Blogging the Life of Salty Endeavors

So September started off at 91 degrees. WTF? We just experienced an August in Illinois, which is typically the hottest month of the year, that saw an average high temperature at 81.6 degrees and just one - let me repeat that so you know it wasn’t a typo - exactly one day above 90 degrees. And so on September 1st, we tied August for number of days above 90. Unbelievable. But still, average of 83 degrees for August? I’ll take that every year. I’m happy to report that temps have steadily dropped off as the days in September expire.

349. That would the total number of miles for the month of August. Still not the 400 I’m seeking, but still 11.25 miles per day average. Not too bad I say, but considering the weather we had for August I really should have had more miles. The interesting part about this, however, is the drastic drop in miles I cover in a given month when compared as a car vs no car month. I easily averaged more than 1000 miles per month in my car. So why the drop off in miles? I chalk it up to Sloeber becoming more organized. I’m not the most organized person around, and when you have a car, most any chore can be quickly and easily taken care of. Now without the car, better planning is almost a requirement, thereby forcing me to eliminate repeat visits to the store, etc. So besides helping me save money (which, by the way, is saving me nearly exactly what I budgeted for), plus helping me lose weight (which, by the way, I’ve lost 30lbs thus far), it has also helped me become a little bit more organized. I can accept that.

So for the last couple weeks I’ve been paying more attention to my aquarium. I guess since I’m stuck in Illinois I misewell get my act together and bring the reefs to me in the meantime. On August 21st I added a Melanarus Wrasse to my aquarium and Thursday I added a Black Leopard Wrasse. I’ll post some photos once I get my act together with the camera. I have another delivery arriving on Friday which should hopefully bring me several new fish. My website is sorely lacking on aquarium photos so it is on my list of to do items in the very near future.

Every so often you stumble across something that just reminds you of yourself. Such as my Internet name of “Sloeber.” Well last night I stumbled across a poem that sums me up as well, perhaps even better, than my own chosen name. So I’d like to share that with you now -

The Double Life
by
Don Blanding

How very simple life would be
If only there were two of me
A Restless Me to drift and roam
A Quiet Me to stay at home.
A Searching One to find his fill
Of varied skies and new found thrill
While sane and homely things are done
By the domestic Other One.

And that’s just where the trouble lies;
There is a Restless Me that cries
For chancy risks and changing scene,
For arctic blue and tropic green,
For deserts with their mystic spell,
For lusty fun and raising Hell.

But shackled to that Restless Me
My Other Self rebelliously
Resists the frantic urge to move.
It seeks the old familiar groove
That habits make. It finds content
With hearth and home - dear prisonment,
With candlelight and well-loved books
And treasured loot in dusty nooks,

With puttering and garden things
And dreaming while a cricket sings
And all the while the Restless One
Insists on more exciting fun,
It wants to go with every tide,
No matter where… just for the ride.
Like yowling cats the two selves brawl
Until I have no peace at all.

One eye turns to the forward track,
The other eye looks sadly back.
I’m getting wall-eyed from the strain,
(It’s tough to have an idle brain)
But One says “Stay” and One says “Go”
And One says “Yes,” and One says “no,”
And One Self wants a home and wife
And One Self craves the drifter’s life.

The Restless Fellow always wins
I wish my folks had made me twins.

Tags: Aquariums, Biking, General Musings // Add Comment »

I could sum it up as simply as College Football, but I wouldn’t be doing it justice.

So let me take a deeper stab at it.

You wake earlier on a Saturday morning than you have since last fall (no coincidence). Bloody Mary’s fight back the Friday evening pep rally and slowly give way to Capt’ns or fermented malt beverages. Food, beverages, et al were purchased the day before to not inhibit, slow down, nor prevent the days events - most of which was bought for complete strangers as you’ll eventually leave your party, wander to many others, getdrunk faster and eat more food than you would have should you stayed at your own parking spot, all on someone else’s dime, while your own food and drinks get consumed by people you’ll never knowingly meet.  You gather with 90,000 other fans (25,000 for you Illini fans) in parking lots made of grass in early season, dried dirt later in the year if we are lucky. All your 80,000 plus friends are wearing one of three colors (blue, gold, or green for me), while all your enemies sport another hat trick of colors that differ from your own. The enemy usually rotates these colors 6 times per fall.

