Downsizing

I have spent all of 15 minutes in my new house. Didn’t take any photos. I have a vague recollection of colours I didn’t love and too much too-big furniture. Lots of cupboards and counter space. Hardwood floors. Well-planned closets.

One thing I’m absolutely sure of, however, is that my current 55 g. aquarium will not fit anywhere without becoming an overwhelming piece of too-big furniture.

At first I thought I’d just get rid of it. I’m a little iffy on the amount of electricity and water it uses; I have a hard time justifying the environmental waste. There’s also a certain amount of worry involved with it. Why did the blue-green algae come back? Eeesh, it’s dirty in there, I should really really clean it. But, damn, too late tonight. Oh well, where did the, oh, that poor bedraggled Ram.

And I was okay with not having them. Well, I had to be. It was sad, but I thought I could do it.

Then I bought Otos. I had New Fish Energy for them, started sitting in front of the tank again all the time. Searching for them, worried that they might not acclimatize. They did. They bustle around the tank, happy as bivalves, swimming from dirty spot to dirty spot and suckering all the gunk up like nobody’s business.

I can't give up the fish completely. Got myself on OVAS, found someone selling a 20 g. tank, asked for the measurements, figured it would fit under the cupboards and still leave me more flat surface than I have now, and paid $70 for the whole kit and caboodle.

But first, I need to get my big tank in better order. It’s pretty algae-riffic in there right now. There’s brown spots and green spots, and beardy stuff and hairy stuff, and most frighteningly, the blue-green stuff. The Otos were step 1 and a pretty easy one.

Step two is to set up a CO2 diffuser, which involves the items you see to your right. I left it for a while because I needed to drill a hole in the lid of the pop bottle, poke the tubing through it and seal it up after, and I didn’t have a clamp to hold the lid steady. After a few weeks of trying to figure it out, I just said fuck it and did it fast and with all of my soft bits out of the way.

There’s a small hole in the top stair of my back porch, but other than that, the fuckit plan worked fine, as you can see. The next step, probably tomorrow night or Wednesday, is to get a sugar and yeast mixture into the bottle, seal the whole thing up, and wait a day or two to let the yeast send their anaerobic offerings up the tube and into my plants’ hungry stomata.