Awesome Personified

Tonight when I went to feed the fish in the aquarium, I only counted two of the three platys that are supposed to be in the tank. I got the flashlight, looked all over the tank, looked behind the tank, didn't find him. Then I looked in the cabinet under the tank where the filter is.

Turns out he jumped out of the top of the tank, fell down the hole where the filter tubes go, and ended up in the cabinet below. He wasn't moving and looked pretty dead. No idea how long he was in there. So I picked him up intending to flush him.

But then he moved just a little. So I put him in a net, lowered him into the tank, and lo and behold, he swam away.

The other fish looked at me like, cried, and thanked me for my heroic lifesaving efforts.

Finally, after over three months of production time, mostly due to me being lazy, I give you No Fish For Old Men. Jeff and I visiting Cheek for four days of the Indian River Paddle Classic compressed into 13 minutes. I think I put all the bleeps in the right place, so it should be suitable for work and the kids that I'll teach to swear later. And by the way, regardless of what Jeff says, I did win the fly division. It did help that I was the only entrant in that category... If your browser doesn't like the embedded player below, you can download the Quicktime movie (~100MB) by clicking here. I can also get you the full 720p HD version (4GB) upon request. [quicktime width="640" height="360"]http://www.midwood.net/tv/movies/FloridaFishingStreaming.mov[/quicktime]

Proceeds from the tournament will support conservation and education of the Indian River Lagoon through developmental and educational programs focused for children Melbourne, FL—Coastal Charities, Inc., will host its Inaugural Indian River Paddle Classic event on Saturday, September 12, 2009. The tournament boundaries run from Ponce Inlet to the 17th Street Bridge in Vero Beach. This no motor, catch, photo, and release (CPR) fishing tournament is open to the first 150 registrants. Entry cost is $60 per paddler before August 15 and registration begins June 15. First-, second-, and third-place prizes will be awarded for snook, redfish, trout, and aggregate by length. “The Indian River Lagoon represents a very unique and diverse eco-system, extremely popular with fisherman not only in Florida, but around the world,” said Bryan Cheek, president of Coastal Charities, Inc. “This event will help to improve awareness of the Lagoon and the integral part it plays within our community. Proceeds from this tournament will provide us an opportunity to make sure the Lagoon is available for future generations to enjoy.” The Indian River Paddle Classic does not allow gasoline- or electric-powered boats as part of the tournament rules. In fact, no motors are permitted of any kind. In order to participate in the event, all registrants must attend a captain’s meeting on September 11 at 7 p.m. at the Strike Zone fishing store located at 2771 West New Haven Avenue in Melbourne. This is where participants will receive the complete set of rules and regulations. Sponsorships are available as the tournament continues to collect prizes, captain’s bag materials, and raffle items. Although there are no cash prizes, sponsors wishing to make cash donations should contact Bryan Cheek on the Internet at www.coastalcharities.org. The awards ceremony and dinner will be hosted at Brevard Zoo in the Nyami Nyami River Lodge located at 8225 N. Wickham Road in Melbourne, FL with check-in starting at 1:00 p.m. Dinner will begin at 4:00 p.m. with the awards ceremony to follow. Registration after August 15 will be $75. To register, visit Strike Zone in Melbourne or in Jacksonville, FL, or go online to www.coastalcharities.org and link to Indian River Paddle Classic to find an application. Indian River Paddle Classic is sponsored by Strike Zone and Brevard Zoo. Coastal Charities, Inc. is a pending 501(c)3 organization dedicated to getting kids outside and learning about the Indian River Lagoon. Coastal Charities awards grants to organizations that provide youth the opportunity to experience the many wonders of the Indian River Lagoon. For more information, please visit www.coastalcharities.org.

