Way too much barbecue…

Haven’t been to a genuine picnic in a long time…but a local marine fish club (marine tanks are one of my hobbies) had their annual picnic and raffle, so Jane and I gathered up a goodly lot of the Hammer Coral from Hell (started as three heads and now is uncountable, each head about half an inch of hard skeleton and about 2″ of expanded anemone-like polyp. I’ve traded off about forty heads to the fish store, gave away another thirty to this same group, and finally am thinning it way out—it grows fast, and has just taken over my tank. And the cheatomorpha moss in the sump that helps supply microlife (copepods and other barely noticeable crustaceans to the tank above—that had grown monstrously thick, so I divvied off a lot of that just to give to people. Some people can’t grow cheato worth spit, but my rig does, so I share the wealth—which helps export phosphate (bad for animals, in excess) from my tank (cheato loves it, sucks it up, and when I toss it, that’s getting rid of surplus phosphate.)

So in the raffle we won a really nice favia, kind of looks like a green pineapple skin, about 4″ around with a 6″ tentacle reach. And that’s about all the room we have in the tank so we gave our other tickets to some nice folk we met. We were stuffed. Our 8″ plate diet is working—for one thing, to really remind us when we overindulge, that, yes, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. But smoky hot dogs, hamburgers, and good pasta salad were just irresistible. Jane says the cookie pudding was special, but I had seconds of the pasta salad and another hot dog. Plus I had beer—I ordinarily don’t drink beer either, and Jane absolutely couldn’t drink it if she had nothing else, but with picnic food and being really cold, it was good. After which we were quite useless.