Paul B's thread

[Paul B]

This week I got my wife a new Jeep. An orange one so now we have an orange Jeep and a Yellow one now on Halloween we will look very cool and with the times.

This Jeep like mine is "Trail Rated" and it has settings for rain, snow, mud and rocks, not that she is ever going off the pavement but we do drive on the beach occasionally which is behind our house.

We turned in the exact same Jeep in red because the tires got dirty. (and the lease was up)
My wife has MS and can't use her right leg at all so yesterday I installed whats called a "Left Foot Gas pedal". It is this contraption that sits on the floor and has a gas pedal all the way on the left side of the drivers side floor and pushes down on the normal gas pedal .

The brake stays where it is. I took her to a handicapped driving school to learn how to use this thing and she had to get certified for it. Next week we will go to the DMV because they will put a restriction on her license and give her handicapped plates.

The Left Gas thing lifts right out so I can also use the car . The device is made in the US and developed and sold by a wounded Veteran so I like it even better.

Today for the first time I will take her out practicing because I don't want her to solo until I am sure she can drive safely because she has to get used to using the gas and brake with her left foot.
She also has not driven in almost a year since her leg got worse.

When I taught her how to drive I had a stick shift so she knows how to use her left foot and she has been driving for 50 years. (we have been very happily married for 47 years )

After she gets the driving down pat we will have to figure out how she will get her walker into and out of the car without falling. That may be harder than driving.

So if this all works out well she can go to her hair, facial, doctors etc, without me taking her there and waiting.

 

[CAPSLOCK]

That's awesome for your wife. She must be excited to be on her way to running her own errands again.

 

[gobyvin]

Great to hear Paul! I will be praying she, and you as well, keep the fight on for as long as possible! Nice!

 

[Paul B]

We have been going on short trips to give her practice because she has to train herself to drive with her left foot.
She has been doing very good.

 

[gobyvin]

Wanting it is always half the battle. If we want it to happen and try a bit... it usually does. Life is beautiful.

 

[Paul B]

I can't believe it, just now I saw a gecko goby in my tank. I haven't seen that fish in 6 or 8 months. I may have two of them. I bought two of them about 5 years ago and it is a fish that stays well hidden and I have never seen the entire fish. I only get a very quick flash of a tail when I shoot some worms near his cave in the back of the tank.
They are a beautiful fish, but no one sees them

 

[gobyvin]

I think those gobies are really neat looking! We keep some gobies in our house, the local Naked Goby Gobiosoma bosci, is a drab colored but big personality fish! We find them in shells and cans/bottles people toss in the shallow harbors and bays. I love gobies, you can tell I am sure. Once I get my Reef aquascaped, I will be planning on long term use of sifting gobies to help maintain the sand.

 

[Paul B]

Good Morning, I hope everybody is safe. Being I am a Geezer I got my second Covid Vaccine shot today and to test it out I went to my Daughters house in Manhattan and licked the subway handrails.

But don't do that.

 

[Paul B]

For the last week or two I was a little disappointed because I couldn't find any of my randalls gobi's and one of my Bangai cardinals.
I was just working behind the tank and found them both. They are pregnant and fine. So this week I found my Gecko gobi, 2 randalls gobi's and my bangai cardinal. My tank had a lot of caves and hiding places so it is very hard to find certain types of fish.

 

[Paul B]

I don't know why they can't make these things last longer. I just had to replace the fan on the left. I don't know how long it wasn't working but you can see that it is much cleaner then the one on the right so maybe it never worked.
I have a few of these broken lights so I have a nice supply of fans.

I had to add a new fan but also the wiring to the fan didn't work so I just had to splice the new fan to the old one.
It's not a big deal but shouldn't happen.

 

[Paul B]

As I am waiting for my wife to get ready to to out to breakfast I was perusing the other threads.
Like 90% of them are about diseases and the other 9% are about possible diseases. The other 1% is somebody's birthday.

I can't believe there are so many problems in this hobby. I feel bad for these people but it is not their fault. Many people just don't know how to keep fish healthy and I get the idea that people think if their parameters are good, the fish shouldn't get sick.

Fish don't care about parameters. You could put a fish in a tank full of sawdust and kerosene with a shot of battery acid and a pH of 2 and they wouldn't get ich, velvet, intestinal worms, or dropsy . They would certainly die, but they wouldn't get sick

I am not going to say it again....................OK one more time, we are making the fish sick, no one else, it is us.
Fish should never get sick and I am blue in the face from saying it. Now I have to go and wash my face and go out to breakfast. On Sundays we do that.

