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Tank birthday and I'm a Geezer

Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
I am going out for my morning walk/jog now but it is still pitch dark out there and I don't want to get eaten by a rabid duck so I have to wait a few minutes. I slightly cut down on my "breakneck" speed on my "walks" because I lost slightly more weight than I wanted to. :giggle:

2 years ago I planned to lose 25 lbs. I wasn't a Moose or anything but I was overweight like almost everyone in America except some ballet dancers and my blackworms. I weighed myself this morning and found I lost 28 lbs so I am fading away to a freight car.

This is a perfect weight for me and I keep asking my wife to call Jenny Craig to see if she needs a Spokesmodel. I keep refusing offers from
"Chip and Dale" dancers and I won't appear in any male underwear commercials. It just isn't me. :unsure:

I normally walk on my morning walks but lately I have been jogging because I often see a female jogger who goes faster than I do....Much faster.

I am afraid she will catch me because it seems she is carrying a bunch of twenty dollar bills and I am not sure what she plans to do with them if she catches me. :oops:

Disclamer: This is a true story but:
If this is racist, feminist, abusive, anti semitic, anti tree, anti ballerina, anti Chip and Dale dancer, anti worms, ants, anti biotic, Anti M (from the Wizzard of OZ" rent it it has flying monkeys in it..You will love it) or any word that begins with the letter A, biased in any way on Earth, please delete it and sentence me and my fish to 74 days of quarantine in hydrogen peroxide while listening to Rap music through Alexa on volume 9

 
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Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
I was able to get a picture of my new, but tiny tomini tang. The thing is a little bigger than a nickel.

Tomini Tang.JPG
Anyway, this thread is not about that. I just now figured out how to get pictures off my phone and on to my computer without E Mailing them. E Mail here is horrible because I live on Mars,next to the sea and our phone service is sometimes "interesting".

This picture is not from Mars.

Through back of tank.JPG


I took it yesterday "through" the back of my tank. I took this to show something that would make most people take out the cro bar and paint scraper to remove because they would call it disgusting. My fish call it lunch.

It is a half inch of algae, sponge, cyano and God knows what, but do you know what else it is? Pod Central. I never bought a pod in my life and I have two mandarins, two ruby red dragonettes and four pipefish as well as quite a few other pod eaters who would not live in a bare tank where you need an ATM next to your tank so you can afford pods.

Pods are like an Abacus, (Google it) They multiple faster than "Rain Man" (Google him to). Two pods will become 2,000 pods in a week or two if you feed them and a bare, clean tank won't do it. Pods need food and a lot of it. I am not sure if they prefer Big Macs or pistachio ice cream but they are more prolific than rabbits. (Wild rabbits not the silly, floppy eared ones people get in Petco and keep as pets).

A few weeks ago I added a pair of blue stripped pipefish. I have not seen them yet unless I go back there with a flashlight.
Yes, I would like to see them occasionally but this hobby has two kinds of people. The kind that have a pristine tank and they can see and count every fish they have and the people with the mature tanks where we never see many of the fish but we know they are in there, healthy, spawning and dancing to the early Stones. (I actually met Mick once.....OK,,I bumped into him.)

I have about 30 fish in my tank and if I look long enough, I will see every one of them. But normally you only see three or four of my fish. That is how fish want to be seen. They know we are watching so they take turns swimming past the front of the tank. The rest are hunting through the vast "forests" of farmland in the dark portions of the tank.

Of course you can't see this area of my tank from the front and I don't want my front glass to look like that. But it is considered "health" by my fish. Because of this grazing area my fish get a big discount on their life insurance as almost all of them die of old age.

This area is severely lacking in almost all tanks and 100% of new tanks which is causing many of the problems people have. You can develop an area like this by keeping enough rock in the tank so you can't see much of the back and never clean those areas. It may take a year or two to develop but it will get there. Pristine tanks are not healthy and your fish will hate you for that.

If you want to argue with me about that put a twenty dollar bill in an envelope with a self addressed, stamped return envelope and send it to me.
I will spend the twenty on Pistachio ice cream and throw out the envelope after I steam off the stamp.

Disregard this picture I had of this Male Model. I needed to get it off my phone and only know how to put it here.


Me in front of tank.JPG
 
diana a

diana a

Staff member
NJRC Member
Moderator
Paul B said:
The-CodFather...I didn't do it.

