Unexpected Consequences of a Clean Fish Tank

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It’s kind of funny – out of all the possible outcomes after this, the last thing that I ever would’ve expected was that the tank would, in fact, get too clean…

It dawned on me sometime the following day that, while it’s certainly nice for me to have an uber clean fishtank, at the same time there was another certain someone who might particularly object to it … that someone being the now gigantic plecostamus that I’ve been employing for many a year to do the jobs the filter wasn’t able to handle! And granted, he certainly wasn’t doing the best job – I mean, you saw the before pictures in the last post – but still, nothing punishable by removing one’s entire food source from their ecosystem!

Fortunately, I had an old bag of these algae disc thingys that I had picked up a while back, so I’ve been throwing a couple of those in every day when I do the rest of the feeding and so far he hasn’t died, so I’m assuming that he’s eating them. Who knew that finally getting around to properly maintaining my tank would also result in putting a hard working bottom-feeder out of a job?!

My Amazing Technicolor Fish Tank Filter Upgrade!

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So anyways, this weekend I made a big purchase that I’ve been putting off for a while now, in that I bought a new filter for my fish tank. It’s needed something new for a while – I only have a total of three fish in it, but they’re huge (3-4″ each, plus a plecostomus that’s nearly a foot long!) and thus they all poop like crazy!!! Trying to clean out the filter is a fool’s errand at best and it just plugs right up again in a few weeks anyways, but lately the water’s been getting particularly cloudy and seeing as we’ll be going on vacation in a few weeks, I thought it’d be a better idea to buy a new one now than come home to a stinky fish tank for an entirely different reason…

I ended up getting a canister filter because I figured that it was about time for a change in direction entirely, and I know that I’m only about 24 hours in, but so far I absolutely love the thing. It literally went from cloudy to visible in a couple of hours, and then crystal clear by the following morning. When I got home this evening I felt like I had an entirely different tank!


Before… (I did stir the water up a little adding some, but still, gross, I know!)


About an hour later…


18 hours later! (damn…)


The thing was pretty cool to setup, albeit just a bit intimidating – I actually had to cut hoses to run into the tank and everything! The filter itself is entirely self-contained and uses three different kinds of filtration media to do its thing – foam for mechanical filtration, carbon for chemical, and then these weird ceramic things for the biological part. I’m actually thinking that it might be the ceramic things that make all of the difference because in most hang over the edge-type filters (like I was using before), you’ve got the carbon and a small amount of foam or felt to filter stuff out, which seemed to get clogged up pretty quickly. There wasn’t really anything to actually break the waste down, and thus it just piled up and got all disgusting. On the other hand, the ceramic pieces are supposed to breed bacteria to do exactly that, so we’ll see.

Regardless, I think the proof is in the pictures – it’s already made an amazing impact to the clearity of the tank (i.e. it now has some!), and now I’m just curious to see what the inside of the actual canister looks like. Admittedly I’m a little concerned about opening it up and just finding a disgusting, pressurized poop bomb waiting for me to break the seal, but maybe I’ll get lucky this time! In addition to the actual filtration, this puppy has the power to cycle through 180 gallons per hour at full tilt, meaning that it should be able to filter the entire contents of the tank more than four times an hour, which I’m sure has got to be a far cry from what that little clogged bio-wheel was doing before! Maybe between the improved filtration and now actual circulation throughout the tank, my fish will actually have a chance…

I think the best quote, though, is one that I found in a comment from a reviewer on Amazon or something: “It’s like we just upgraded to an HD fish tank.”

I don’t really speak fish, but I’m pretty sure so far mine are just loving their new 1080p home! I’m only sorry that I didn’t cough up the dough and buy one of these things years ago… 🙂

Weekend Update

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Mall, Beach, Food, Movies
Saturday was a nice day that I don’t get to enjoy nearly enough, in that I actually got to spend the entire day with Sara! Typically when our schedules mesh, we’ll try to fit in a trip to the mall or maybe a night out at the movies, but sleep on her part and writing on my own tend to limit our time to much more than that. This weekend was a rare occurrence, though, and it was really nice to just kick back and go with the flow – we still got some errands in, did a little shopping, and then spent some time bobbing around in the waters of the Gulf while we caught up on each other’s lives. After toweling off, we wrapped up the evening with a quaint, little dinner at a new Mexican place that we discovered, then at my wife’s humble request, endured the atrocity that is Twilight: Eclipse…

Twilight is Ridiculous
So Sara got me to sit through the first two while we were out visiting friends in Seattle and the first one was almost decent, but New Moon was pretty much a joke overflowing with teen angst and unnecessary cliffhangers. She claimed that she had been hearing good things about the third installment, however in hindsight I probably should’ve asked her to cite her sources because it was, in a single word, absolutely ridiculous.

