Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Twinkies!

see my thread for more...
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7290&p=418182#p418182

Hi Steve!

Sorry I took so long to find your post. I'm behind on *everything* right now; it's really hard to have both a job and a life!

The greenhouse is great; I *love* it. And it came through our recent windstorm without any problem, unlike the big maple tree that used to shade my deck. Fortunately the maple didn't fall ON the greenhouse. Or the house. *whew*

There's a Flickr album of my greenhouse and aquaponics; I think it's in my signature. If not I'll put it in.

It's already autumn...and a year since I started my greenhouse aquaponics project. I've got a ton of stuff still to do, because I wasted most of the warm summer months having a mystery illness that wasn't bad enough to put me out of commission, but basically left me with only enough energy to keep going to work, and not much else. Bah. They still haven't tracked down the WHY of it, but at least they know sort of what's wrong (my potassium level is too low), and by eating lots of bananas and taking potassium supplements, I can keep myself feeling somewhat normal. In the meantime, I seem to have managed, somehow, to damage both of my rotator cuffs, so I'm limited in what I can do with my arms. Getting old is really cramping my style right now! I'm supposed to start physical therapy soon, so maybe by NEXT summer I'll be back to normal!

Anyway, most recently I've been working on my indoor aquariums. I set up another 55-gal tank I had in the garage (former corn snake habitat) and moved all the small fish and the plants from the 135-gal into it, where they seem unanimously happier and are more enjoyable too...



Then I reconfigured the mammoth tank to accommodate big fish, and moved Henry the Pleco and the convict cichlids out of the pleco-powered aquaponic bedroom system and into it. And had a mad spending spree at the fish store to add some color, in the form of a few clown loaches. fire mouth cichlids, and electric blue Jack Dempseys. (The new fish aren't in this photo.)



Part of the plan while I was doing this was to move the big tank away from the wall and paint behind it. (You can see the new purple color at the top right, where it stopped because the tank was in the way.) When it became evident that we did not have enough combined muscle power in the household (even if my arms were working properly, I don't think it would've made a difference) to even budge the thing, even with just the gravel in it, we came to the unanimous decision that we'd just paint AROUND it.

With that done, the next step in my master plan was to clean the formerly pleco-powered aquaponic tank and put some of the tilapia in it to overwinter, in case I can't keep the greenhouse tank warm enough for them, since my scheme involving a rocket mass heater hasn't yet come to fruition. I had to come up with a way to catch the buggers, since my stupid shoulders keep me from being very quick with the net. I ended up going out at night and spotlighting them with a bright flashlight, which worked pretty well. I caught out a few of the biggest ones last night, and I'll try for a few more tonight. They're surprisingly pretty!



I haven't figured out what the different coloring means. Some look black, like the one on the right, some are more bluish, like on the left, and the rest are silver. They're supposed to be 100% Mozambique, so maybe it's what mood they're in, or something. Some of it is maturity, I suspect, since it's the smaller ones that tend to be silver. Anybody know?

Mystery illnesses don't even slightly rock.

My personal favourite is where 40 billion years of research ends in something like "Not Quite Well Syndrome".

That's not a diagnosis, that's an escape clause*.

Sing out if your recovery requires any more Tim Tams.

I think glucose drips should be replaced with intravenous Tim Tams.

That's just my opinion, not necessarily a reliable medical procedure.

Dont change what best practice medicine currently does based solely on my suggestion.


But this is totally worth while as a distraction....

Get a copper tube, and drop some powerful rare earth magnets down through it. The magnets drop at a fraction of their normal pace. Totally amazing. The magnets dont stick to the copper, and dont seem to interact with it in any way, but as they fall through the tube, they generate some kind of magnetic flux wonderment* that is totally worth sharing with grandchildren.

Awesome!



Stop being not quite well.

I'll have to try the copper tube thing. Too bad copper tubes aren't transparent! I think I already told you about the little copper caps that made the magnets stronger (ones we used to find around oil drilling sites in Texas when I was a kid). I wonder what it is about copper?

