Tank birthday and I'm a Geezer

On my raining early walk this morning I saw something in the grass in the distance. At first I thought it was a wounded baby deer, or a rabid racoon or maybe even an Alien from the Andromeda Galaxy. But No!. It was this snapping turtle about 25lbs and about 2 1/2' long head to tail.

I tried to pick him up from the back of his shell because they have a nasty bite, but I am going for a new shoulder in a few weeks and the thing hurts enough, so I decided not to pick him up. So, I decided to just walk behind him and nudge him back to a large pond that is full of big bullfrogs which is most likely where he came from.
He is probably running out of food and the water is shallow, so he was looking for a new home. In the direction he was going, he would have had to walk for miles to find another freshwater pond so against his will, I returned him to his pond.

I know this is supposed to be about fish, so I will write something about fish so I don't get banned. My tank seems to be doing very well. All the fish are doing what they are supposed to do. I finally eliminated all the invasive sponge, diatoms, and algae. I don't have much time to actually work on the tank due to my wife's disability. In about 4 weeks I am getting a new shoulder so will be out of commission for a few weeks.

In about three weeks, I will be undergoing a new right shoulder surgery, so I will be out of commission for a few weeks. As a result, I will need to hire a ghostwriter. I will see if Hemingway is free.



All that red algae is gone, it only lasted a few days but all the codium is still there. There is a lot more codium than in this picture as I pick the stuff up all the time. It won't live forever but it looks great for a few months. So far I have not seen any of those flying parasites although I have been looking. I hear that after 55 years, they become a concern.

All my cooler corals were decimated while removing the invasive sponges.


I try to feed the tank twice a day because that long nose butterfly is very young and can only eat the tiniest food so I want to make sure he gets enough. But he will eat all the live worms he can get.

So I finally found some people who like to eat Porgies and invited them over. I didn't think they would all agree to come so I have a lot of cooking to do. I have about 140 Porgies, (which means 280 fillets) so I won't run out of fish. I have 7 "guests" coming over so I made olive oil and rosemary bread along with Borchetta. I grew the tomatoes, basil and parsley.



I have to get cooking with these Porgy fillets. Maybe I will even save some for my fish

Awww homemade Borchetta...the best. There is nothing like home grown tomatoes. Is it Porgy season here? Love them too.

It seems to be porgy season. As soon as you put a hook in the water, nothing but porgies.

I just got off the phone with the hospital. I think they have me on speed dial, as this will be, I think, my 39th surgery. I have to go in next week for the "Pre Surgery" nonsense. I wrote down everything except the date, and of course, they don't answer the phone.

After the pre-surgery nonsense, I have to go to my own doctor for more pre-surgery nonsense. This way, everyone gets paid. I mean, there must be 300 doctors and nurses in the hospital, so while I am there doing some stupid things like filling out forms in triplicate, you would think, while I am there anyway, they could do the entire pre-surgery waste of time. It's only a blood pressure test and an EKG, which takes all of one minute.

Anyway, then on another day, (naturally, they can't do this while I am there) I have to go back before the surgery for the "Fitting of the Brace," which is a sling that they probably have 50 of in a drawer, but it is another hospital visit. Thank God I have insurance for all these wastes of time, and I don't live around the corner from the hospital. But the good thing is that my favorite LFS is right near the hospital.

Eventually, I think the 21st or so I am scheduled for the surgery to get a brand-new shiny shoulder to match my other one.

Next week is our 52nd wedding anniversary so we are going to a B&B for overnight.

Our friend Sue will pick me up from the hospital the next day and stay with us for a day or two to help take care of me and maybe peal me a grape, then the next day I think our Daughter will come over to stray another day or two. Right after that, I should be ready for bungee jumping and gymnastics.

This was from my last new shoulder surgery.

I had to be in the hospital this morning at 8:00 am for the stupid pre-surgery thing. The nurse took my blood pressure, which, by the way, is always perfect. I should be in the "Blood Pressure Monthly" magazine. My pressure is always a little low, which is good for when I discuss diseases with people on here

She also took blood, urine, (not urinema) and I think she also took a few tens out of my wallet and invited me out to dinner. She looked at my history and saw that I already had 38 surgeries so she said, I should be sitting on the guerney and you should be here. I told her that anyone who gets to my age and hasn't had 10 or 20 surgeries didn't work hard enough or have enough fun in their life.

