Blog It Out Your Pie Hole

So all the fish we’ve purchased have died. The goldfish got Ick, and nobody knew what it was until it was too late. The Zebra Danios we got were probably diseased when we got them. There’s a 15 day guarantee, but only on established tanks. Tank’s not estabished, no guarantee. So we’ll cycle the tank fishlessly.

Decided to do it fishlessly for 2 reasons.

1. It will give the LFS time to get non-diseased fish, or to kill off the disease ridden fish; and
2. I want my fish to live longer. Putting them in such a stressful situation will greatly shorten their life expectancy.

To get started, I had to find some clear, non-sudsing Ammonia. I went to Safeway, Long’s, Walgreen’s, and Drug Emporium. Looked at the cheapest ammonia available. All they had was either sudsing or lemon scented. I finally found some at Albertson’s. I dropped in 1 tbsp of ammonia in a 10 gallon tank, and the reading went off the chart. The chart only goes up to 8ppm of ammonia, a fatal dose for fish, but still, it went off the chart. 1 Tablespoon is 3 teaspoons, so I guess “a couple of teaspoons for a small tank around 40 liters (10G)” would be 1 or 1-1/2 teaspoons. An optimal reading is 3-5ppm. I guess it’ll recover.

Good thing it’s called “Fishless Cycling.”

So we have some girls here, who, when I tell them something they aren’t expecting, say For reals? My response to them is that a) Yes. and b) “In how many realties do you live? I only know of one.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, the future of America.

So last night, the fish was swimming around like there was no tomorrow. This morning, it was dead. I guess it was right.  :sad: Now we get to start all over again. Drain the water, fill the water, get a new filter, run the filter for a whole day, then restart with a fish.

This time, we’ll use a tropical fish so we can add some tetras later.

I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, and I have some problems with the way it is coded. For some reason, the quotes used in urls are single quotes, instead of double quotes. That’s a violation of the newer specifications, but since browsers are backwards code compatable, it works in most cases. The Tidyonthefly patch tries, but still craps out. There are a lot of single quotes in the code that need to be switched over.

Another thing with the upgrade is that the Quicktags are different. The paragraph Quicktag is gone. It’s in the documentation, but now it’s gone. Maybe I added it, and need to replace it. There. That’s done. Now if I could only remember how to get the WP GRINS plugin working again.