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If it's not rubbishy wine recipes it's..............
Bl33ding animals!
The fish phot' below is "Sebastian" we inherited him(?) along with flounder from the Nursery at Clares' school (flounder went to the great fish finger factory in the sky about 6 months ago).
If you look carefully, particularly at his tail you'll see faint white spots (only faint because of the camera flash/glass/water/fish medicine). So believe it or not, that's called (originally enough) Whitespot.
Apparently, it's a bacterial parasite, though how the hell it's got into the tank because I only use treated (de-chlorinated) tap water.
It's sometimes caused by poor water quality.
Which is equally confusing. Because having just spent the better part of 3 hours doing a 20% water change, followed by testing for just about everything I can think of i.e. Ammonia NH3/NH4 is about 0.6 mg/l, the pH is 7.5, Nitrite NO2 0.1 mg/l, Nitrate NO3 is <5 mg/l, Phosphate PO4 is 5.0 mg/l, the General Hardness is 220 (I didn't bother converting the test kit reading as there's about half a dozen different potential scales that can be used) and the Carbonate hardness is about 100 mg/l.
The only one of those numbers that isn't particularly good is the Phosphate, but that indicates either poor tank hygiene (but that's not indicated by any of the other figures) or over feeding.
I can cure it by either getting a "waste management" chemical and/or putting plants in the tank. I'll probably do both.
Secondly, the rather rubbishy photo of the cat is Tipsy. We've had her for nearly 9 years (she was second hand - one careful owner, but aged 12 on arrival).
Tipsy is 21 and although a "lap cat" very manipulative/crafty. We know that she's on her last legs, but as it transpires, still costing a bl00dy fortune to run i.e. she has 2 thyroid tablets a day @ 25p each and as Clare went round the vets yesterday morning to top them up, she ended up taking Tipsy round there for a 6 monthly check up.
We know that she's had manky teeth for a while, but on the presumption that she'd pop off before they became a problem, told the Vet on a previous visit that we weren't gonna bother.
Now it seems we're gonna have to spend between between £250 and £300 on tuesday to have the teeth removed (and having to blend her food until she does finally pop off - which I don't mind, but £300 is probably enough for an enolmatic filler/filter device).
I suppose that the only good thing will be that she won't breath "dog breath" all over us at night when she decides to climb on the bed!
Though because she'd quite old, as far as cats go, she no longer grooms - so it falls to me to mug her with the comb every other day to get the knots out of her fur - hell, I get enough knots of fur out of her in a week to knit us both jumpers (like those daft beggars that were in the paper the other week with their "dog fur" jumpers
).
So like I say, if it's not wine recipes that don't turn out as expected, it's the bleedin' animals!
TTFN!
JtFB
The fish phot' below is "Sebastian" we inherited him(?) along with flounder from the Nursery at Clares' school (flounder went to the great fish finger factory in the sky about 6 months ago).
If you look carefully, particularly at his tail you'll see faint white spots (only faint because of the camera flash/glass/water/fish medicine). So believe it or not, that's called (originally enough) Whitespot.
Apparently, it's a bacterial parasite, though how the hell it's got into the tank because I only use treated (de-chlorinated) tap water.
It's sometimes caused by poor water quality.
Which is equally confusing. Because having just spent the better part of 3 hours doing a 20% water change, followed by testing for just about everything I can think of i.e. Ammonia NH3/NH4 is about 0.6 mg/l, the pH is 7.5, Nitrite NO2 0.1 mg/l, Nitrate NO3 is <5 mg/l, Phosphate PO4 is 5.0 mg/l, the General Hardness is 220 (I didn't bother converting the test kit reading as there's about half a dozen different potential scales that can be used) and the Carbonate hardness is about 100 mg/l.
The only one of those numbers that isn't particularly good is the Phosphate, but that indicates either poor tank hygiene (but that's not indicated by any of the other figures) or over feeding.
I can cure it by either getting a "waste management" chemical and/or putting plants in the tank. I'll probably do both.
Secondly, the rather rubbishy photo of the cat is Tipsy. We've had her for nearly 9 years (she was second hand - one careful owner, but aged 12 on arrival).
Tipsy is 21 and although a "lap cat" very manipulative/crafty. We know that she's on her last legs, but as it transpires, still costing a bl00dy fortune to run i.e. she has 2 thyroid tablets a day @ 25p each and as Clare went round the vets yesterday morning to top them up, she ended up taking Tipsy round there for a 6 monthly check up.
We know that she's had manky teeth for a while, but on the presumption that she'd pop off before they became a problem, told the Vet on a previous visit that we weren't gonna bother.
Now it seems we're gonna have to spend between between £250 and £300 on tuesday to have the teeth removed (and having to blend her food until she does finally pop off - which I don't mind, but £300 is probably enough for an enolmatic filler/filter device).
I suppose that the only good thing will be that she won't breath "dog breath" all over us at night when she decides to climb on the bed!
Though because she'd quite old, as far as cats go, she no longer grooms - so it falls to me to mug her with the comb every other day to get the knots out of her fur - hell, I get enough knots of fur out of her in a week to knit us both jumpers (like those daft beggars that were in the paper the other week with their "dog fur" jumpers
).So like I say, if it's not wine recipes that don't turn out as expected, it's the bleedin' animals!
TTFN!
JtFB
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