Musings from Left of the Bible Belt

Viburnum in bud


Carolina jasmine covering the roof of my shed, cascading down and smelling delicious.


My old faithful azalea is full of buds


Little girls have a special place to sit...they love it because they feel hidden.


Serenity

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The east garden has my special project for the season.

I'm converting the water feature of the last five years to a goldfish pond. See far left, in the background.


I designed a bog filter for the 275 gallon stock tank, and my son supplied the muscle.

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For anyone interested in how we built it, I described it step by step in this thread on an aquarium forum.

The pond and bog plants will ship the week of April 22, and after I plant and let them settle in for a week, the first two ryukins will go in.


This pond will be ryukins only. Commons, comets and shubunkins get so much larger, and are so much faster, they can out-compete the ryukins for food.

I planted the ultimate, low-tech nano "tank" today - a la Diana Walstad.

I used this vase from Target. I'm using a cheapo clamp on lamp and a 13 watt CFL bulb for light.

Not sure if I will add any critters to this. It's only about 2 1/4 gallons. A few shrimp might work, but I think I might just want to keep it plants, and let it run wild.

Wish I could have gotten a sweet little cryptocoryne. I am so tired of having to order those.

I'll post photos when the soil settles.

Really, anyone interested in gardening can do water gardening on an insanely small scale this way.

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I clean forgot to post what I think is a really neat photo of Ivan the Terrible, flaring at his reflection in the side of his tank.

Dual reflection here.

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The journey is good.

And you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Namaste.

So I had this wonderful idea.

I have the 20 gallon aquarium, intensively planted. It has some wonderful schooling fish - tetras, rasboras, and corydoras catfish. They are all peaceful little fish - the tetras and rasboras occupy the midsection of the tank, and the cories are on the bottom, except when they race to the top for a gulp of air.

But I needed a top dwelling fish, and since the tank is about 89% stocked, this fish should be a contrast to the others in color.

My centerpiece fish. The piece de resistance.

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I've been studying on this decision for a couple of weeks.

Making lists of fish that would work. In the end, it was a toss up between a dwarf honey gourami and a male halfmoon betta.

I've always loved the look of halfmoons. But they are - comparatively speaking - pricey bettas.

I pondered on the idea. If I got the gourami, and he had a bad disposition, would my cute little neons be in trouble?

And if I got a betta instead, I'd be rescuing another one from one of those nasty ass little cups.

I set out for Petco.

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Came home with a gorgeous creamy white halfmoon male with some gray streaks in his halfmoon tail.

Put him in the tank. He swam behind the filter, hiding. I waited about 45 minutes and went to check on him. He was exploring the tank.

That was good.

And then it turned bad.

Meet Ivan the Terrible.



In three hours, Ivan had cornered all 28 other fish in the right back corner of the tank, except one lone cory who was hiding out among the anacharis on the other side of the tank.

It took me 45 minutes to net Ivan.

My intensively planted tank has multiple plants floating. But that's okay - more plants are coming Friday, and I'm taking the anacharis out.

Fortunately for Ivan, I had a two gallon fish bowl, an extra air pump and an airstone.

I set him up next to Lucky.

Ivan wasn't crazy about the bowl.



Lucky wasn't crazy about this new betta right next door.



You can't heat a bowl. An airstone isn't a filter.

My $14 fish needed a proper home, even if he was Ivan the Terrible.

So, um...yeah.



Both tanks will get new and more plants on Friday.

With all three others.

Someone stop me, please...

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The journey is good.

Namaste.

Haven't updated in several months.

Since my last post, I have...

Survived the December 25 snow storm that paralyzed Arkansas, and from which all storm debris has still not been cleared away;
Got the flu, had a rare reaction to tamiflu, and learned that it just takes 7 to 10 days for the flu to go away, and you may as well veg on the couch; and
Endured more of this weird Arkansas weather this past week. Yesterday, we had a combination of sleet, freezing rain, hail, plain rain and thunderstorms.

All within the space of about 14 hours.

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Animals and babies have taken center stage in my life. My niece had a beautiful baby boy on February 8, and my nephew and his wife are due to have their daughter on April 5.

Knit, knit, knit...

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And I have gotten back into fish tanks.

In a major way.

MTS - big time. (For those unfamiliar, MTS = Multi Tank Syndrome. It also means Malaysian Trumpet Snails, but I don't have any of those.)

For those who find fish tanks interesting, I have some photos.
( Image intensive under the cut... )

Just wait until I get my DIY bog filter for my pond done this spring.

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The journey is good.

Namaste.

