Thank you, Donna, for the suggestion. I don’t know whether it’s the silver or the sugar that’s done it, but it went from a full-blown upper-respiratory awfulness to pretty bearable in 15 minutes, and I got some sleep last night in a stack of about 6 dense pillows—hard to get up this morning, I was so comfortable. Actual sleep, and the upper-respiratory crud on the run: I’m still having the chest-cough thing, but diminishing and I can get off the Dayquil/Nyquil stuff that were keeping me in too great a fog to work.
The one bad thing in all of it—I’d done an algae treatment on the pond before I collapsed, and we lost 2 of our fishes, not Ari, who’s still among the wounded, but two others of our mid-sized adults…I don’t know why just them; but it was due to something I didn’t see until I surfaced midway through the respiratory crud: we’d had a strong wind blow up from an unusual direction and blow the round winter cover from its mooring on the north side of the pond across the skimmer intake on the south side of the pond, blocking its ability to collect dead algae, and reducing the oxygen level in the pond—it was a complicated accident, one that Jane didn’t spot because she doesn’t handle the pond, usually: I do, and I’m not even sure I told her I’d put the algae killer in. I certainly didn’t anticipate the winter cover getting loose and blocking the intake: Jane went out and fixed it, and then another blow dislodged the fix again. After we lost the two fish we did a partial water change and then I got out the 100 lb test line and made a new mooring line, that has held fast. On an ordinary day this would have been a non-incident, but the algae killer piling up a skin of dead algae where the surface gas-exchange process happens at the same time I was unexpectedly too sick to stand on my feet and too stupid to remember to ask Jane to check it, and the old mooring string broke free, it was just, well, one of those many-moving-parts type accidents. Bummer.
Glad the remedy worked, but so sorry you lost two fish – circumstances WILL pile up on you.
I’m so glad you’re feeling better, CJ! And sad for your loss. 🙁 It sucks totally when things coincide to make everything go awry in such a unfortunate way!
The chest stuff might be worth giving the goldenseal root a try, eh? It’s really good for that. Like I posted just now under your last blog entry, you might try muscle testing to ask if goldenseal root is ok for you to take, and also if it will help with the chest stuff. Holding the substance is good, but you can also ask without holding anything. It’s a great health supportive tool!
Never had any problem with its family, at least. I’ll look for that. There are a few herbal remedies I do use. And thank you very much, both of you.
Re the fish loss—it’s a pain. One complication was the fact that I had someone caring for the pond for 2 weeks, and they did exactly what I said, which was very proper. Problem was we got in late at night so I couldn’t see what was going, did spot it, treated, and immediately went down for the count. I’d have spotted it and treated it days ago if I’d been home—but alas, you just cannot leave those kind of instructions: I had to see it—and unfortunately, wasn’t able to go on seeing to it. Sigh. At least they weren’t Jane’s pretty babies that died. Our golden one, Amy, and our patchwork, Denys, were the ones that bought it—I wish I knew why them,—probably just farthest from the water entry at the water fall. That skimmer clogging was just the wrong thing to happen…sigh.
More likely they were just the ones with the weakest constitution. Koi/carp are tough beasties.
My sister and her family use the full size (and MUCH more expensive) version of this to help with aeration on their LARGE clay bottom pond in Texas, which has no other filtering or aeration. They actually use the pond water for everything but food (they also use an inline UV sterilizer on its way to the house), and this aerates it enough so that in the summer time it doesn’t get scummy and they have a pond full of catfish and sun perch.
http://pond-supplies.thepondguy.com/search?w=Windmill+aerators
Thanks for the link. Our waterfall/skimmer, which drops water over stones over a 3′ course, and cycles the entire pond through every few hours, is usually enough—but not with the skimmer throat blocked. Wish I had a clay bottom pond. Up here, you’d have to truck in some Oklahoma Red: we have a little vein of clay in a road cut south of here, but most of the ground is flood basalt, from several million years ago, about a mile thick of hard black rock fractured every foot or so vertically, so it’s a pita getting it to hold water. We’ve got that, under glacial till, and hpdm liner is our only recourse. OTOH, the rocks make great water features. 😉
I’ve got that floating thing on a strong line now, so it can’t get across the skimmer intake, and we shouldn’t have any further problem.
Feel free to come and digit up out of our yard. Yech… it’s revolting stuff.
You might want to include daily pond pictures to be emailed to you the next time there’s a sitter. You might catch something from the pix your sitter would miss.
That’s an idea, and a good one, though I haven’t been able to establish e-mail contact with our sitter down the block—very reliable, very very smart, but just not wireless.