If I could stand my screaming, I would replace my shoulder myself.

All my surgeries were for stupid things like worn-out things, broken bones, tears, cuts, etc, and nothing important like adrenaline glands, kidneys, or brain stuff.
If you sit behind a desk all your life or sit in your wife's car for years, you will never break anything or need an operation. I love surgeries, as that is the only time I get a really good sleep .

I couple of months ago I had a new back procedure done and it totally eliminated my back pain. You know, pain you get from working hard, like MAN working. I don't mean like swatting flying microscope parasites nine feet from your tank.

Anyway, yesterday a girl from the company who makes the thing used in the procedure called me. At first, I thought she wanted to take me out to dinner but I told her I was married. I learned she didn't want to do that and besides she is in California.

She asked me questions for 20 minutes about the procedure and how I feel.

She wants me to possibly travel around the country speaking about the procedure. I told her I was sleeping when they did it so I don't have much information about the procedure, but she wants me to speak none the less.

I would rather speak about fish so we will see. Back pain isn't a very exciting topic. Unless, of course you have back pain.

Paul B said:

I couple of months ago I had a new back procedure done and it totally eliminated my back pain. You know, pain you get from working hard, like MAN working. I don't mean like swatting flying microscope parasites nine feet from your tank.

Anyway, yesterday a girl from the company who makes the thing used in the procedure called me. At first, I thought she wanted to take me out to dinner but I told her I was married. I learned she didn't want to do that and besides she is in California.

She asked me questions for 20 minutes about the procedure and how I feel.

She wants me to possibly travel around the country speaking about the procedure. I told her I was sleeping when they did it so I don't have much information about the procedure, but she wants me to speak none the less.

I would rather speak about fish so we will see. Back pain isn't a very exciting topic. Unless, of course you have back pain.

Click to expand...

That would be a pain staking conversation. I'll let myself out.

When is your surgery scheduled for?

It's scheduled for the 21st of this month.
Tomorrow we are going away for our 52nd wedding anniversary to Cape Cod for a couple of days. My friend will take care of the fish and our friend, Sue above will stay with us for a couple of days. After that, I am on my own but we have a lot of friends here who I am sure will constantly visit and bring me food.

Happy anniversary!!! How many years? Have fun in Cape Cod.

52 years Diana.

This week I took my Bride to Cape Cod for our anniversary. We took the ferry from Orient Point on the end of the North Fork of Long Island about 45 minutes from my house.




It takes about an hour and a half to get to New London, Connecticut. Then it's about 2 1/2 hours to the B&B that we stayed in.

I kind of screwed up with the ferry schedule and got there an hour early. Just before the earlier ferry left so they squeezed us on the earlier boat.
(You take the car of the ferry). When my wife booked the ferry, she paid extra for Handicapped space, which leaves you off right near the elevator, but because we checked in at the last minute, they had to put us on the other side of the ship from the elevator.

My wife can't walk at all without a walker and the thing couldn't fit between the cars to get to the seating area of the boat. There happened to be a bunch of Hells Angels on the boat with their bikes so they wanted to help us. (Hells Angels like Veterans and I have Combat Veteran plates on my car and had my Veteran hat on)

My wife squeezed out of the car. They put you right next to a wall and it is very hard to get out of the car for a healthy person, but for her it was a big job. I held her up as the bikers lifted her walker over the bikes and cars. Then we helped her around obstacles to the elevator.

My wife was not happy and didn't speak to me for most of the cruise as she was embarrassed and she paid extra to get the spot by the elevator.

So we get to the B&B which was very nice. I also brought her powered chair in case we had a long walk. My wife has friends from near Boston somewhere and they made plans to meet us at this restaurant near our B&B. We went there and of course it was pouring rain. We discovered the place was closed so we found another sea food place near by. The Cape, which is in New England is full of sea food restaurants and thats mostly what we eat.






All was well and our friends came back to our room for drinks. We walked around in the rain and left the next day.
I checked on my GPS to see how long it will take to drive back to the ferry and I noticed it would take 3 1/2 hours so I said, we have to change our reservation to the next boat an hour later because we won't make it.

Then as we left I noticed I put the wrong ferry into my GPS. The one I put in takes an hour longer than the ferry we wanted to take. Both ferries would get us near our home but we booked the closer one. So again, we get to the ferry an hour early so they checked us in at the last second.