Diana, I don't like Palermo. It's Manhattan with no yellow lines in the street so it's like bumper cars. Ridiculous place.

My entire family came from Sciacca. Have you gone there? It's 2 hours due south of Palermo. Nothing but fish, mostly anchovies. :)
Click to expand...
No I didn't make it to Sciacca. I was two hours north of Palermo most of the time I was there in Santo Stefano
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
Today I am diatom filtering my tank........No! not for any stupid parasites as that is just silly. I decided to clean a small portion of my back glass. Like 8X8 to see what is living back there and the stuff is half an inch thick and flying all over the tank.

I don't like that and it sticks on my gorgonians so I am filtering it out. I won't clean the entire back because thats one of the secrets of a healthy tank so don't tell anyone. :rolleyes:
Tank with diatom.JPG


For those who don't know what a diatom filter is......You are so young and probably watch Justin Beiber and never saw your girlfriend except on Facebook.

Diatom filters were big in the 60s and 70s which is when I got this one. I had to replace the motor a couple of times because they were built, (not very well) for freshwater and when you use them in salt, you can hear them rust.

I still have 3 or 4 of them in various states of decomposition.

I don't think I could be in this hobby if I didn't have a diatom filter although any powerful canister filter may work, just not as good.

I don't use this filter to often or long because it removes anything solid including pods, coral food and parasites which I "don't" want to remove.

And if you run gravel or a "reverse undergravel filter" as I do, this stirring up of the gravel is needed maybe two or three times a year as it gets full of detritus and although I like detritus, I don't want it clogging anything.

All of us have nose hairs ( some of us really need to trim those hairs) and those hairs are to filter air we breathe in so we don't suck in dragon flies or frogs. But if we had to many, or to thick nose hairs, we would not be able to breathe so those dragon flies and frogs would be safe but we would croak. We would also look Icky.

A diatom filter, as the name suggests is that it used diatom skeletons which are much smaller than this ---------> . <----------

They filter out things as small as a micron which is 0.0004" which is smaller than an ich parasite.
I don't use it for parasites nor do I care about parasites but if you do, a diatom filter will remove parasites from a semi bare tank of if you like quarantine tanks it will remove all the parasites from there so you wouldn't have to use medications which I abhor (That means hate)

Diatom filters use diatom powder which you dump after you use the thing and it is very cheap from swimming pool companies.
Vortex used to make them but they are out of business so I have no idea where to get them now....Sorry.

If my last working one bites the dust I will have to build one.
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
In the 7 years since I wrote my book I have attended a few conferences put on by neurologists. My wife has MS so we get invited to these things all the time. The last one was about stress and how it lowers our immunity and gives us all sorts of other afflictions including what I consider the most interesting, shortens our (and I assume fish) lifespans.

How does stress do this? It is actually simple. Our bodies make Cortisol. We exude it from our adrenal gland constantly and it gives us energy for various tasks. Our bodies use it as the day goes by.

If we for instance are being chased by a rhinoceros, Model T Ford or Henry Winkler, our Adrenalin gland would pump out a lot of cortisol to give us energy.

Cortisol dissolves some of the calcium in our bones for our energy. and turns some muscle into sugar for energy.

These are good things especially when we were always in danger of being eaten by something.
But cortisol has some big problems to. When our bodies produce it but can't use it it also brings out dormant diseases, lowers our immunity, lowers our sex drive and a whole lot of other things. But the worst thing it does is shorten our life span.

The way it does that is because there is this thing on the ends of every chromosome in every cell of our bodies. This thing is called a telemere. As we grow and age our chromosomes need to divide and different creatures do this at different time spans.

The telemere at the end of each chromosome is like the "aglet" on the end of our shoelace and it keeps that chromosome from unraveling so it protects it. But every time the chromosome divides the telemere gets shorter until there is no more of it left and the chromosome degrades and can no longer divide. That is the end of our lifespan and in Humans happens at about age 80 or so.

That is why everything has a lifespan and can't live forever.

Cortisol is called the stress hormone because stress causes us to make more cortisol and if we are not physically running for our life, our muscles can't use that cortisol so it builds up.
The main problem with this is that it shortens those telemeres shortening our and I assume a fishes lifespan.

Fish experience stress in a tank but really experience it in a tank not set up like the ocean such as a bare quarantine tank with PVC elbows from Home Depot and fish not getting the food they recognize.