Glug, one setback along the way: a spate of coughing so severe I nearly threw up in the process…bad enough I did a check on Whooping Cough, which is present in the state, though I don’t know where I would have gotten exposed to it. I don’t think that’s it, because a little Scotch settled it, and it hasn’t recurred. But sheesh—not to be too explicit, but you know nature shuts your nasal passages off if you’re trying to throw up; and if what you’re actually trying to do simultaneously is to breathe in some air between coughing spasms, that’s bloody damned uncomfortable. I had to call for Jane—I’d gotten a swig of cough medicine to calm it, but the whiskey did better, sipped very, very slowly, over the next hour. Hasn’t recurred…but that was an experience. I think I’ll keep a half ounce of whiskey by the bedside tonight, just in case that gets started again.
Glad to hear you are recovering from Fall Crud. I am sorry for the loss of the two fishies. Went back and looked at Jane’s photos, Amy and Denys were so pretty. Hope it was due to the skimmer malfunction and not some horrible disease.
I did not know how attached I could become to fish until our own Moby Fish disappeared for several hours. He appeared to have been under the much overgrown water hyacinth.
I have continuing problems with nighttime congestion. My doctor recommended I keep ginger ale by the bed. Something about the combo of fizz and ginger does the job. It works better at room temp than cold; I have no idea why. One thing that has helped a lot is that we have gotten rid of the goldenrod and other fall blooming weeds along the stone walls.
How about one of those cameras that sends to your computer, permanently mounted to focus on the pond? Not sure how pricey they are – especially for an outdoors one – or what extra equipment might be needed, though.
So sad about your koi. The showa patten (Denys)is my favorite koi color pattern and I picked up 2 showa babies at the Washington Koi & Water Garden society show in early September. They are still in their 3 month quarantine for KHV. I’ve been experimenting with solar aerators in my water features to ‘guarantee’ oxygenation, at least when the sun is out.
We have one showa left, Renji, who is such a personality—even as a fingerling, he was always the missing one: where? in the skimmer basket, getting stray food pellets. Under the waterfall, looking for worms. A real food hound. He’s ok. Amy was our only gold—Ari was supposed to be, but turned out to be cream colored. And we now have more butterfly fins than straight fins, so definitely next year we’re going to be looking for some straight-fins of good type, particularly the showa. Kenpachi, who was all over grey and orange and black mottled, not our prettiest fish, suddenly changed his coat entirely this year, and is snow white with an orange and black patch on his head. He was a shock. Our ‘unmade bed’ is now a pretty handsome fish. We’ve gotten all of ours as fingerlings, and most haven’t surprised us, but Kenpachi is amazing. If you saw before and after on him you’d say it was two different fish.
The show folks manning the sales tanks talked me into a third baby koi, telling me that I’d be amazed at how the color on that one developed. I’d told them I prefer koi that have some black on them….along with white and orange. Don’t even know what color pattern that fish IS….mostly orange metallic with some black scalation along the dorsal and whitish belly. Not patchy like a showa. We’ll see. And I’m still learning all the koi pattern terms (sigh). These babies were spawned last year and are brought in by Pan Intercorp. I hadn’t been able to see them much since bringing them home as they spend most of their time hiding….but last weekend I netted 3 2-year-old comet goldfish I’ve reared from egg (herpes virus free), popped them in the quarantine tank and that made all the difference. The three koi babies came out from the parrotfeather ‘refuge’ and cruised the feeding ring. They are interacting with the goldfish quite a bit so that move has helped them gain confidence.
A ‘dither fish.’ 😉 I keep a small reef tank, and rather than having bigger fish looking cramped, I prefer the smallest fish, gobies, blennies, etc. But they’re also very shy and in a tank with larger fish, they generally don’t come out. But in a fearful tank, just put one blue-green chromis, which paces, constantly, and everybody comes out. On the reef every fish has its own hole into which it will dive if threatened—and if the silly chromis is out and about, it’s got to be safe. Millions of years of evolution have built some nice shortcuts to logical behavior into these bitty brains: a food-fish out swimming means safe to swim. If danger comes, dive for the hole and leave ‘Mikey’ to face the threat or outrun it—it works real well for them, and actually pretty well for ‘Mikey’, who also has a hole—and is the mildest of a pretty pushy species, the damsels.
Yeah, that’s a pretty standard trick with freshwater tropical fish keeping too….but I’ve never run across goldfish or koi that act like that unless an encounter with a predator freaks them out. I guess I assumed that these little guys were reared in a covered koi shed or something like that without the predator experience. Maybe I was wrong and they were not predator naive, but the bottom line was that falling back on the basic inside tank ‘tricks’ helped bring these babies ‘out’ so I can at least SEE them. SUCCESS!