Again, my wife booked the handicapped space, but since we eeked on, we didn't get it. As soon as we got on the ferry, they made my wife get out of the car and wait there for me to park because the place to park was in what they call the tunnel and there is even less space to open the driver's door, and maybe 4" on the passenger side so she had to get out before I parked.

Not happy again because she had to stand there with someone helping her until I squirmed my way back there through the cars that are packed in like sardines.

She is not speaking to me again.

Now the good part comes. The elevator is in the back of the boat, but my car is in the middle, and there is absolutely no way to get her walker to my car, so I asked one of the crew how I would get her off the boat when we dock.

He said I will drive off the ship, then make a "U" turn and drive back on the ship to pick her up . This is while 100 cars are waiting to get back on.

OMG. So I drive off and stop at the side near the crew that don't know that I am going to turn around and drive on the the same boat I just got off so they come running up to me screaming. I had to explain what I was doing so they said "LIKE REALLY!".

Anyway, thats what I did,. I drove back up the middle of the ship while all of Long Island waited for me to pick up my wife. She was not happy at all.

With marriage you take the good with the bad. She loves you and that is all that matters.

So far, after 52 years, she does. I hear at 53 years problems start.

Wisdom.
There is an old Testament reading (6:12-16) that explains if you are generally seeking wisdom, then open your mind and heart and wisdom will seek you out and be found sitting by your front gate.
That is a little before my time (not much). Religion and science have a lot in common. Most of us believe all scientific principles come about from thought, assumptions, experiments, study, and then fact.
Science's main method is deduction. It moves in a precise and convincing fashion from general to specific.
The process of discovering some "fact" is based on solid starting "assumptions".
Science relies on a starting assumption. Not necessarily fact. Where do the assumptions come from?
Scientists use life experiences and detailed observations to guess at starting assumptions. But they are guesses and for the most part, can't be proven.
(Ref: James Magner MD)

Many Scientist "facts" in the past are no longer facts today. The GPS in your car would not function on Newtons "facts". It needed Einstein's input about space, light, time and hair styles to correct the "facts of the past. Although Newton was close and close was good enough at that time.

The "fact" that the Earth was flat turned out to be wrong. But it was a good theory because many times when a boat ventured out to far, it never returned so they figured it fell off the "face of the earth".

In reality what could have just as easily happened is that on those boats, half the sailors were hired rowers and the other half were boat owners. They all took part in rowing. But the hired people (maybe were Liberals) were mad that they were rowing as hard as the owners, but the owners were making more money. They didn't get along so the owners started rowing on one side and the hired people were on the other side.

After a loud argument, the hired people stopped rowing to spite the owners. So the boat just kept going around in circles until the batteries went dead on their I Phone-4s and they couldn't text so they got bored to death and jumped overboard. It's just as plausible as any other theory.

Galileo surmised that the Earth was not the center of the universe. The Pope wasn’t amused by that one at all and at the time, Popes didn’t have much of a sense of humor so he ex communicated poor Galileo and took away his free pass to the Venetian public aquarium.

Scientists today try to explain their "facts" but often fall short. They fumble through trying to explain gravity and it is all around us. They teach that the Earth has a solid iron core and it forms a giant molten magnet that attracts everything.

I am in my workshop and have plenty of magnets. So far, I have yet to find a magnet that would attract one of my fish that jumped out and rolled under my tank.
Scientists speak of the vastness of the un- ending universe. My mind can't envision that much space so I just believe that at the end of the universe there is a brick wall with tar paper on top. Beyond that there are Strawberry fields forever.

That assumption makes as much sense as any scientific theory.
Many scientific discoveries came about by accident. I can think of four off the top of my bald head. X Rays, Microwaves, safety glass and smoke detectors. . Darwin also surmised that life came about by accident in a primordial pond. So far, that has not been disproven.

I of course think life was brought here by Aliens. Bowlegged bald Aliens who were just bored and wanted to go to a disco. (Remember, this was a long time ago)
There is a term used by medical “experts” whereby the cause is deduced from the effective remedy. This term is called “ex juvantibus”

“If the patient fails to respond to a specific treatment, the cause of the illness is a different one”
(ref: Water Chemistry for Advanced Aquarists “Guido Huckstedt” )
In other words if a sick patient is treated with antibiotics, and doesn’t recover, the cause will probably not be bacterial.
What is the point of this discussion? The point is not everything we do in life, or reef aquariums will have a basis in scientific research. Much of it, like scientific research is guesswork, conjecture and yes, luck.