In a nutshell, Eclipse drove me freakin’ nuts because the entire movie was basically pandering to its fan base gone overboard. To help illustrate this point, I’d like to present Exhibit A, in which people in our theater actually applauded for their respective “teams” as they each scored big hits during the battle scene. The icing on the cake, for me at least, was the scene when Edward and Bella pull up to meet a half-naked Jacob and Edward mutters, “Doesn’t this guy own a shirt?!” I’ll still admit that there’s a halfway decent plot buried in there somewhere, but at this point it’s been lost underneath so much pandering and angst that unless you’re a 13 year-old (or otherwise horny) girl, it’s hard to embrace the actual underlying story.

P.S. Team Edward rules and Team Jacob drools…

Sunday is for Cleaning
We’ve got Sara’s parents coming down to visit in a couple of weeks and we’ve really let the house become a disheveled mess as of late, and even though we don’t expect it to be spic and span by then, we’d still like to get the place a little cleaned for our own respective sanities as well. Sunday evening we started tackling the living room – found our coffee table, banished a few spider webs from the ceiling fan, and managed to throw away a bunch of stuff including about two dozen old wedding magazines that had been abandoned from two years ago! We’re kind of trying to clear out a lot of the clutter as we go, so I’m ok if it takes a little longer than normal, but the logic stands – if we haven’t used it in over a year, we probably don’t need it lying around collecting dust…

Improvements of the Aquatic Kind
I’ll go into a much more elaborated post later, but one exciting change is that I finally got around to buying a new filter for my fish tank! It’s one of those fancy, canister models that costs a fortune, but if it works to actually keep the massive pooping that my humongous fish tend to do under control, it’ll be well worth the cost. More details and plenty of pics about the setup and results so far in a separate post!

Thin Post : Health Tracking, Week #2

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So this is the part where I begin to get frustrated…

My weight went up 0.6 pounds this week – almost halfway back to where I had started. My wife tried to comfort me with the “muscle weighs more than fat” addage, but it’s hard to take that at face value because I’m so used to this pattern with regards to losing weight. Still, I know that two weeks in is no place to judge long-term change, so I’m trying to focus on whatever positive bits I can find, but it’s hard.

Positive things like…

  • I only ate out twice in the last week, as opposed to five times in the previous week.
  • I exercised five days last week for a total of 205 minutes! Last week’s totals were four days for 73 minutes.

I do recognize that these things are accomplishments in and of themselves and that I need to be proud of them as well … it’s just tough because my end goal isn’t to do all of these things that I know I should be doing, it’s to lose weight by doing all of these things that I know I should be doing. The feel-good attitude is nice to an extent, but eventually I need to see some actual results, too.

More on that later on this weekend…

How I DON’T want to make money writing…

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I have a pet peeve about other writers – specifically, all of those writers who write books about how you, too, can be a successful writer.

You’ll find several shelves of them if you browse the Writing and Publishing sections of Borders or Barnes & Noble – they’ve all got clever titles like You, The Writer! or Make a Fortune Doing What You Love…, and frankly, they all go through the exact same crap that anyone who wants to work for themselves should already know – that you’re going to have to bust your ass, work really hard to find people who will buy your stuff, and then with a little luck, you might be able to make a living off of it.

I’ll admit that I even bought a couple of these time wasters myself before I finally caught on and stopped being a sucker. And what’s weird is that I normally don’t have a problem with other self-help books, but I think that these ones just hit a little too close to home to me because at the end of the day, I think they’re just a really low blow to profiteer off of other people’s dreams.

The thing is, a big part of why writing is appealing to me is the idea of the endless possibilities that the writer has when putting his own words down on paper. He can craft these amazing worlds of fantasy and wonder, or even share person experiences (possibly in a humorous manner) for the entertainment of others, but the cold, hard truth of the matter is that much like in any creative career, a relatively small number of people will ever actually get to make a living off of doing what they love. It’s because of this that I see these books and immediately think that these writers are selling out the dream, if you will – they could be writing about all of these amazing things, and instead they’ve opted to take the low road and pander to the dream because they know that they’ll sell a ton of copies to other people who want to live the dream themselves.

I don’t know if this makes any sense, but in my mind it’s kind of like Amway for creative types – instead of just being happy with creating, they’ve chosen to sell the idea of creating to other people who want to create. They make a few bucks and most of the people downstream from them make nothing … it’s all about the people at the top of the pyramid, and it really bothers me when I see writers selling out like this.

And don’t get me wrong, twenty or thirty years from now, I’d love to be successful enough to be able to write a book sharing my own experiences in these creative arts, but it certainly wouldn’t be intended as an instruction manual for being a successful writer. Stephen King had the right idea with On Writing, which is why it’s such an amazing book – because it shares his stories about the craft, and because he’s Stephen King, he’s got a lot of great stories to share. I have no problems with someone who chooses to look back over their career and reflect on their own successes and failures, but the goal of making a fortune always has to be second to simply telling a good story or it just doesn’t work.