It’s 9am, you are drunk, your grill is ablaze, and you are playing catch with a football (or tossing sandbags at holes in plywood forms if you are too drunk already or un-athletic). I should just stop right there. What more needs to be said? Now I remember… 

The women… lets focus on the women for a second. Hell we’ll even give them their own paragraph. Women wear jersey’s of players they love but have never met. They spout off about positions they couldn’t label and season’s ambitions they can’t explain. Their hair is pulled back into a pony-tail. They wear no make-up, no hair spray, and no high heels. Any visible jewelry (and some that’s not) is usually team-associated. Jeans and tennis shoes accent the team jersey. For a few Saturdays in the fall, women are real people as opposed to the fake individuals that masquerade around the nightclubs every other Saturday evening.

Obviously Adam first met Eve on a game day otherwise none of us would be here today (and since they obviously did not watch the game I’m betting the Illini played).

And so man’s existence in this world can be solely explained by college football.

Beer, grilled food for breakfast, and women acting like real people. Welcome to college football Saturday’s. Regardless of what Christmas song you sing, this is the best time of the year.

Tags: Football, Humor // Add Comment »

Sing it Parrotheads!

“You got fins to the left, fins to the right, and you’re the only bait in town!”

Now of course Jimmy is referring here to a lovely lady that is about to get hit on by every guy in town, much like the incoming freshman girls I wrote about earlier. However, this time I’m considering myself the bait, as I ran into more adventures with my finned friends this evening.

But before we discuss that, allow me to introduce you to a very fine brew. (Side note: Doesn’t Zeplin’s Bron-Y-Aur Stomp just rock the house? Is there anyone that can listen to that song without stomping their feet to it? I dare you to try not to stomp. ) Ok, the Great Lakes Elliot Ness Amber Lager used to be readily available in down state Illinois until a certain somebody said things they shouldn’t have and sales south into the endless corn ceased out of Chi-town. So anytime a trip to Chicago is in order, so is a pit stop to Binny’s for refreshments of the Great Lakes variety. The Ness is as ruthless on your palate as it’s namesake was on crime (and evidently the walls of the bar, too). And yet it is really easy to drink. For example, I had to open my second one already!

Ok, brew pours clear, not a unique trait of a fully filtered lager, but the copper brown amber color is telltale that this isn’t your typical lager. It truly delivers two distinct flavors at once. The tip and sides of the tongue experience the roasted malts which cause the copper coloration. Several flavors accompany this, mostly richly sweet Carmel malts and vanilla extract. The very center of the tongue is all lager hoppy goodness. The hops last longer, eventually overtaking the malts in flavors, but the malt is more than respectably present and appreciated. Hats off to Great Lakes on a eminently quaffable brew! 4.5 mugs out of 5.

So I decided I’d finally clean my skimmer for the aquarium. About once a month I endure the stench, and this current clean up job is weeks overdue (I’ve mentioned my procrastination before, right?). Stench you say? You aren’t familiar with a skimmer?

Ok, in a nutshell it is a filter that creates a foamy concoction that is removed from the aquarium and stored, later to be disposed of by the aquarium owner, or perhaps someone paid to deal with such atrocities. The foamy mess, you see, is more or less fish shit. Oh, I’m sure there is plenty of decomposing fish food, and if I’m lucky and my fish are mating there is bound to be a fair portion of fish sperm. But by and large, we can concentrate it all down to a single, easy to say phrase, while also enhancing it with a politically correct name, by simply calling it “fish waste.” Makes it so much easier to clean it. Really. It does. Anyway, some skimmers are better than others. The good ones are often bigger, more powerful, and create some gawd awful olfactory sensations. The smaller ones run with smaller pumps, are smaller in stature, and sometimes the smells are mildly annoying, like a little brother’s fart, as compared to Grandpa’s room clearer that just sweeps you off your feet and makes your eyes tear. My skimmer, just so you don’t have to ask, is big. Think grandpa after prune juice.

So I’m doing my job of dumping this down the drain and scrubbing it out, all the while gagging from the smell. I’ll spare the readers of descriptions or photos here. But I do find it ironic that I now have a fish room with its very own sink and how convenient it is to keep the mess and smell concentrated to my fish room only. Heck, but in the ole days, when  was married, I used to carry that mess into my kitchen sink for a good scrubbing. I’m sure this has nothing to do with my eventual divorce. Never-the-less, I liken its iroinc value similar to when my father bought a riding mower the very first weekend I moved away to college. For the previous baker’s dozen or so years prior it was me with the push mower on our acre-plus lot.