Thinking outside the box

Unfortunately there is this box. It is very comfortable and warm inside the box which is why almost everyone wants to stay and think inside the box. People inside the box all have much of the same ideas and ways of thinking and oddly enough many of the same problems that don't get resolved using the same methods that people inside the box have been using since the salt water hobby started in the United States in 1971. I think it was on a Tuesday about 2 or 2:30 in the afternoon. Even though many of the methods don't work, people still use those methods because the sides of the box are very hard so the information gets echoed all over the box and we hear the same wrong information over and over again. We can't help but to use those methods because that is whats inside that box. The box also gets a daily influx of Noobs and many times Noobs will try something and it will work. Of course they don't know that that thing has been done forty seven thousand times. Then that information bounces around the box and everyone in the box hears it and thinks that is the way to do that particular thing. So it is done over and over again and even though it worked once, and never works again, it is still done because eventually that Noob gets out of the hobby and goes on one of those "Getting out of the Hobby, everything for sale " threads, but his Ideas keep getting re-circulated. He goes on to colect stamps and becomes an accountant at Burger King where he becomes a manager of the French Fry cooker.

Many years ago there was no box. All we had was wide open spaces, Elvis, Marylin Monroe, bellbottoms and a lot of sky. There were also no methods so we had to find our own ways to do things. We had to experiment and in doing so we killed more fish than StarKist Tuna. There was only one salt water hobbiest per state and there was no internet and we didn't know each other so everyone was a researcher. When we bought a fish,no one knew anything about that fish except the fish itself and Jacues Cousteau and he wasn't talking. So if our tank got overcome with hair algae, we learned on our own how to deal with it. We grew enough algae to cover a 19 hole golf course, but eventually we overcame and eliminated the algae. Of course if we were inside the box we would learn that changing the water will help with that. But we, outside the box realize that never works so we didn't do that.

When our fish got parasites we quickly learned how to deal with that also. Again, if we were inside the box we would change the water , with the same result.
If a fish died, we learned through trial and error how to correct that situation. No, we didn't change the water or check our parameters. We had no test kits anyway so we had to rely on our common sense which worked out pretty well.
We also learned, on our own how to feed fish so they would never get sick. We found out that our fish were supposed to spawn all the time and if they didn't, they were not healthy and prone to diseases. We could have changed the water but knew that in the future there would be this box where everyone changed water all the time but still had numerous problems.

We never had a new fish that wouldn't eat because our tanks were natural and healthjy, not sterile like a newly shampooed rug like many of the tanks inside the box.
Sometimes, after a while someone climbs outside of the box and in doing so trys to go against the fine folks inside the box. The people inside the box make fun of that person and say his (or her) Ideas can't work because it is just not done that way. If say that person uses a reverse undergravel filter, the laughter from inside the box will rise to a roar. If that person goes against biblical box knowledge and finds a way to keep fish healthy without quarantining, that roar will become a typhoon and the box will shake.
The box people will never accept those outside the box ideas because it is just not taught inside the box. Even if those outside of the box ideas are proven, they will never be taken seriousely, and more importantly if any of those ideas and methods are very cheap and easy to implement, forget about it, that person may as well take up collecting old shoes because he will be driven out of the fish hobby.
Now everyone knows there are some really nice tanks inside the box. Some tanks, everyone are jealous of so going outside the box is not for everyone. But history proves that all of the new, important, earth shattering or Awe inspiring events that happened were the result of thinking outside the box because if everyone always thought inside the box there would never be any improvement because the box doesn’t allow for it. Most Neanderthals thought inside the box which is the reason they walked around for thousands of years carrying sticks and little else. It took an outside the box thinker to invent a microwave so Neanderthals could throw away that stick and heat up a TV dinner. Eventually Neanderthals got taken over by Liberals who invented that box.

Invasive species and I can't even keep them alive.

My power was out last night and it just came back on. But being an electrician, I have emergency lights all over the place including in my workshop near my tank so I had light to connect my car battery jumper which I keep charged all the time.

It has a plug where I plugged in a powerhead on my tank, so they had some circulation, so my fish slept right through it.

Now, before my shoulder surgery I would like to build a UPS so my garage door opens in a blackout.