C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 94

It’s on its way from Bolingbrook IL…finally!

I nabbed 7 spammers during morning coffee.

And I’ve got 30 gallons of water ready. I’m now working on the next 30, which is half full. Rock is washed. Still hoping for sand.

The name of the company shipping this tank, btw, is Aqua Vim. They’re the only company doing strangely shaped tanks. And doing it very well, apparently. I was able to get mine out of the ‘specials’ section, for not a bad price for what it is. The ones they make for hotels and corporate offices, now, or for incredibly rich guys who want a major tank built into a library wall…sheesh, I don’t wanna see the price tag! But I was surprised to find that if you don’t mind taking whatever wood is available, there are some deals…I suspect because they occasionally have an order somebody doesn’t follow through with: their fabrication can be, reportedly, slow, in a crowded season, so I can see why some people might bail; but their impatience is my good fortune.

Oh, I can hardly wait!

And…the tank process begins…

This is a good time for it, because right now I’m planning the ending of the next book, and there’s a lot going on I have to think about.

While thinking, I can be doing useful things… like

a) setting up the ro/di filter. I’m selling the old one. Anybody need a killer 4-chamber ro/di filter, everything good except the inserts and the pressure gauge. 50.00, new, with cylinders, about 150.

b) running 32 gallons new ro/di water (reverse osmosis filtered water)

c) hauling 2 32 gallon trashcans downstairs to the water filter.

d) pouring ro/di into 3 gallon bucket for measure.

e) pouring ro/di into 32 gallon can for salt mixing. I’m soaking wet and have poured 15 gallons of our new water into said tank. Ro/di is running: it takes time. Like 8 hours for 32 gallons, at least.

Meanwhile the tank is in Illinois, having arrived from NYC.

Due to the large number of potential offers of inheritances and knock-off handbags…

We are trying a new membership plugin, which will NOT let anybody post until I’ve approved the membership: this happens within 24 hours unless we’re on the road or sick or having computer trouble. We don’t know if we’ll keep this…but it shows promise of cutting down MY job of tossing out these ‘bots by the half dozen every time I log on. A pox on them, I say, but let me see if this works.

Meanwhile Jane link to Jane’s pagehas some lovely cute baby koi pix up, and some interesting posts…

She is trying the same thing…so bear with us if you’re new. We’ll get this worked out.

I am so sorry about the handbags.

Shopping for rocks, yes, indeed.

The store thought they had my sand in, but didn’t. It still ended up being great, because they had rocks. Wonderful rocks. I need some more rock, because this tank is bigger. And I need spires, because damsels love to chase one another around spires, which define their ‘kingdoms.’

Damsels are wonderful for large enough marine tanks, bright, colorful—cheap—and though they can get sizeable (up to 4″) they’re still rated small, among marine fishes, and being on everybody’s menu, they never stray more than 1-2 feet from their kingdom. Perfectly suited to a 100 gallon marine tank. They have their entire livespans predator-free, each with their own kingdom, and a wonderful show of constant movement.

Too often, fish stores sell one to a guy with a 30 gallon tank, and all is well until the unsuspecting novice puts in another fish. Well, what do you think would happen? The damsel’s got a guy in his 1-2 feet, who just won’t leave. It’s like tossing a guy over the fence to meet a guard dog in a 10 foot enclosure. It’s not going to end well.

These are the kind of things I wrote the fish book to try to prevent.

And back to my rock—it’s splendid, complex shapes— I can turn this into a wonderful thing!

With lots of damsels.

And…on our fishy outing, we got some baby koi, silver and black, to replace the poor koi gotten by the cats: we have the netting in place, and right now the fish are figuring out they’re no longer on the menu.

The plan with the new tank

a) today, I have to get a couple of new Rubbermaid Brute trash cans: they’re ok for saltwater.

b) a reliable gallon measure. I’ve got a lot of saltwater to mix.

c) an appliance dolly. Jane and I aren’t getting any younger, and we foresee more than one use for this thing. They have them at Lowe’s, and one thing we don’t damage will considerably pay for it.

d) eggcrate lighting grid: I lay this on the bottom of the new tank and set the rock on that, so that there won’t be any ‘point load’ on the bottom glass. I may have enough. I’ll have to check.

e) 1″ hose. And 40 feet of 1″ pipe, with about 12 elbows. Two 1″ valves for cutoff. One pot of purple glue. We’ve been using hose to connect tank to sump in the basement; pipe would be neater. We also need hose clamps.

