis or cardinals. I am not sure what happened to the chromis but I suspect the cardinals died as a result of the capture method or I have too much flow/lights (I really suspect they were not healthy critters when I got them as they only lasted a 2-3 weeks).

I have lots of new additions, I have a green bubble tip anemone but unfortunately he has decided to live in a cave so we don’t see him much L. I really wanted to have an anemone for my clown fish to host so I purchased a Seabae anemone which my clowns are hosting J I now have a One spot Foxface, Yellow eye kole tang, dwarf flame angel (Geoff’s favorite), lawnmower blenny, a square anthias, 2 Azure damselfish and 2 velvet damselfish which are supposed to get big, mean and lose their awesome colors so they may become fish bait lol. As far as corals, I have a torch, hammer, leather, 2 sps, quite a few polyps/zoas, a green montipora, a sea fan, and some green star polyps. I have a xenia but for some reason he kept getting unattached to the rock and ended up attaching to my tuxedo urchin so I decided, why not J so he travels around on the urchin J There are 3 videos after these pictures...

Foxface and the thing coming out of the sand beside him is a sea fan: