The last week of October is always hectic and stressful for me. Several family celebrations plus Halloween makes for an unhappy introvert. And this year all the political turmoil added to the pandemic strain piles on the anxiety.
So I haven’t been very productive this week. Just have been exhausted and scattered. Which isn’t to say that I have done nothing. I have been thinking about my Veritas re-write, and as snatches of scenes or paragraphs I want to insert come to me, I have written them down. It’s fits and starts, but it’s progress. I hope to get those words into the computer before the week is out.
Those of you who have followed this blog for a while will know that we have had a rather adventurous time trying to keep guppies alive in our small 5-gallon fish tank. We’ve been through 8 fish. The last one died right before the lockdown in March, and our tank has been empty since.
We’ve begun “cycling” our tank again to get the ammonia and nitrate levels to zero before adding fish. It’s a slow process and currently leaving me scratching my head, but we seem to be getting there in spite of ourselves. Once we get the water right, we’ll get new fish, and hopefully keep them alive for a decent amount of time. Of course, the way coronavirus cases are rising in our neck of the woods, we will probably be ready for new fish right when we get closed down again!
So I have written a paltry few hundred words on my novel, and have been watching bacteria grow. Exciting times. But the end of October is always like this for me. I know come November I will be able to take a deep breath and feel some weight come off my shoulders.
I am not crazy enough to do NaNoWriMo this year. I do not have the headspace or emotional bandwidth for it. But I do want to try and at least get into a rhythm, dedicate some time each day to writing. We shall see.
Are you doing NaNo? If so, good luck!
Have a happy and safe Halloween, everyone!
The Great Fish Die-Off of 2020 – CoronaLife Day 236
Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know we have had quite a few adventures in fish-keeping. We have a small 5-gallon tank, and have kept about 3 guppies at a time in there, give or take a few dying. We have had 8 guppies so far, and the last one died just before the coronavirus lockdown started. So our tank has been empty a long time.
Because of that, it took a while to get the tank properly cycled and safe for new fish. Finally, after about 8 months, the water tested perfectly for multiple days, and we went and got fish #9, 10, and 11. My daughter was very excited to have friends in her tank again! She named them Moonlight, Starlight, and MiniSeashell 2.
We got them home, popped them in the tank…and immediately knew there was a problem. Starlight was acting weird, “vertical hanging”, which we have seen before and never bodes well. Sure enough, he died within the hour. The others seemed okay, so we went downstairs to watch a movie. When we came back up, the other two were dead.
My daughter was upset to lose all her fish within a few hours, and I was baffled. Our water was perfect, what could the problem have been? I decided they all must have been sick with something from the store, because what else could it be?
The next morning, I changed out about 2 gallons of water, put in fresh water, as I always do when there has been a fish death in the tank. A few hours later, I tested the water, since I was planning to buy more fish that day to try again.
The mystery was unexpectedly solved.
Ammonia is deadly to fish—they suffocate. My tank water the day before (and several days prior) had tested at 0, both at home and at the store. That morning, it tested at 2.0 ammonia. That’s AFTER I had changed out almost half the tank, so it had probably been closer to 4.0. Deadly.
The only place it could have come from was the store’s water. Those poor fish had already been poisoned before we bought them. If I had not dumped that water into our tank, at least 2 of them may have recovered. But I didn’t know. It never occurred to me that the store’s water might be toxic. The fish never stood a chance.
I know better now. Once again I am cycling my tank to get the water fit for fish. This time, no water from the store will enter my tank. And hopefully the fish won’t be poisoned before we even get them home.