Thin Post : Positive Signs … Appetite

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Sometimes it’s hard for me to focus on the positive when I’m attempting these things because they’re so few and far between, but one thing I want to try a little differently this time is looking for progress in places other than simply the numbers down there on the scale…

For example, I think I’m starting to notice a positive change in my appetite, in that I find myself (most of the time) not eating as much food or as big of portions as I have in the past. Tonight was a good example because I made homemade pizza – I ended up having three slices, which still sounds like a lot, but it was pretty much both lunch and dinner combined and I hadn’t eaten for quite a while when it finally came out of the oven.

Another example would be eating in the middle of the night because I used to have a really bad problem of getting up to snack at 4:00am, to the point where I would consciously close the pantry doors before I went to bed so that when I got up to snack later, I’d hit a brick wall (well, wood, anyways) and hopefully just be too groggy to go through the ordeal of opening the door to grab a couple of granola bars or a handful of chips before wandering back to bed. I haven’t done that in a long time, though, and I don’t even have to trick myself into keeping out anymore!

I like to think that all of these are little signs that my efforts are actually working – that I’m less hungry because I’m actually eating less calories and my body is getting used to it. I could probably write a lot more about specific foods that I’m trying to focus on and eating intervals to try to change my previous just shovel it all in mentality, but for now just a few baby steps here and there are enough to make me feel better and stop beating myself up … at least for a little while, anyways… 😉

Please don’t sell my mailbox…

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You know, I wish there was a way to track back junk mail that you get so you could see the actual point at which a mailer acquired your address.

At least for me, I’d use this information to decide who I’m going to do business with.

Out of the blue within the last week, I’ve started getting random advertising that’s very specifically targeted to publishers … interesting to me because, hmmmm, I’m publishing a book right now. Now as far as I can tell, there are probably only two companies that I’ve been dealing with who these might’ve originated from – the company whom I purchased my ISBNs from (who everyone does), and the printer itself. Unfortunately I have no real way of knowing, aside from just asking, but let’s not kid ourselves…

Sure, I know that companies make a lot of money off selling their customer lists to 3rd parties, but that doesn’t make it right. Besides, snail mail is pretty much dead in my eyes, anyways – aside from Netflix and Christmas cards, there aren’t a whole lot of worthwhile things that come out of our mailbox anymore and almost all of that crap just ends up in the trash. I’m not sure which is worse – a waste of my attention, or simply the waste of paper.

Still, I think it’s kind of a shitty thing when companies take advantage of their customers like that. I mean, it’s one thing for Target to send me a mailer with coupons every other month because at one time I bought something from their website, but don’t share my info with people who aren’t even you! I rarely even want your junk mail, let alone the unsolicited junk mail of some random 3rd party who just happened to be the highest bidder for your list. Here’s a thought – why not maintain a high quality list of customers who are interested in your own products, and then fine tune your marketing to use it for your own benefit?! Wouldn’t you rather keep the customers both happy and more importantly, paying you than pissing us off by throwing other offers down our throats???

What’s that? It’s more profitable to just sell off our info and let somebody else gamble on that next potential sale??? Only as long as us consumers don’t know who sold us out, it might be…

Thin Post : Health Tracking, One Week In…

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So after actually about 10 days of life tracking, as it were, here’s what I’ve learned so far, both good and bad…

I CAN exercise on a regular basis!
It’s funny how simply writing it down makes all the difference here for me, almost like I’m keeping score like in a video game. Whatever works, though – over the course of the last 10 days, I’ve exercised for 6 of them, 2 days on, 1 day off, which after months of not doing a damn thing, even after dropping a grand on a new elliptical, is a win in my book!

I need to work more on getting a consistent amount of sleep.
This really isn’t a huge surprise – I have a bad tendency to stay up super late when I’m being creative, then suffer the next day and eventually end up falling asleep early. This happened to an extreme last week when I got less than 6 hours of sleep several days in a row, then clocked in something like 15 hours when the weekend hit! Besides, ultimately I know that I’d have more time if I went to bed at a set time and worked a little bit each night – I just need to work on it.

I REALLY need to stop eating out for lunch!!!
This fact was probably the most disturbing of all – over 10 days, I ate out for SEVEN OF THEM, and for a couple it was even multiple times each day. My excuse is that I’ve been really preoccupied with getting the book done and thus cooking hasn’t been anywhere in the proximity of my priorities, but considering the fact that all of this fast food may very well have directly counteracted my weight loss efforts, needless to say, I need to come up with some simple things I can make next week to avoid the drive-thru…

All in all, my official weight change for the period was 1.4 pounds, which my wife is trying to convince me is actually perfect for gradual, healthy weight loss, but this early in, I still have significant fears that it will follow my typical pattern and this week will be my most productive, thus leading to a failure even earlier than normal. I’m trying my best not to think like that … for now we’ll just have to see how the numbers look next week.