Catching Up

It has been a bit since I have written a blog, the winter seems to be well past and a few things have happened I thought I would share.

Most important to Andrea and I was the just concluded visit of Jessica, “her man” Chris and their beautiful 21 month old baby Alisha. We spent a glorious week with our granddaughter, and it has been the highlight of our years in Manitoba. We truly enjoyed our time with Jessica and Chris, this is the first time we have gotten to spend more than a few minutes in passing with them in years, and it makes us very proud to see the young woman she has grown into. There is a touch of sadness though as Johnathan and his Andrea have two beautiful children we have not had enough time with either. It is a wonderful thing how much joy grandchildren can bring to your life.

On another note, I am just about done my time at Monarch as the Safety officer at the foundry. I have been struggling for a bit with the position and some stuff that has happened. An opportunity came up for a new position at a very large company in this area named Décor Cabinets. They have created a position for a Safety Manager and intrigued I applied. There was a real good interview where I was able to offer my vision of a safety program and obviously there was something there they thought was worthwhile. To make a long story short I was offered the position and accepted starting Monday may 11^th, which coincidentally is also my mother’s birthday so I take that as a positive sign.

In other news both our fish tanks are doing well, we do enjoy spending the evenings watching them, it was quite interesting to see how much Jessica and Chris enjoyed spending time watching them as well.

We did something very unique for us this year; we never bought a golf membership. This is the first time in a dozen years but we intend to play a bunch of courses when we want and enjoy other things like our boat a little bit, although given the lack of water in this area (a few small lakes) and the length of drive to any decent size lakes we have tossed the idea around of selling the boat and buying kayaks, we will try the boat in a couple of more lakes first though.

The other thing that will distract us is the motorcycles, I have been out a few times and will be riding most days once I start at Décor as I will be able to park the bike there without the residue in the air from the foundry eating up all the chrome. Andrea is a little more tentative until the spring winds stop howling, better safe than sorry. It is hard to explain to someone that has not experienced the wind on the open prairie what it is like to drive in it, so being cautious for a new rider is a wise thing.

Getting Harassed

Yes really, I am being harassed by my darling daughter on the dreadful facebook to post another blog showing pictures of my aquarium and my mother is liking it!!! Well I guess its working because here I am writing again...this will be all about my beautiful aquarium and what we have done so far.

The aquarium is 135 gallons for the display tank and 35 gallons for the sump that is where the cleaning takes place. It normally takes a couple of months to prepare a tank to support aquatic life but because Andrea had been storing rock in her tank and I had another separate tank preparing rock as well I was able to start off quickly. The rock houses the essential bacteria to stabilize the water. Therefore I was able to start using my tank immediately, so here are some pictures.

As you can see it is a different style than Andrea's, hers has the back wall blacked out and is designed to be viewed front on. Mine is a see through  or peninsula style with all the gear on one end. Because we are able to see through it we chose to place it in the doorway from the dining room we do not use, into the living room. (Yes there is a separate entrance into the living room) This way we can see it from the kitchen and great room as well as the living room.

Some of the contents are:

Regal Blue Tang

Yellow tang

Two Blue Green Chromis (third is hiding) and the RBT. The chromis appear different colours depending on the light, I am still waiting for a special order of Blue Reef Chromis as well.

Keyhole Angel - sorry the picture is blurry but this guy is FAST and I have not figured out how to get him to pose. As you can see from the Regal Blue Tang in several pictures, he is a bit of a showoff.

This is the most colourful attractive fish in either tank, a Coral Beauty Angel, he like the keyhole Angel is extremely fast and not given to posing. His true colours are a deep blue frame with brilliant markings vertically along the sides.

I also have some very cool corals, first up is a Devils Hand Leather, it is the only somewhat mature coral I have.

This is my bubble tip Anemone, very nice white that picks up great colouration from my lights.

This is called a Feather Duster, it is actually a worm. It has a long tube in the rocks and the feather duster waves in the current to collect food. When it gets a special morsel it instantly just disappears into the tube for a few seconds until it devours it and pops right back out.  In the background upper left there is a Gold Tip Hammer, it really is golden coloured but my tank light setting makes it look odd in this shot.

Here we have a gorgonian, very young that was gifted to me by the live fish store we frequent when I expressed interest in the sea sponge it is attached to. The sea sponge is in very poor health and the two brothers that run the lfs (local fish store)are marine biologists expect it to not survive. This likely because someone exposed it to air at some point, that is a death sentence to a sea sponge. They gave it to me so I could try and nurse it back to health, so far it is stable, no further loss of colouration but it is not advancing either. You can see little spots of brilliant red, those are the live spots, the whole thing should be that colour, we will see what happens.

These are just some of the very colourful soft corals I am starting to grow, several pictures in a row. There is no way to describe how they look in the evening when we have the deep blue LED lights on in the aquariums and that colour spectrum makes everything seem to glow. You have to see it to appreciate the colouration these produce. Luckily we are able to trade for most of these because some of the more colourful ones are priced from 40.00 a head and up. They reproduce in the tanks and once they start spreading they act like a weed. We then get to frag them off and trade them for other stuff or sell them. The ones in the top picture actually came from Andreas tank.

This is one of my mushrooms, it actually came from Andreas tank as well, it was a good size and splitting so I fragged a piece for my tank and it is thriving and growing right off its plug (plugs are ceramic disks you glue frags / the pieces of coral you harvest to so they have a stable base)

 The next three pictures are of another mushroom, I captured some of its colours fairly well in the first shot, the others I tried some different camera settings. There is a large snail on the top cleaning off all the algie, in the first picture you can see a single polyp growing, it was just a hint of a dark dot on the plug when I bought the mushroom, looks like it will grow into a nice red one. The second picture is a lighting shot for the fun of it. The third picture has a zoomed out shot that will show several colours of soft corals.

For a splash of colour, see my red cardinals below, I bought three but only two made it to my tank (Andrea!!)

I mentioned when I first talked about getting this tank that I ordered a light, well the light came and all my soft corals liked it but it did not have enough power to grow hard corals so I sold it and bought another more powerful light. I am still learning to make the lighting do what I want as it is a four channel controller instead of the normal two channels. As you can see in the pictures the brushed aluminum looks very nice on the tank.

One of these nights Andrea and I will do a night shoot on both of our tanks and try to capture some of the brilliant colouration.

Until next time, stop harassing me Jessica Lorraine :)