If I went the salt-water route again (highly unlikely), I’d love a school of green chromis and maybe some little gobies or blennies, so it appears we fancy the same saltwater fish ‘types’. Although I drool over flame angels, I have no space for a large enough reef tank to keep one of those lovelies happy. I’m not much of an invertebrate fancier so I’d stick with the basics in a reef tank, that is, whatever is a must to make the reef work. Now that live sand and live rock is so readily available, doing reef stuff is easier than back in the 70’s when I dabbled with saltwater in grad school. We’ve had this conversation before. Even though I spend my days playing with dead marine fish parts for pay, freshwater tropical is the route that pleases me (and doesn’t require RO water…tapwater works for me…YAY).
We’re getting your wind through the gorge. It’s keeping the marine layer at bay. Bright sunny days, chilly nights. The vinyards are ecstatic, and the vintners are doing happy-dances. (The past two years have been terrible for Willamette Valley vinyards,too cold for grapes to ripen properly.) I’ll be picking grapes for an amateur wine-making buddy Saturday and Sunday, Gewurtz and Pinot.
Last evening I decided it was finally time to strip the bed, put on the flannel sheets, get the comforter and duvet cover down from the closet shelf. (Getting the comforter in the cover and out to the corners pretty much means crawling inside, without finding you’re kneeling on the comforter. 😉 ) Nice and comfy last night 🙂
There is an outbreak of whooping cough ongoing that’s said to be the worst in 50 years, and 3/4ths of the people who are getting it have been vaccinated. Bad outbreaks in the NE, Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington state. see: http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/wash-whooping/wash-whooping
Conventions are great places to swap “bugs.” Another thing I was thinking about is legionellosis outbreaks which usually occur in summer and early autumn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionellosis
Hope you get better soon, and that Jane stays healthy.
Well, fortunately, I’ve had nothing so bad as that one episode, and I felt well enough today to make a store run. Seems that some test or other has turned up untoward levels of arsenic in rice, particularly rice grown on old orchard grounds, where arsenic was once used to fight pests; rice likes arsenic, and sucks it up, apparently, and the levels in some rice can get higher than is permitted, say, in American drinking water—and since Jane is experimenting with a gluten-free diet, we’ve been having a lot of rice. Soooooo…Jane had just bought two bags of American rice…which should be ok, being from California, but…just to be sure until THIS food scare shakes out, we just traded that rice back for some Basmati rice ‘grown in the shadow of the Himalayas,’ which I am relatively sure did not get sprayed with arsenic. It might be in the rocks, but, hey, some things you just can’t ask. SO I had to trade in the rice we had for the Basmati, and meanwhile some fellow in a wheelchair, ahead of me in a line, must have bought hundreds of dollars worth of groceries—little bags stacked higher than I’ve ever seen at this store, a veritable snowstorm of bags—with two people between me and him—and one of his cards won’t work, so here are all these sacked bags, this monstrous order, this guy who cannot easily run about to customer service to try to solve this situation, and here am I back in the line beginning to regret I’d volunteered for this trip: Jane says I was pretty pale when I got home…
I’d’ve bought the basmati from the get-go! It’s like bacon–it smells so good when you’re cooking it. 😉
Hah! Look up a few recipes for dim sum (‘pearl balls’, among others) online; between that and sushi, you won’t be bored. I’m guessing you already have a steamer.
One thing I am jealous of people on the West Coast over is that we have no Trader Joe’s here.
Hah! Look up a few recipes for dim sum (‘pearl balls’, among others) online; between that and sushi, you won’t be bored. I’m guessing you already have a steamer.
One thing I am jealous of people on the West Coast over is that we have no Trader Joe’s here.
Something is majorly delaying your site, it’s taking minutes between loading screens.
I shouldn’t have let her go, but she was doing real well this AM and I had a scene moving…I didn’t know she was going to buy the store out…Sigh. She’s doing OK now, tho.
Try some quinoa! It does taste a little better if you rinse it first to remove the saponins, but I treat it pretty much just like rice. I even cook it in a rice cooker just like rice. I like to get all three colors and mix them up but that’s really a matter of taste. It’s so easily available, even the organic version, at least in the Seattle area. I get it in bulk at Central Market. And it’s often on sale!
Oh, I needed the trip out. It did me good. But I am still suffering a bit from the crud, for sure. People look at me as the Black Death if I cough—it sounds awful.