 

[Paul B]

This morning I finished this cool Steam Punk lamp. It is "really" Steam Punk because it was made from an oiler from a 19th century steam Locomotive. It is solid brass and weighs about 10lbs. It has "firelights" and those glass tubes have fluorescent liquid in them that I made from the stuff in highlighters. They have ultra violet LEDs under them.

 

[chadfish]

As I am waiting for my wife to get ready to to out to breakfast I was perusing the other threads.
Like 90% of them are about diseases and the other 9% are about possible diseases. The other 1% is somebody's birthday.

I can't believe there are so many problems in this hobby. I feel bad for these people but it is not their fault. Many people just don't know how to keep fish healthy and I get the idea that people think if their parameters are good, the fish shouldn't get sick.

Fish don't care about parameters. You could put a fish in a tank full of sawdust and kerosene with a shot of battery acid and a pH of 2 and they wouldn't get ich, velvet, intestinal worms, or dropsy . They would certainly die, but they wouldn't get sick

I am not going to say it again....................OK one more time, we are making the fish sick, no one else, it is us.
Fish should never get sick and I am blue in the face from saying it. Now I have to go and wash my face and go out to breakfast. On Sundays we do that.

Hey Paul,

I’m one of these people. I went away for 4 days, left the tank on auto-feed/lights/flow, but when I got back, I was greeted with dinos and ich.

So what can I change to prevent this in the future? My thoughts always go to better monitoring of parameters, but if it’s something else, I want to know. Is it simply that I’m not wearing gloves when I reach into the tank, or maybe that I dote on it too much and move too much around and change things to “optimize”?
I was so excited and hopeful about my move to salt. I had all the right equipment: RODI, sump, UV, fuge with chaeto, awesome lights, ATO. All the stuff.. but now I’m feeling depressed and fed up. I can’t get the fish out and into my QT, i can’t do a blackout because of the coral and BTA, I’ve got dinos up the yingyang..

Did you ever go through this when your tank was young? Mines only 4-5 months old. Maybe I should just start over??
Any sage advice is appreciated

chadfish

 

[Paul B]

Chad, Hello. I am sorry for your problems. I have written volumes on this and wrote a book. It will take volumes to go over it but in short your parameters are not going to make your fish sick or give you diatoms.

I am totally against quarantine or medication but you need to get your fish very healthy first and the fact that they got ick, we know they were not healthy.

I posted many threads on this and I am pretty sure I have some here on Boston Reefers. I spoke to these people a few years ago and I had a lot of fun.

If you search for my name on here you can find all the nonsense, I mean articles I posted.
If you can't find what you are looking for, let me know and I will get you some articles or try to walk you through it. But it is not a 5 minute thing.

Here is a recent one to get you started:

Why Fish In Captivity Get Sick

As some people may know I have been talking about how my fish have never gotten sick in decades and I have been offered many reasons why such as I am Lucky or my tank has some mysterious creature that eats parasites, my Undergravel sucks up parasites and diseases, the Ozone I use kills diseases...

www.bostonreefers.org

And another one:

Aquascape for Fish Health

As I sit here self quarantining myself I have a lot of time to look at and ponder my tank. As I study it from the front and the back which I just scraped clean just to do something I noticed something that we rarely speak about. We normally make our aquascape to look like something pleasing...

www.bostonreefers.org

Another

How "I" would start a "Non Quarantined" tank today

I am fairly sure I will never start up a new tank. If my tank ever crashed now, I would probably leave the hobby as I have been in it since the 50s and I think that is long enough. My wife and I would do some more traveling and maybe buy another house in the tropics someplace. Maybe open up a...

www.bostonreefers.org

 

[chadfish]

Chad, Hello. I am sorry for your problems. I have written volumes on this and wrote a book. It will take volumes to go over it but in short your parameters are not going to make your fish sick or give you diatoms.

I am totally against quarantine or medication but you need to get your fish very healthy first and the fact that they got ick, we know they were not healthy.

I posted many threads on this and I am pretty sure I have some here on Boston Reefers. I spoke to these people a few years ago and I had a lot of fun.

If you search for my name on here you can find all the nonsense, I mean articles I posted.
If you can't find what you are looking for, let me know and I will get you some articles or try to walk you through it. But it is not a 5 minute thing.

