Thank you. I also feel is a milestone but to me it is also the last milestone.
Here is a stupid video of a milestone.
I think we all need to set milestones for most of the things we do. I always did in my job and my life (which rarely go as planned)
I feel I had milestones for my tank but at the time of each one, I didn't think of them as milestones.
Of course as pertaining to this hobby our first milestone was to get the tank, water fish etc.
It takes a while to figure what lights you want, how to build, get the money, win them on "Name That Tune" or buy them.
So that was everybody's first milestone.
The second milestone was to get them to live a few days or a week. That took a little time. Some people are still stuck on that milestone.
After we get them to live, our next milestone is to keep them healthy enough that they only die of old age like they are supposed to do and what I want for myself. I would like to live to at least 157.
That last milestone is where 95% of the members are still stuck. I myself was lucky because I passed that milestone probably between 1979-1983. That was because Steve Jobs and Bill Gates didn't perfect computers yet so we didn't have so much wrong information and we had to think about this stuff using our brains and common sense.
Our brain is that often unused blob in our heads that is normally used to control our thumbs so we can text a person of the opposite sex (sometimes the same sex) and try to mimic conversation that makes us "seem" intelligent without actually having to have words come out of our mouths as many of us speak in Klingon using "words" such as LOL, ROTFLMAO, DUH, ERRRR, OMG etc.
I discovered, mostly by accident, somewhat through SCUBA diving "alone" and not in a tourist resort with 57 other people that learned how to swim last Tuesday and discovered SCUBA diving that morning about 8:00 - 8:30 am after breakfast of pancakes with that fake Maple syrup instead of the real stuff.
I dove with fish in places I couldn't pronounce, laying on the bottom which was a DSB until I either ran out of air or remembered my wallet was still in my Speedo that I was wearing to impress the cute little French girl that I met that morning sitting next to the guy who just learned how to swim.
From that I learned a few things. French girls don't like me, and fish are getting along very well without us.
There are predators all around them but they don't swim around shaking in fear like we do if we see a Great White Shark smiling at us. ;Jawdrop
I also learned that the majority of fish do not eat flakes or pellets and very rarely eat anything freeze dried although a Great White Shark will eat an accountant no matter how dry he is.
Fish eat fresh seafood. Mostly whole seafood and they don't even spit out the bones like I do.
I also learned that fish in the sea do not "look" sick. They are all much better looking than the fish in tanks but not that French girl with the long hair and..........OK forget her.
That milestone in the early 80s I learned that as long as I "left the fish alone" and fed them the right stuff they lived forever or until they jumped out like many of my fish do. Unfortunately healthy fish in spawning mode jump very high.
When fish in tanks die, it is "always" our fault. Not the drunk who hit the power pole causing your power to go out (buy a generator) the owner of the LFS that told us that Achilles tangs stay smaller than an inch and can be fed goldfish pellets, (read a book) or the guy in the canoe in WacaWaca land in the South Pacific who was just trying to make a few cents so he could feed his pet iguana.
It is our fault. 100% all the time.
And if we fail to learn or don't want to know how to keep fish healthy, we will lose the fish. Probably all of them then get out of the hobby and work in Home Depot loading toilet bowls onto minivans.
You want to learn? Don't ask that guy eating pancakes or that French girl. Ask somebody who has never been on the disease forum. Not me because I am old, cranky, ornery, set in my ways and past my milestones. My milestone was 50 years and I achieved that so maybe now I will start to feed all my fish nothing but boiled gold fish flakes, install a DSB, quarantine everything in hydrogen peroxide for 75 days and soak my corals in tree stump remover like many people do. You can usually find those people in the disease forum with a heading of "HELP"