First, we had Mitt Romney telling Scott Pelley of CBS how he'd balance the budget.

Asked for specifics, Romney listed "the subsidy for PBS, the subsidy for Amtrak, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts" and "the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Humanities."

Now, the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia, Brian Kemp, will close the state's archives building to make a required 3% reduction in his office's budget.

“The building will be mothballed, if you will. It will have just enough employees there to take care of the critical documents.”

Open season on public access to arts, humanities and public records.

Not just the brightest bunch...

I love those.

I get to meander. The older I get, the more meandering appeals to me.

Stuff still gets done, but at a more leisurely pace.

And I get to work on genealogy.

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Caught up on my genealogy blog reading.

And read one post in another blog that got me to wondering.

Again.

About Hetty Hill.

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The journey is good.

Meandering moves you along, too.

Namaste.

About my decision not to renew my subscription.

~face*palm~

It would not usually be my custom to address this issue to you in a public forum, but alas, your people will not leave me alone.

Last Saturday, as well as today, I received a phone call from one of your subscription folks, earnestly pointing out to me that I have not renewed my subscription to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Although you apparently don't realize this, I am fully aware that I did not renew. It was not an oversight.

My failure to renew was one of those last straw moments, nurtured by decades of irritation that erupted into a calculated decision.

From your less-than-convincing protests in 1986 that you were not trying to run the Arkansas Gazette out of business, to your acquisition of the name to tag on to your newly formed "only daily statewide newspaper" in 1991, with its decided right-wing editorial stance, my irritation grew. Still, these were your choices, and as a staunch proponent of choice, I soldiered on. I maintained my subscription, even through the very lean financial years as a single mother.

In the last few years, I noted that the vast majority of the letters on your Voices page came from the religious right. As I stood back and looked, that page in your newspaper made it appear as if Arkansas was populated primarily by religious zealots determined to make everyone else in the state live, love, work and play by their own personal interpretation of the King James bible. (And where do you get those letters? Surely they are not the only ones coming across the editorial desk.)

The only representative of competing views - John Brummett - has limited page space in your newspaper. Perhaps that is by mutual agreement, or by his choice alone. Nonetheless, I found that your newspaper was less and less relevant to my life.

But the wrecking ball you heaved into our relationship came on June 1, 2012, when you published that letter to your readers announcing an increase in the cost of single issues of the newspaper.

Now why, you ask, would that affect me as a subscriber?

First, you failed to mention in that letter that you were not merely increasing the price of a single issue, you were doubling it. I have never been a fan of disingenuous announcements spun as heartfelt explanations.

Second, in your effort to entice non-subscribers to sign up, you failed to take into account that home delivery of your newspaper often isn't - as in the case of my parents, who live in rural Pope County, Arkansas, and have tried to pay for home delivery from you for years. For them, "home delivery" means a box on the highway several miles down the road, because it isn't cost efficient for you to pay a carrier to truly deliver to them (or their neighbors) at home.

Again, your choice.

And after I looked at your website to see if I - and they - could get a cut in the home delivery price if we had an online-only subscription, and found we could not, I made my choice.

Seriously, why should I pay you the same amount of money to cut out the carrier, the cost of newspaper and ink, and read the paper online?

I was already aware my subscription would expire on June 25.

I made a conscious choice not to renew.

I have now asked your people on two consecutive Saturday mornings not to call me again.

Parting is such sweet sorrow...

Not really - that's quite disingenuous. It will only become sorrowful if one of your folks awakens me again next Saturday morning.

Call to the doc about results of blood work and effects of meds got me this:
Added B complex (my B12 is low);
Added 50,000 IU D2 once weekly for 12 weeks, recheck (my vitamin D is way low);
Keep gabapentin at current dose;
Up Lasix to 40 mg/day and see if it kicks the rest of the edema, maintain current potassium dose.

Interesting to me that this vitamin D deficiency is common among people with RA and MS, and they report greater pain relief when levels come back to between 40-50...

A fried sent me a photo he took of some the papier maché skulls he saw in Venice Beach, CA.

They were cool.

And started me thinking about my collection of skulls - crystal skulls.

And the other crystals - mostly spheres, but other shapes every once in a while.

So I had to go spend some time with them - holding them, dusting them, gazing into them.

I re-discovered some of them, and realized how drawn I am to quartz, and in particular, smokey quartz.

Naturally, I had to put up the duster and get out the camera.

Which doesn't do them justice.

( Image intensive after the cut... )

The journey is good.

And a bunch of the rocks are pretty.

Namaste.