Getting circulation throughout a wedge tank can be interesting. I’ve been using two oscillating devices that sweep the current back and forth, but I’m wanting to replace those and go for a sleek hood with no bulky oscillators sitting in windows in the facing.

My plan is to extend the downflow right down the back center of the tank as a pipe drilled full of holes, so pump-pushed water will go out in two directions at various levels. That will replace the oscillators.

f) I also am going to try to saw out the top of the fancy furniture canopy: closed lids are not good for a reef: controlling heat in the tank is difficult enough, because of submerged pumps. I’m going to attach the light kit to the underside of the canopy if I can: otherwise I’ll put it atop. Changing metal halide bulbs is a pita! You have to push them til you fear they’ll break, and they can’t be touched with bare hands, because finger oils will cause the bulbs to fail.

g) if I can do this, I’m going to figure out a way to install two computer fans in my canopy: if we start for an overheat problem, I’ll plug them in. Otherwise not.

That’s the start, and we haven’t even involved water yet, except to run 32 gallons of water into those trash cans and 32 more into the one I already have, and add 16 cups of salt to each one. A ‘mixing pump’ will start mixing each container of water.

h) and I need to get 100 lbs of sand, when I can get my hands on it, and get a bottle of Prime, which removes chlorine, and wash it meticulously in dechlorinated water and store it in buckets.

Very glad they’ve got the guy in Boston

The infernal device, as they used to call these things, is not new: this happened also in Victoria’s reign, as a group of people called the anarchists tried to disrupt ordinary life, create chaos, diminish confidence in governments, and bring about a sort of political zombie apocalypse, which would have everybody tucked into a private fortress looking for leaders—who, of course, would be—them. Cartoonists of the day pictured these people in black cloaks, slouch hats, and carrying little round bombs with lit fuses. Eventually the anarchy movement died back to the point it quietly stopped.

Now we’ve got people doing much the same thing with much the same motive, destabilize, confuse, and agitate. They’re the footsoldiers. The guys promoting this of course hope to continue to be pundits and princes after the dust has settled.

Most of you know we had our own in OKC: my father worked many years in the Murrah Federal Building; I very often drove him to work there. He’d retired before the bombing, but people he knew were in there. Jane was asleep when the bomb went off; I was outside talking to a neighbor. Sounded as if somebody had taken our chimney off. Jane woke up, thought I’d used the propane weed-burner and blown myself up; I’d grown up near explosions of all sorts (Lawton/Fort Sill, Artillery Capital of the World) and I knew something monstrous had happened. Jane and I met up as I was headed in to turn on the telly to see what was going on—I envisioned a natural gas explosion, a big one. And when we turned the telly on, it was the now-famous helicopter footage of the building. Live. It says something that my dad never mentioned it. At all.

On 9/11 I was trying to get to his bedside— too late: everything shut down; and he passed. I could barely get there for the funeral, and there were no flowers—because flowers are shipped by air. So I don’t like to remember that time. Ever. The happy years are more important. Now is more important. I know he’d like Now, right well.

The way to deal with these anarchists, in my opinion? Stop them where possible, and carry on where we can’t. They can’t destroy our way of life. We’re the ones that can do that, and that’s exactly what our enemies want. While the effects of these actions may reach out and touch us each in various ways, how we react is in our own control, and I refuse to give these bastards the satisfaction of worrying about them. Precautions, yes: if I spot somebody set down a bag, I’ll move away and call 911. Change my plans of where I’ll be and what I’ll do for fear of them, no. My life is under my control, and the odds are vastly in my favor.

I’m not inviting comment on this thread, because this is a politics-free zone, and I want to keep it that way. But I want to acknowledge the courage of people, ordinary people, first responders in all crises, soldiers on the line, and their support personnel. Optimism and determination are our counter-weapons in resisting these enemies of peace; and employing them defeats the purpose of these people, in whatever era we meet them.

