Lightnings don’t strike twice, but tragedies most certainly can. Almost 2 years ago, my beloved tv-quarium suffered its first tragedy when there was a mass fungus outbreak that literally killed all my goldfish overnight. You probably could’ve guess what I’m about to say – yes, another fungus outbreak has claimed my ENTIRE tv-quarium, barring the plants. I don’t know if that was from the new fish that I introduced a week or so ago or if it was something more inherent, but pretty much all of my fish just died with a white puss surrounding them over the course of 1 day. Here’s how it went down. I bought 4 more fish Thursday last to add a bit more colour (1 silver shark to keep the remaining silver shark company, & 3 giant danios to inject some blue into the tank). Everyone looked very happy, & then on Sunday (ie 3 days later) the 1st of the giant danios died. It didn’t look sick or anything. It just died as if it had starved to death except it didn’t look thin or anything. I went back to the store to ask what the f & they asked me to bring in a water sample. So I did. They tested pH (which I also did at home, 6.5, 7-ish) and a couple of other stuff which I didn’t have the equipment for & concluded that my water was too acidic (it was a 4 or something according to their test) with a high level of ammonia. So I asked how did that come about when I tested pH on Monday & it was 6, 7-ish? The guy explained maybe I’ve been overfeeding & the leftover (plus the poopies) is producing too much ammonia. As such, I should feed over every other day & put some ammo lock in. So I did. That was Friday. Not long after I put in all the stuff & stopped feeding for a day did stuff start to go wrong. Another danio died, & then the normally resilient serpaes started looking puss-y. Tested pH again & still acidic despite putting in pH-remedy. Another danio died Sunday morning with the swordtails & platies started looking off. Over the course of the day I had to remove 12 (yes, a full dozen) dead fish including the very, very resilient bristlenose catfish that had been in that tank from the very beginning. The clown loaches were looking normal, swimming happily foraging for food scraps 1 minute & the next they were just lying dead, sideways. By the end of last night there were only the 2 silver sharks (with the older/larger 1 looking rather puss-y) & 1 serape (which was beginning to look better again) left. All of which died overnight & were just laying motionless by the time I got up this morning. It took me hours just to take out all the water of the 100L tank, & after a brief trip down to get a parcel from the post office, more hours spend washing the decorations, rehousing the water plants, washing out the gravel & deciding what to do with the tank. The last time this happened I left the cleared-out tank along for a month or so. I don’t know what to do just yet this time round, but am thinking of putting in yabbies instead. Not right away of course. Will need to have the whole tank washed out a few times to make sure whatever was in there is thoroughly, well, washed out. That would take more days. Great. Visitors coming in 2 weeks. Wonder if I’d have it re-populated by then.
Meanwhile, the new/7th/final HP was released over the weekend & I’m slowly working my way through it. Me, a notorious sufferer of the slow reader syndrome (I think HP6 took me on & off 3 months to finish) I’ve only covered 11 chapters in 2 & ½ days. Considering most of today was spent doing the tv-quarium that is actually not too bad an effort seeing I was in the middle of Ch8 when I went to bed last night/this morning. Don’t really know if I should just finish it off quickly & start on my PhD chapters again or to drag it out & interweave reading with re-writing chapters. Shall see. But of course, needless to say most of my MSN contacts have conveniently disappeared since Saturday, a few of which I know were/are buried under HP7. never a fast reader, I cheated by looking up the plot on wikipedia on Saturday. I did guess a few things right, but many things are most certainly surprising. Despite knowing the plot, the gory details of all fights scenes are still very entertaining & exciting. Some sentence structures are a bit tedious though, eg explaining what stupefy is when everyone reading the book would most likely know it by heart that the hell that spell does! Argh, it’s chamber of secrets all over again! Although the general, overall quality of Deathly Hallows is much better.
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