So (and I am speculating here as I am an electrician and not a fish physiologist) if a fish has a normal lifespan of 10 years and we get that fish 2 years old. 72 days in quarantine with copper will make that fish create a lot of cortisol which will shorten it's lifespan. How much? No one knows because all fish are different and fish are built much differently than most of us.

But I think that is the main reason that I have not been able to find even one fully quarantined tank or fish that is very old. But of course I am guessing.

If all of our fish are not mainly dying of only old age, we are failing and doing something wrong.
Just my opinion of course. :anguished-face:
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
I am going to a dermatologist/plastic surgeon this morning because this Dr. found a freckle under my eye that he tested and said it is cancer.

He also removed a "freckle" under my arm yesterday that Dr. Dogie Howser said was "questionable".

At my age, everything on me is "questionable" :oops:

At that time Dugie and a Supermodel assistant numbed my arm with some novocaine or Prizapro and made an incision. He kept talking and said that he was going to make a diamond shaped incision. His assistant was asking "why not make a square" incision?

They were going on and on about the shape and depth of the incision until I said, Look, I don't care if you make an incision that resembles Angelina Jolie or Mount Rushmore. Just cut the thing out, rub some Rowaphas on it and let me out of here because I got fish to feed.
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
The freckle under my eye turned out to be cancer so they will remove it but they want to sew my eye closed for 2 weeks while it heals. I have to think about this for a while as I decide which pirate I want to look like with that patch on there. :(

On a lighter note:
Thank you to all who bought my book. I was just able to donate the profits. $500.00 to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society in my wife's name.

I will post the receipt when they send it. :D
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
Nothing wrong with my eye but the lower eyelid will have some stitches in it so they don't want it to rip. I am not crazy about this Idea so I may go for 2, 3 or 9 other opinions. Friday I am going to the Eyelid surgeon. Who even knew there was such a thing.

It's a tiny freckle. This is why you should never listen to your wife and go to a dermatologist for a skin check. I probably had this thing for 50 years and it was not going to turn into anything . But after they prod it and take biopsies, it turns red and wives think this is important.

Just leave things alone and they will be fine.

If you go to a foot doctor, they will find something wrong with your foot, a heart doctor will find a problem with your heart and a hair doctor will tell you you are bald. Just stay home or go out to dinner and don't invite any doctors, lawyers or shoe salesman and go about your life.

These people don't make money looking at their fish tank. :cool:
 
Jamie S

Jamie S

NJRC Member
Good luck Paul, like you said hopefully it’s nothing. I think wives like to worry more to make up for the fact that we don’t worry much.
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
I cancelled my eyelid surgeon today. I don't trust the guy and will find someone else, maybe a Veterinarian, horse doctor or Dr. Korvorkian

The office called me to ask why I cancelled. I told them I don't want my eyelid sewed closed, then wait two weeks to get it fixed.


I got a different guy who will do it differently, maybe using small toggle bolts or double sided tape. :oops:
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving :D We are going out tonight to City Island which is a small Island off the Bronx which is all sea food restaurants and is famous for that. I will have my traditional clams for a pre Thanksgiving feast. :) Then to the Grand Kids in lower Manhattan.

Yesterday I went to a doctor to get some stitches removed from the back of my arm that Dugie Howser said he needed to remove.
He said, Oh No, you have to wait 5 more days to remove these.

I said, Like, why did your office tell me to come in today as I don't live around the corner and I am sure you knew how long stitches had to stay in before you removed them.

This place is in Hampton Bays about 40 minutes from me.
They want me to come back in a week but of course that ain't gonna happen so now I have to remove them myself. The problem is they are on the back of my right arm where I can't see so I am getting my friend to do it. I wonder if my insurance takes his bill? :confused:

PS. I got a different doctor to remove this "freckle" on my eyelid and that will happen in January.
They call it a surgery but if I could take my screaming, I would do it myself as they make a big deal out of the stupidest things. :rolleyes:
 
Paul B

Paul B

NJRC Member
Diana, Greta is 10 years old now and is into make up and shoes. She is a real Girly Girl but will be a real force to contend with when she is in her teens and I am glad I don't have to raise her. I went through that once, thats enough. :oo:

My wife takes her to the outlets where she gets all these free samples of make up. Then she brings them home and lines up the bottles just to look at them.

I saw one was foundation. I asked Greta if she uses foundation and she said, "No, I just like looking at the bottles"
 
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