This was Deathmarch Thursday…a little writing this morning, and Jane alternated writing with hitting the front flowerbeds with fertilizer. I got the filter washed out, and can say we are showing signs of improvement in the pond.
Then the marine tank. This is the Big Fix, necessitated by lousy tests that expired, and a refractometer that finally went out of calibration, and the lights burned out of ‘true spectrum’. IE, these corals are tough. But it’s time I fixed their array of problems and got the tank back on track toward zero maintenance: zero maintenance is great ONLY if you don’t rely on bad tests.
So…yesterday I prepped 21 gallons of saltwater, and today, after the salt had had time to fully dissolve (it’s more than sodium chloride: it involves all sorts of minerals) —I started a water change, which, since I can’t find the right diameter hose for my one surviving lifting pump, means dipping water out, dumping it, and, well, since I have about 20 lbs of aragonite (calcium) sand that needs to go in, might as well use the waste water I take out to rinse the dust off the sand, which means carrying 30 lb buckets of water up from the basement, and 20 lbs of sand, and then deciding to do it downstairs, so back downstairs, and more 30 lb buckets of water up, and then the wet sand upstairs…not to mention rinsing it and dipping up sand by handfuls…
Jane helped. We scraped pink coralline off the glass, rearranged the corals, the rocks, cleaned, and added water. I’m hoping for my test kits soon, but this can’t wait: it’s gone critical, and we’re losing some coral bits. SO….
We head off to get new lightbulbs (special, to the max) and a heater because what I have isn’t enough; and then—we stopped for a late lunch, early supper, for a burger; and THEN Jane wanted to visit the relatively new Hobby Lobby in the Valley. Sigh. Two hours later, I am done in. I hate shopping. But Jane has so looked forward to this store, and she was having such a good time…
I literally couldn’t walk by the time I got home. A glass of chardonnay, magnesium, potassium, and two Advil have restored humanity and eased the pain in my legs, but by the time I got home—I was having muscle spasms in my feet: magnesium shortage. I know that one when it hits. SO…we still haven’t put the new bulbs in and I was too done in to tackle the heater installation, simply a matter of bending over and plugging the sucker in, but I just couldn’t. Age is a bitch, my friends. But magnesium is your friend. I hurt so damn bad I didn’t even want to bend over to get the power cord plugged into my laptop.
Doing much better now. Advil is also your friend. And tomorrow we will get those lights installed and the fixture cleaned—they’re ungodly bright: you can’t even look at them; and hot; and we’ll have them on a shortened schedule, burning only an hour a day for a few days, then working up to full 8 hour daylight. You can sunburn your corals, even kill them, if you take it too fast, too long on new lights.
The house is now full of roses: they’ve succeeded the peonies and iris. The smell is to die for.
And the tank is now looking much nicer.
It would be nice if you had some sort of lift system from the basement to the main floor. I don’t remember what is on the main floor directly above the filter system, but even something you could put in an out-of-the-way area would at least eliminate having to carry heavy loads up and down. Jane (and I) are nearing another milestone in age, the end of our 6th decade, and she’s going to be slowing down, too.
One really wishes that manufacturers of complex systems such as aquaria would standardize their fitting sizes, the various hose sizes, etc., because even working with PVC pipe for a kendo gear stand means I have to look for special adapters that aren’t readily available off the shelf.
What bugs me about pumps is when you have one with a 5/8ths inch outlet and another with a 1/2 inch outlet from the same manufacturer, one an 800 gph and one a 1200 gph. They look so near the same.
One day we may have to install one of those chair-stair lifts, but we’re not slowing down that much. Despite the fact I have a heat patch on my lower back. 😉
My father installed a chairlift (while recovering from a stroke – ask what engineers do for therapy) and it was used almost entirely for moving heavy items up and down the stairs. It was great for getting the 40-pound bags of water-softener salt down to the softener.
I was thinking something along the lines of a dumbwaiter.
….and then I read further down the thread, and saw your reply about the lack of available wallspace to make a dumbwaiter. Read first, then type……
Even a pulley and basket system might help if there is a convenient place to put the hook to suspend it from.
I would DEARLY like to put a dumb-waiter in my house, just a little home-made affair, but the only place that would work for it to appear upstairs is directly in front of a door downstairs, oh, well.
No use worrying about it now, anyway. I’m stuck in the house in town for the next 6 weeks waiting for my broken ankle and 10 added screws to all stick themselves together. And magnesium I’m taking, but no advil or aleve. Anti-inflammatories are right out, says the doctor. Bone-healing is an inflammatory process that we do NOT want to inhibit.