The good thing about mystery illnesses, I suppose, is that it tends to get all your body systems thoroughly checked out. My heart is fine, although it objects annoyingly to not having enough potassium. My kidneys were originally in big trouble, as the ultrasound showed "greater than 50% bilateral renal artery stenosis," but after a couple of weeks of me trying to puzzle out how that could even be possible, since it would make my blood pressure high, which it isn't, that was cured by an addendum to the radiology report. My lungs passed the basic spirometry test with flying colors, but my doctor wants me to see a pulmonologist anyway, so I guess that's next.

The Tim Tams were amazing, but given my genetic predisposition to diabetes, and the way my body seems to be betraying me lately, I probably shouldn't tempt fate.

Unless they're high in potassium, in which case I could see making an exception.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, this happened:



It didn't fall on the house, or the greenhouse, or (too much) the fence, or any of my family, or the chickens or goats. So that's good. It did fall on my pie tree. The multi-variety apple tree I planted over the summer is now missing the whole Granny Smith section. Given that it was directly in the path of the fall, though, I suppose it could have been worse.

So, now our back deck will not be shaded in the summer. I don't know yet how much of an impact this will have on the coolness of the house, come hot weather.

On the other hand, maybe solar panels would be feasible, now...

I had a similar list of bewilderments (similar only in my total lack of understanding) and they treated me with morphine patches. You can see the results of my treatment in some of my posts

I've decided on an arbitrary limit of 9 pills per day. I figure the people in charge of my body can fight it out among themselves as to what pills are most important, but I wont go over 9.

It actually seems to be working

Drug interactions are so complicated that nobody seems to have any idea what's going on once you throw enough into the mix. 9 seemed like a reasonable limit. It's certainly made my specialists actually talk to each other for the first time in the recorded history of human health care

I call it* Nineist Healthism.

It's roughly as meaningful as any other health regimen

Is it just me, or does everyone else think there needs to be a wikipedia entry on "Nineist Healthism"?



*as of this second

Maybe shovel some dirt onto that root mass and create one of those trees with a family farm history.

Like that coconut palm that grows out over the ocean at the edge of the village.

Or this thing that kept falling over and growing again for ten thousand years or so...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagarostrobos

When I was a kid in Olalla, Washington, a friend and I came across a Douglas fir tree that had fallen over and it's branches became full sized trees.

Is that 9 types of pills, or 9 pills, total? I can see how that would foster some desperate cooperationism between your docs, especially as you get older!

I, for my part, do my best to find the most useful and multipurpose medications with which to treat my patients. Pharmacology can be almost like software development, really. You have a set of tools with which to solve problems, and you try to find the most efficient combination with which to do it. Side effects and drug interactions don't have to be bad; you can also take advantage of them to accomplish what you want, if you put them together wisely.

It's like solving a logic puzzle. I love it. (Especially when it works!)

I found a nice man via Facebook who had a chainsaw and wanted some firewood, and we worked out a deal. We still have the giant root mass, though. My husband thinks the goats would like to climb on it; we just have to figure out how to get it to where they are, which may involve installing a hitch on my truck. And putting it in 4WD. It's *my* truck, but I guess that doesn't keep it from having its boy toy appeal for my hubs.

Meanwhile, my daughter has cooked up a scheme to convert the hole it came out of into a fish pond. That makes me inordinately happy. Isn't it cool when your kids like what you like, instead of rolling their eyes at it and thinking you're silly?



This is completely unrelated, but my husband is watching a TED talk about developing a 3D printer large enough to print an entire house in about 20 hours, and I have now forgotten every other thought I had in my head.

O.M.G. A 3D-printed house!

I'm going to be awake half the night thinking about the possibilities.

I think I had something I wanted to say about this, but...3D printed houses have overwritten whatever it was.

WOW.

There was a big discussion about 3d printed houses on the forum about 6 months ago... Welcome back from whatever rock you were under

Yeah...some rock, huh? My greenhouse is overgrown, my fish population dwindled to half without me knowing it, my system isn't finished, my bricks still aren't a rocket mass heater, the inside of my house is half purple/grey/blue and half orangey tan/nicotine-stain yellow, I still have a depressing number of boxes to unpack after living here for a full year, and I've missed all the good stuff on the forums.

Bah. And I didn't even get morphine. I can't even do mystery illnesses as well as Bullwinkle.

9 pills in total.

Tis a funny thing, but I actually think it has some merit.

Keeps them all on their toes.