Somethings fishy
No, I didn’t disappear. I’m still very much alive, just busy as all get out. Tonight Marie & I finally finished winterizing most of the house. We had to put up those Frost King insultation kits on alot of the windows. The living room has 4 really olds windows, 3 of which are huge - which are probably original from when the house was built. Those were fun to do. We also did the 2 windows in our bedroom. A couple of weeks ago I caulked in the windows in the knotty pine room from the inside since the previous owner neglected to do this when they installed new windows, and there were some pretty big gaps. I went thru two tubes of caulk for just those two windows alone. That room is still so darn cold tho…
Ethan is doing awesome and growing so fast. Everything he does is so damn cute. He’s already trying to talk to us. Marie can really get him going and it’s the funniest thing. He’s still sleeping thru the night, sometimes 12 hours at a time! Doesn’t get any better than that. Marie & I did a Christmas photo shoot with Ethan last weekend and those of you on the Christmas card list should be getting your card and picture soon. Speaking of pictures, I have a bunch that I need to upload to the gallery. I’m actually thinking about upgrading to Gallery 2, which integrates nicely with Wordpress.
My tank is still in the cycling process. I was having an issue with one of my green tiger barbs attacking the other two so I thought I would try adding 3 more since tiger barbs do best in groups of six or more. I know adding more fish is a no no during the cycling process but I was worried about my other fish. I picked up 3 albino tiger barbs but two days after they were added, I noticed the two green barbs had badly nipped fins from the green meany. One was so bad that his anal fins were almost completely gone. I pulled the bully out of the tank and put him in a fish bowl. I knew he wouldn’t survive but at that point I didn’t care. Unfortunately, the green barb with the bad anal fins died two days later. Shortly after that, one of my albino barbs got an eye infection. Two days later he was belly up. Less than 5 days later, my last green barb died. So now I’m left with 2 albino barbs, tho they are doing great.
I’ve done a couple of 15%-20% water changes and will continue doing these every couple of days until my tank has been cycled. I don’t want the ammonia to get so high that it will kill the fish. I’ve been testing the water every day and the ammonia is measuring between .25 and .50 ppm with no signs of nitrite yet. One thing that probably set my cycling process back a bit was that I removed all the decorations from the tank last weekend and took out a bunch of the sand I put in. When I setup the tank, I ended up putting way too much sand in so I wanted to get that out. My bio wheel is starting to get a little discolored so the bacteria should be doing there job soon enough.
We picked up two 4.5 gallon aquariums at Meijer the day after Thanksgiving. We woke up early to get there at 6am since they were on sale for $10 each (normally $50)! This was the first time I’ve ever ventured out shopping bright and early on Black Friday. We setup one of the tanks in our bedroom and put a baby beta in it. He’s just loving it in there with all that space. The other tank I setup at my work, tho I haven’t added any fish to it yet. I think I’m going to get a couple of platy’s in there.
Can you tell I’m obsessed with tropical fish?