I have also learned some important info about nutrition and neurological degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, M.S, and maybe even Alzheimer’s. My inherited ataxia is not, in itself, life-threatening, but it is certainly a major contributor to my falling down and breaking my ankle. I thought, since it is genetic, there was nothing much to do about it, but it seems that nutritional therapy to keep my mitochondria healthy may be of considerable value. This is the popular reference, a TED talk on youtube, but it is backed up by some serious research. So bring on the kale!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc
When did the ankle debacle happen? It sounds like a royal PITA! And in summer too! I hope there is a lot of sedentary stuff you enjoy doing. Lots of reading time? Toes crossed for a speedy and healthy recovery.
Back on Wednesday the 6th I got home after a fairly spectacular thunderstorm whose approach I had not been aware of when I went to town for a few hours. It was still raining lightly; I was concerned about the cats I had left out in a storm; I park on a somewhat uneven grassy hillside in front of the house– all contributory factors, besides the ataxia, to my lack of concentration on making sure my balance was secure as I stood up. Result — a keystone cops type wild dance down the slight slope, resulting in a worse fall than if I had simply dropped at the first feeling of imbalance. I crawled to the house, let unhappy cats in, and called a good neighbor for help. Had to wait till the 15th for the swelling to go down to get it all screwed back together.
Current project, appropriately sedentary, is getting my laptop all backed up on a terabyte drive and cleaning out its own overstuffed drive. Then before my lovely cousin goes back to her own life, she will bring in enough of my chainmaille jewelry stuff that I can keep busy (and try not to lose open jumprings in bed — worse than cracker-crumbs). Also maybe I will catch up on my woefully out-of-date blogs. http://abigaillmm.blogspot.com
The plate and the 10 screws ought to keep the bones secure. I am a bit concerned about whether the dislocation will have a tendency to recur. Have forgotten so far to ask the orthopedist; must remember that question when I see him on
July 1st.
Can’t spell my own name right! If anybody’s interested, my chainmaille blog is at http://abigailmm.blogspot.com
duh
That’s pretty stuff!
WHen they put ankles together for skiiers, they do intend for them to stay put. Ask them about rehab to rebuild muscle strength, but they should give you a recommendation on activity.
Yes, really! YOu and Jane should do lunch, re the ankle. She didn’t break hers, but a bad sprain, so that now and again I have to do the violent-handshake or hard-pull method of snapping it back into alignment. ONce injured, ankles and knees are a bear, and having 2 football knees which really haven’t given way in like 30 years, I can say wonky ankles have mine topped, for sure.
Definitely what you eat affects how you feel. The way to feel real good for 15 minutes and like crap for 3 days is a big sugary piece of cake. Yesterday we stopped at Five Guys’ Burger and Fries, new to our area, but we had it on the road, and mistakenly ordered mine with ‘sauce’ and also a large fries. No. Do not eat the secret sauce or order large fries unless there are five of you. I’m convinced the meal was what had me hurting so bad on the shopping expedition: last night, my feet swelled awfully—one fluid pill later, and we are much better. But yep, had to be onion in the secret sauce.
About the healthiest diet for us seems to be a variation on South Beach: bread for the B vitamins; and as many cups of veggies as you can manage, salads, cooked veggies (potatoes for this purpose are not a veggie: they’re in with the breads.) And each person gets the equivalent of half a cup of meat or an egg a day. An egg counts as meat, not dairy. And you need dairy, which we satisfy with cheese. If you’re super hungry, add a salad. Keep the salt low: cook with olive oil.
Breads: bread, potatoes, rice, green peas, corn, any grain. One half slice, one scoop.
Meat: beans, lentils, meat, egg. 1/2 cup.
Veggies: green and leafy should be major; also cauliflower, broccoli; shrooms; sprouts; green beans; snap peas. As much as you want.
Dairy: milk products, cheese. Moderate.
Sugar: sucralose products. When needed.
Fruit: rarely.
On this diet, we don’t get aches and pains, so long as we don’t have nightshades ( potatoes or tomatoes, paprika or tomatillos.) And as long as we avoid the whole lily family (onions, chives, garlic—the latter in great moderation.)
Get off that and we limp about something awful.
RE the basement stairs: they’re nice carpeted stairs, nothing chancy, and we plan to resurface them in good wood and do a runner. But—if comes the day one of us can’t do it anymore, we’re going to have to consider a stair life, and we’d better lay it aside in the budget: that’s about a 4000 price tag.