Here is a recent one to get you started:

Why Fish In Captivity Get Sick

As some people may know I have been talking about how my fish have never gotten sick in decades and I have been offered many reasons why such as I am Lucky or my tank has some mysterious creature that eats parasites, my Undergravel sucks up parasites and diseases, the Ozone I use kills diseases...

www.bostonreefers.org

And another one:

Aquascape for Fish Health

As I sit here self quarantining myself I have a lot of time to look at and ponder my tank. As I study it from the front and the back which I just scraped clean just to do something I noticed something that we rarely speak about. We normally make our aquascape to look like something pleasing...

www.bostonreefers.org

Another

How "I" would start a "Non Quarantined" tank today

I am fairly sure I will never start up a new tank. If my tank ever crashed now, I would probably leave the hobby as I have been in it since the 50s and I think that is long enough. My wife and I would do some more traveling and maybe buy another house in the tropics someplace. Maybe open up a...

www.bostonreefers.org

Thanks. I’ll check it out.

 

[chadfish]

Chad, Hello. I am sorry for your problems. I have written volumes on this and wrote a book. It will take volumes to go over it but in short your parameters are not going to make your fish sick or give you diatoms.

I am totally against quarantine or medication but you need to get your fish very healthy first and the fact that they got ick, we know they were not healthy.

I posted many threads on this and I am pretty sure I have some here on Boston Reefers. I spoke to these people a few years ago and I had a lot of fun.

If you search for my name on here you can find all the nonsense, I mean articles I posted.
If you can't find what you are looking for, let me know and I will get you some articles or try to walk you through it. But it is not a 5 minute thing.

Here is a recent one to get you started:

Why Fish In Captivity Get Sick

As some people may know I have been talking about how my fish have never gotten sick in decades and I have been offered many reasons why such as I am Lucky or my tank has some mysterious creature that eats parasites, my Undergravel sucks up parasites and diseases, the Ozone I use kills diseases...

www.bostonreefers.org

And another one:

Aquascape for Fish Health

As I sit here self quarantining myself I have a lot of time to look at and ponder my tank. As I study it from the front and the back which I just scraped clean just to do something I noticed something that we rarely speak about. We normally make our aquascape to look like something pleasing...

www.bostonreefers.org

Another

How "I" would start a "Non Quarantined" tank today

I am fairly sure I will never start up a new tank. If my tank ever crashed now, I would probably leave the hobby as I have been in it since the 50s and I think that is long enough. My wife and I would do some more traveling and maybe buy another house in the tropics someplace. Maybe open up a...

www.bostonreefers.org

Wow. I can’t agree more. A diverse and healthy gut biome is essential for health. Also a diverse and healthy population of bacteria and algae in the water, rock, and substrate is essential.
My dry rock start probably had something to do with it, as well maybe too much UV. I’ll run it at night from now on. And I’ll figure out how to start feeding more live foods.

Have you ever thought of selling some tank sludge to help seed other tanks?

I really appreciate your help and club leadership.

 

[Paul B]

Wow. I can’t agree more.

You can if you try.

Have you ever thought of selling some tank sludge to help seed other tanks?

I have never sold anything from my tank, but I will give it away if you like. Come on over, I will also give you some cool gorgonians.

I really appreciate your help and club leadership.

I am not really in your club (or any club) I just visit occasionally until they throw me out.

 

[chadfish]

You can if you try.

I have never sold anything from my tank, but I will give it away if you like. Come on over, I will also give you some cool gorgonians.


I am not really in your club (or any club) I just visit occasionally until they throw me out.

Careful, or I’ll take you up on that offer.
Let me get this Dino outbreak under control and some stability established first, then I can seed with some real live rock and your sludge. If I add it now, the dinos will just outcompete them.

 

[Paul B]

My tank is running excellently. All the fish that were spawning are still spawning and I am happy that my new long nose butterfly and my copperband are getting along like brothers, or sisters. ;Bucktooth

They hunt together and hang out like best friends. I like that. My Janss pipefish is past his lifespan but still looks great as does my little blue stripe pipefish.

All the other fish look great, batter than I do. ;Joyful

I know so many people have so many problems and I feel for them. I am not sure why there are so many problems. Maybe I have been doing something wrong.

My DIY algae scrubber is scrubbing perfectly and my 25 year old DIY skimmer is skimming nicely.

I would imagine my reverse UG filter is doing what it is supposed to do but I can't see it so I don't know.

Brittle stars are doing the macarana and I assume dancing with the bristle worms of which I have many.
No problems to report so far but I hear after 51 years problems start to pop up.

 

[Joe Rice]

I would imagine my reverse UG filter is doing what it is supposed to do but I can't see it so I don't know.

What's the theory behind running a reverse UG filter?