And then trouble struck. < /me ques up the cheesy disaster background music for additional effect > The advanced ear of the aquarists strikes again. No you horoscope junky, the kind that play with glass boxes of water. I hear something, but can’t place it. Something eerily similar to electricity arching. Around saltwater, electrical arches are exceptionally possible, and needless to say very dangerous. If you have seen photos of my aquarium filtration room, you know I have 1 or 2 outlets to concern myself with. Ok, maybe 30.

So I start turning electrical outlets off one by one and patiently listening to see if the noise has stopped. Only two devices are left - my skimmer and my main return pump. I chose to leave the aquarium on if I can, so I close a few valves and flip the switch to my skimmer. As expected it stops. But does the annoying sound? I pause a few seconds and wait listening carefully.

< plop >

WTF?

Oh yeah, the cotton ball from the skimmer I remember. I’m suppose to remove that before turning off my skimmer. Cotton ball you ask? It is the 1 cent piece of equipment, literally a cotton ball, that makes your $800 piece of plastic that vaguely resembles a bong go from sounding like the over sizedbummble bee 16yo boy driving a Honda Civic with glass packs and 12″ exhaust to something more resembling Daddy’s 700 series BMW, a clean, smooth, efficient power. As a side benefit it also filters the air intake of the filter, essentially cleaning out the air like a filter on a cigarette. And yes, as mentioned, mine just dropped into the water it was employed to protect.    

So I consider it’s retrieval. Should I go right for it, hoping to catch it before getting sucked into the intake of the return pump, or shut the power off of the pump? Clearly, at least it was to me as this particular moment, the best option here is to…

< slurp….zzzzz >

Uhhh, ummm, is to shut off the pump that is jammed with a cotton ball.

For those unfamiliar, when a return pump is shut off, the sump level rises. How far you may ask? Usually its not a concern of overflowing because size precautions are put in place during original installation.

Flashback 1 week. Ole Sloeber here couldn’t figure out why his RO/DI machine wasn’t filling it’s reservoir. After hours of tweaking and fiddling he discovered his RO/DI working exactly as it should. And so, unfortunately, was the top-off system. No design can protect against user error, and I had the newly made water getting dumped directly to the aquarium. I discovered this about the time the water was to the top of the sump.

Now, water at the top of sump prior to return pump shut off is not good. This pretty much spells flood. In my favor - roughly one week of evaporation. Ok quick math. I’ll spare you the work as you better believe I did it several times. 7 days * 4 gallons a day evaporation, or maybe 28-30 gallons. 10% run off on loss of electricity / 345 gallon system = 34.5 gallons of run off storage needed.

Those are not odds in my favor.

So now I clean the return pump, somewhat quickly as I’m hoping to advert any ensueing floods, or at least minimize it. This is probably the first time the pump has been cleaned in over a year, so it was at least due. What wasn’t due was the bolts falling out of the housing and slipping down my drain. Thankfully I’m still quick and saved them and reinserted them without having to dismantle my drain.

After a thorough cleaning, it was time to reassemble the pump. I reach for the gasket, which rests in the bowl with the bolts, and half chuckle at myself, not sure if I’m more proud of myself for not dropping any bolts down the drown, or for remembering to replace the gasket on the first attempt at reinstallation. I then grabbed the fully assembled pump and its impeller and knelt down to put it back online. With bare minutes to spare I might add as the 120 gallon sump is now cresting with the surface tension bubble at 121 gallons. I grab the impeller, stand up, and prior to flipping the switch to the return pump, thereby pumping vital electricity back into the system, I come to two revelations.

1) With all electricity off, I can still hear the noise reminiscent of an electrical arch. Shit.

2) I’m about to turn the electricity back on for a pump who’s impeller resides within my hand. Double shit.

So what do I do first? Track down the noise, or replace the impeller?

Me? I choose to strip my wet socks off and grab some towels for my overflowing sump.

Water soaked up, pump with impeller installed, air leak on RO/DI tracked down (yes the same RO/DI which caused the flood by filling my sump too high is also the culprit for the cotton ball incident. I think the RO/DI has something against me.) I am able to flip the switch and bring voltage back to my aquarium.

Tags: Aquariums, Beer, General Musings, Humor // 1 Comment »