If you are like me, you spend many a sleepless night staring at late night TV infomercials wondering why you didn't come up with an idea like that. And sometimes, those informercials bother you. Take ShamWow. It holds 20 times it's own weight in liquid. That's a whole lot of liquid, isn't it? And then the most important question pops into your head. Does ShamWow work on boats? Does it???? Well thank god for the people over at Gaff Magazine. They used a very scientifically rigorous method to demonstrate that ShamWow DOES, in fact, work on boats. Seriously guys - thanks for getting the answer to that question for me - I was really worried about it, and this totally put me at ease. See their method in the video below (the last 60 seconds is the best part). I have to thank my buddy Cheek for pointing me at Gaff Magazine and more specifically (and importantly) the Girls of Gaff. In a world full of ugly girls and pansies that don't fish, this is a fine publication that gives us all reasons to keep on living. [qt:http://www.midwood.net/tv/movies/shamwow2.mov 480 320]

I was on board before. Now I'm really on board. [caption id="attachment_598" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Sarah Palin, looking hot, holding a salmon"] [/caption]

Happy Veteran's Day. This is a good weekend - 3 days long, and Christy stood in line yesterday for about 3 hours to get me an autographed Jacoby Ellsbury bat. Pictures of the bat will be coming soon. There are a few new pics up on Flickr, so if you haven't seen them go check them out and leave a comment.

So we got the fish tank up and running finally.

We went out and got a few more blue damsels and put them in. This time we took over an hour to acclimate them to the tank and slowly put some of the tank water into the bag before we scooped them out and into the tank.

Here's a couple of pics of the little guys. They only measure a couple of inches long. Supposedly you can only have one inch of fish per every 3 gallons of saltwater, so that limits us on how many we're going to get.

The one you see in the pics here seems to be the braver of the two. He likes to hang out at the bottom of the tank and does a lot more swimming around. The other guy seems to like to hide behind the filter bar at the top of the tank, though he will come out and swim around when I toss food in there.

So I think the plan is to keep them in there by themselves for about 4 weeks or so until the tank finishes cycling. Then maybe we'll get a few small clowns to keep them company. So far so good...

We went out and got our first three fish yesterday. Some blue damsels with yellow tails. We put the bag in the water for 10-15 minutes, and then put them in the tank. Well, 60 seconds later and all three of them were belly up. Not sure exactly what went wrong. All the stuff I could test for seemed well within the normal range. Temp was 79. pH was 8.0. Ammonia was 0. Nitrites at 0.25 ppm. Nitrates at 0. We ended up talking to a bunch of different people at a bunch of different stores and we're going to try again. We changed all the water in the tank and I'm currently bringing it back up. Maybe I put too much anti-chlorine stuff in the first time? I'm not sure. Supposedly we can try this Bio-Spira stuff, so we're going to try a few more fish on Wednesday night. Keep your fingers crossed.

We went out and bought a fish tank last weekend. I've been spending the week trying to set it up. It's going to be a very small saltwater tank, and evidently we're only going to be able to put about half a dozen fish in it, but we like the tropical fish, so we decided to go with saltwater.

Here's the tank we bought before I put anything in it.

Even though it looks small for the area, it just barely fit inside the opening in the cabinet. Anyway, the first night we didn't have a bucket or a piece of tubing, so I had to fill the tank up one half gallon at a time. That was a huge pain and it took a while, but eventually we got it full. Then we dropped the artificial coral and stuff in there, hooked up the filter, and added the salt.

As you can see, I wasn't thinking there either. I had to readjust all the coral later using the tongs from our barbecue set. And I had to fish out a few suction cups that I dropped in there like a moron. In any event, once I got all that worked out I dumped in the "living" sand. I had to do that one half cup at a time since I could get the bag over the opening in the tank without spilling it everywhere. Not the most ideal way to work it, but it got done. Here are a few pics before all the sand settled in.

So then I had to shake off all the sand off the coral (dumb again) so I put the tongs back in and shook things around some more. And then the specific gravity was too high, so I had to pull some saltwater out and replace it with fresh water. That was a show. Getting the saltwater out with my tube and bucket was fine since I could put the bucket on the floor. But trying to get freshwater out of the bucket and into the tank was a nightmare. I had to try to hold the bucket up higher than the tank (since I couldn't set it on top of the bookcase because of the electrical wires) and suck on the tube and get the water into the tank. So there was a bunch of water on the floor.

So this is the current state:

Tomorrow I need to work out a few more salt issues and then I can test the pH and everything. I think the temperature is pretty good. I'm trying to keep it at 79 degrees. Saturday morning I guess we will buy about three fish and toss them in and see how they do.

Finally, here's a picture of the boat we bought for our window. Christy thinks it's too big, but I guess we'll see how it looks once I get it mounted. Trying to get the sails put on was a pain since neither of us know a damn thing about sailboats.