A friend is coming to our aid…

And we have got someone to help us on the 444 lb object…

Here’s the deal. My marine tank is a wonderful tank, but we got it when we had the apartment, and it fits in a corner. I’ve been looking for a way to enlarge the tank so I can keep some fishes that I particularly like. So—I found a tank on special, probably made for an order that didn’t get picked up; and I have this monster coming in—444 lbs, pallet and crate. And we’re going to have to get it into the house.

Hopefully this will arrive on schedule, next Wednesday: hopefully it will be everything I hope it is: if not, well, I’ll make it work. It’s coming from New York on a pallet with crate, so it’s not as if this is all fish tank. There’s a stand and canopy, so I can bring it in as 3 pieces. Still—it’s going to weigh, and it’s fragile. We needed help, and friend Tim, bless him, is going to come over after work on Wednesday and help us get it up the steps. Til then, it will probably have to stand in our front yard.

The good news is—the most expensive part of a tank is not so much the tank as the gear—and it’s not a huge enough leap that I have to have new gear. So I can do this the ‘easy’ way and just plug one into the other. But it’s going to be a bit of an undertaking. I’m very excited. I love the hobby. I mentioned I’m doing a (of all things) fish book, how to, and I hope that will pay for it. And save a few pretty fish from untimely demise, with my how-to instructions. Anyway, I’ve looked forward to this for a dozen years, since I gave up my big tank when I moved, and I’m real excited.

The books ordered are going to the P.O…

We’re mailing today. SOrry for the delay—it was my stupid fault for letting us run out of mailers, which we have to order from the post office, and they took longer than usual getting them to us. They came, and we have them all ready to go today.

Pretty good success with the diet so far…

14 pounds apiece. I’m at 194. Jane and I both, though not at the same weight, starting or now—are losing at the same rate. We also both have an important ‘set point’ or previous stable weight level, coming up. Mine’s 192. I won’t say where hers is, but we’re also coming up on it.

Now, I have another set-point just 7 pounds below that set-point, and that would also get Jane past hers. So if I target that, (and sometimes as you approach an old set-point, your body can get cooperative about weight loss, but won’t budge lower) we can begin to moderate this diet a bit. That would be 21 lbs down for me and Jane, which is pretty good. Then we’d laze along, go to a couple of conventions where eating is not as regulated, then come back home and go back on the induction routine again, which would let us shed anything we did gain (though we can subsist on bunless hamburgers for the trip). Then we just continue on to the next set-point, 10 lbs away, approximately.

This is the game plan. That would take me to 175, at which I can fit into designer clothes…not that I’m playing that game any longer. We’ll see from there.

The main thing this diet is doing is not the calories or the low-carb: it’s those little frozen dinners I don’t cook: it’s breaking the cycle of thinking about food (repeating the same five meals [even good ones] for several months will tend to do that.)

The cycle we got into: I like cooking. I plate everything. I was hurting Jane by serving too much. I know that now. So I needed to get cooking off my schedule, out of my head, and get the thing under control. Funny thing, now that I’m not thinking about meals and groceries, I have time to deal with my marine tank and some other things that need doing.

We couldn’t, right now, possibly eat what we’d been eating: we’d splode. We’ve reduced portion sizes to 2 heaping tablespoons of 2 different veggies, a piece of meat the size of a card deck, and a tablespoon of sauce. Now we’re modifying that to go to 1) breakfast omelet 2) small salad for lunch, 1 oz Ranch 3) the Atkins frozen dinner.

BUT! somebody recommended coconut oil as a better shortening than olive oil: wrong for us. We got some, used it two-three days, and weight loss, which had been regular as clockwork, stopped cold, even reversed. We went back to olive oil, no other change, and off came the weight, regular as clockwork. So we’re back on track.

It didn’t arrive overnight, and it’s going to take some time to get rid of, but the biggest thing that’s happening, we’re breaking the food-compulsion and breaking the ties to it. We’re doing other things.

And feeling good. If we get too carb-short, we take a small wheat tortilla, sprinkle bacon bits and cheddar, a little salt and pepper, a little dry basil and broil 3 min. Pizzalina! Eccola!

Is anybody using Windows 8? We have a CC customer with a download problem…

We’d like to know if this is a problem for others.

If you are using Win8, have you tried to buy from us? Was the download ok?

If you haven’t and do have Win8, would you mind going over and doing one of our free downloads or samples to test it?