Right now, of course, we’re great. It’s no fun carrying 30 lbs of sloshy water anywhere, let alone upstairs, but outside of that, we’re in no difficulty, so don’t worry about us. We have a hand-rail, we use it, we have good lighting: don’t think of a spooky basement: it’s carpeted and wallpapered, on the stairs half.
Unfortunately a dumbwaiter has two drawbacks, outside their notorious hazard re Assassins in the Bujavid, —size and weight of what we have to carry—and the fact no useable wall is available. You do put me in mind that someday installing a laundry chute in the bathroom, and we have just exactly the place to do it: inside the sink cabinet. Just put a laundry bin below, and viola! no more lugging bags of laundry down. The only problem is that the kitchen, Jane, and moi would all be lumped into one bin of laundry items. Hmmn. But you don’t want narrow chutes: nothing like having a fuzzy bathrobe stuck halfway down a chute. You’d have to send a cat down to clear it. 😉
We used to have a trash chute through the kitchen counter down to a garbage can in the garage below. Demise of the trash can system in favor of plastic trash bags made this obsolete. Years later, the coming of curbside recycling pick-up allowed us to put the recycling cart under the chute and use it again. But a gallon plastic milk jug doesn’t fit without careful crushing. And if it re-expands partway down, then a hammer or something else has to be dropped down to clear the way.
Does this mean tha Shu is saying “Pick me! Pick me!!” or “Nuh-uh! Not my job!” 😀
You have your aquaria upstairs, but support systems in the basement; I wonder if it would be worth it to install a small dedicated pump to simply move prepped water from the basement upstairs. Discarded water could be handled either down the drain, or a tiny basin like a dentist’s with a catch downstairs.
“…a fuzzy bathrobe stuck halfway down a chute. You’d have to send a cat down to clear it.” Heh.
Our Cassi earns her keep by keeping moles out of the (huge) yard — she eats them inside the house. I’m sure, though, she would find it undignified to be sent down a laundry chute.
So sorry to hear about the back. I never truly appreciated how *MUCH* I use my back until I threw it out a couple weeks ago. Still recovering, very very slowly. As my job requires much physical labor (I’m a hosuekeeper/personal assistant, more or less)…yeah.
Fortunately I’m able to get things done in five minute increments.
Sure hope the corals come back beautifully for you 🙂
Oh, and I’ve been badgering my local library to get more of your work on their shelves – they told me today that they have some titles on the way!! Due in at the end of summer!! Yay!!!
THank you! 😉
I suspect that S00p3r Sh00 would have such an adventure that one would have to prevent him from repeating the excursion, even when not needed to clear a jam 😉
You have him pegged. 😉
Bless your heart! Tell me about 30 lb buckets of water. I went to a water service so I could get the delivery guy to schlep the 5 gallon bottles of water into the house and put them on the dispenser. Guess who schleps the water bottles in off the porch and puts them on the dispenser! I’m 5’4″, about 3 years older than Jane, the bottles weigh 40 lbs apiece, and the dispenser is waist high. Talk about an exercise in body mechanics. . .
Oh, we know those bottles. We went over to Brita, which does pretty well for us. Or, you can install a Culligan system under the sink (we went to this in OKC after the delivery guy schlepped in and out with Jane’s purse from the living room), and you just have to get a strap wrench or cylinder wrench to change out cylinders now and again…
Unfortunately, while we have the killer ro/di system in the basement, and an access to the sump, where we could drain off water and put in water on the same level—but it’s full of microlife we don’t want to kill off. So…rather than drain and fill from the downstairs tank, we want to drain and fill to the top (display) tank to save all those little no-see-ums.
If this is a dumb question, forgive me, but don’t these buckets which seem to hold about 4G, (“A pint’s a pound, the world around.”) also hold 2G, 16 pounds? 😉
Actually, Paul, your quote is (only sort of) accurate. One Imperial gallon is 160 Imperial ounces and weighs ten pounds (Act of Parliment, 1824). So one Imperial ounce does indeed weigh one avoirdupois ounce. Sixteen of them would weigh one pound. But an Imperial pint is twenty ounces, as any true ale drinker will tell you. And the Imperial ounce and the US ounce are not the same size; the Imperial ounce is 28.4 milliliters, the US ounce is 29.6 ml, or about 4% larger. So the old phrase is about 4% off. More accurately, one might say “a pint’s a bit more than a pound where-ever Americans abound.”
Oh well, it is certainly true that a liter (of water) is a kilogram the world around. Someday you’ll all learn… 😀
Isn’t pedantry annoying? The things you learn (and never forget) while trrying to design racing cars…
My degree was in Chemistry, but career in Computing. Attention to detail is never a bad thing, in my experience. Sloppiness usually returns to bite you in the ****.
The quote certainly dates to the era when there were pints to be found “the world around”, i.e. the height of the Victorian Empire.
Be careful ordering your pints in this country–some places are pulling 14oz pints!
Lol, Paul, yes. But I only have about 4 or 5 guaranteed ‘clean’ buckets, ie, the never-used-otherwise sort that I reserve for the marine tank. And I want to do as large a water change as possible. 2 of them hold 7 g, and we dipped FROM them into the 4 g buckets, believe me, not to mention the slosh factor if we’d tried to schlep them upstairs.
But you don’t have to fill them to the brim (or the 4G mark, whichever comes first)! Half full means no sloshing and the weight wouldn’t be nearly as consequential. You can still make the same exchange, just twice as many trips up the stairs.
p.s those 4G buckets are just the thing to have if your bathroom remodel involved a new throne with the 1.5G flush. If that’s occasionally ineffective, a 4-5G bucketfull of water poured into the bowl from waist high can be an excellent “persuader”. And if’n it’s too recalcitrant, you can easily stop pouring before the level reaches the rim. Believe it or not, I’ve known someone to have flushed again with an already full bowl.
If you have crunchy knees, more trips up and down stairs can easily be as bad as, if not worse than, overfilled sloshy buckets.
Sympathies to AbigailM on the bum ankle. DH twisted his, ironically on a handicapped access ramp while trying to hold open a door for someone on crutches. He got a super-whizzygig splint with no fewer than 3 separate Velcro straps from the physical therapy store whose computer he was fixing at the time.
Oh, I know about crunchy knees, and sandy neck joints. 😉
Thanks for the magnesium/cramps tip. Gotta try that.
Back when, there was a preparation sold as ‘Carters’ Little Liver Pills.’ They were nothing to do with the liver, but did cure backache, and they were taken off the market eventually because, as I recall, they were nothing but a magnesium tablet. But they sold really well and people swore by them.
There is magnesium for regular back pain. Headache is often dehydration, often overnight. A glass of water by the bed, defended from the cat or Fido, can prevent morning headaches. Leg or foot cramps: potassium shortage can do that to you, but never overdose potassium: it has to do with heart rate. Sodium and potassium exist in balance, ideally.
Years ago I found lists of potassium equivalents for foods. High: potatoes (baked or french-fried), broccoli, raisins, beans and peas, stone fruits, avocados; low (or potassium-draining): cranberries, bread and pasta, cheese, tea.
It’s the only legitimate reason I’ve seen for eating fries.
Cantaloupe is also very potassium-rich. Not that one requires any extra excuse to eat it beyond the taste! I just had the summer’s first picked-yesterday-and-sold-at-the-farmers-market cantaloupe. Mmmmm!
USDA nutrient database http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/
They’ve changed it; I thought it used to be easier to use.
Restless legs can be helped by folic acid, and also by iron supplements. Be VERY careful with iron supplements, because too much can lead to major complications. Ask your doctor what dosage you should be taking. My neurologist put me on 650mg of iron, which is a hefty dose, along with the hefty dosage of other medications for my RLS.
Check out the boswellia-based pain relievers which are so much healthier than NSAIDS. And there are substantial clinical trials to support that statement. I just stumbled on them myself after years of relying on naproxen and have gone through my orthopedic doctors to set up a trial. I’m using 5-loxin which my health provider pharmacist helped me select from the many options. I have severe osteoarthritis, and an inflammatory disorder which luckily can be controlled with diet rather than drugs (so far). Right now my knees are acting up so I’m searching for a solution to naproxen (and knee replacement…at least until I retire). The Synvisc injections help but aren’t a total solution.
I find that the South Beach approach isn’t useful as an anti-inflammatory diet and I’ve researched anti-inflammatory foods, herbs and supplements extensively. Eating such a teensy amount of protein doesn’t work for me. And avoidance of most grains is key….bread is a killer for me as is anything with added sugar. Obviously, anything processed and non-organic is avoided. I can add back some of the nightshade veggies (usually I eat tomatoes only) once my C reactive protein levels have gotten back down to normal, since the solanine tends to exacerbate inflammation but not cause it. But each body has it’s quirks….onions are not an inflammatory food for most but then neither are almonds (which I have to studiously avoid). I learned about the almond connection after having a IGg antibody panel run.