Tank birthday, 47+ years

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Paul B

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My good friend Paulie picked this up in Barnicut Bay New Jersey as he was clamming. It's a piece of codium seaweed attached to some large limpets.
At first I thought they were chitons, but they are limpets. Very common here on the east coast of the US and probably all over the world in intertidal zones or very shallow water. They are like very slow moving snails but they look like half of a clam or scallop shell.
They are nocturnal and slowly graze on algae.

This piece has 3 or 4 limpets on it but they may crawl someplace at night. Very cool.
The codium seaweed is also very common in the Atlantic right near shore. It lives a few months in a tank. The problem with it is crabs, and snails bite off pieces near the bottom and the thing floats. I never saw fish eat it. and I collect it all the time as it looks very cool. I wish it lived longer in a tank.
This is it in my tank


thumbnail.jpg
 

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My good friend Paulie picked this up in Barnicut Bay New Jersey as he was clamming. It's a piece of codium seaweed attached to some large limpets.
At first I thought they were chitons, but they are limpets. Very common here on the east coast of the US and probably all over the world in intertidal zones or very shallow water. They are like very slow moving snails but they look like half of a clam or scallop shell.
They are nocturnal and slowly graze on algae.

This piece has 3 or 4 limpets on it but they may crawl someplace at night. Very cool.
The codium seaweed is also very common in the Atlantic right near shore. It lives a few months in a tank. The problem with it is crabs, and snails bite off pieces near the bottom and the thing floats. I never saw fish eat it. and I collect it all the time as it looks very cool. I wish it lived longer in a tank.
This is it in my tank


thumbnail.jpg
There is a similar species of algae that is red.
I grow Ulva intestinalis in my ATS if I put it in th tank it dosent last long my fox face eats it.
20200616_160856.jpg
 
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Paul B

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Some day I need to do some work on my tank. I need to move the entire middle section back a few inches because some of the corals are to close to the glass and my magnet cleaner hits it.

I did this once before and I don't look forward to it. I have to wear thick gloves so my fireclowns don't take my arm off and I have to break a lot of growing stuff and tear a bunch of sponge and that stuff is tough as wood. I will probably also break some montipora and other SPS.
There are two large, like 6 or 7" anemones back there that won't be happy and my powerhead is also back there that feeds the skimmer/reverse undergravel filter and algae scrubber.

The middle section from about where the copperband is to about the gorgonian on the right side is needs to go back a couple of inches.
This is an older picture and the corals are not that big here.
 
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Growing up in the fiftees. Remember, this should be in the Lounge.

I decided to write this because this morning we face timed our Grand Daughter who has just about anything you can imagine and is bored out of her head.

Because of Covid they had to leave their apartment in the West Village in Manhattan and go to their other home on a mountain in Vermont where they have a small pool, pool table, ping pong table, Pin Ball machine, trampoline, ATVs, (along with hundreds of acres of woods with trails) snowmobiles, A swimming pond, rope swing etc.


Anyway:
I never thought we were poor, I grew up in Queens New York but I was born in Brooklyn near Coney Island.
In those days we didn't get allowances, had no computers, cell phones, tablets or just about anything else. We also played outside no matter what the weather was like because "if" you had a TV, it was tiny and of course black and white. There was one or two shows on like The Ed Sullivan show which was a variety show where they would get "talented" people that would sing, dance or balance dishes on their nose. :oops:

There was sort of "Color" TV but that was a curved piece of glass that you would hang in front of the black and white TV. It was tinted blue near the top and green near the bottom so if you were watching a scene which was in a grassy field, it looked really cool, but any other scene just looked ridiculous.
We didn't have one of those but if you did, I would imagine you would keep watching "The Sound of Music" which had a lot of singing out in the grass.
I do remember seeing Elvis Presley on there in his first public appearance. That was the extent of our indoor entertainment and remember, there was no air conditioning.

My "Fish Tank" was the bottom of a wine barrel or an enameled basin which I kept turtles, tadpoles, minnows, and newts that I would catch in streams.
There were no fish stores but there were toy stores and fish would be sold there and called "Toy Fish". They had guppies, molly's, swordtails and little else. Occasionally they would have a crawfish. Eventually dry food was sold by Wardley and were dried flies and ants. . :confused:

One day I heard my Mother scream, I ran there and saw here standing holding a broom. My crawfish got out and was walking across the kitchen floor. She thought it was a mouse and squashed it. o_O

My Dad had a fish small fish market in Jackson Heights and my Mom didn't drive. She would wait with me for the bus and then tell the bus driver to let me off in front of my Dad's fish market which was about a 45 minute bus ride. I would go by myself and sit behind the driver when I was probably 5 or 6 years old and the driver would stop the bus in front of the store (which was not even on a bus stop) and watch me go in. (Today, they would put your Mother in jail) Remember cell phones were decades away.

The fish and meat stores in those days had a thick layer of sawdust on the floor and at night they would sweep it up and put on new sawdust. It would collect the fish scales and guts.
(Today, because of lawyers, you can't do that)

I would pile up the sawdust and make a fort. Then I would take live blue claw crabs and live lobsters and put them down and try to make them fight. Lobsters can't really walk out of water but crabs run fast. I had a toy metal cannon and I would shoot tooth picks at the poor crabs.



(there was no plastic and toys were metal)
I would also lay some dead sardines in there for effect.
I had other toys in the fish store like rubber bands and I would shoot flies. I would feed the flies to my newts and turtles. Sometimes my Dad would give me a piece of wood, a hammer and nails and I would spend hours banging in the nails and pulling them out.

Occasionally I would ask my dad for a nickel. He would always give it to me but I had to work for it like maybe shine his shoes which entailed about 30 minutes of removing large fish scales, then shining them. After he inspected them I would take that nickel to the toy store on the corner next to the firehouse and buy some gum or caps that I used to "shoot off' with a rock.

I walked to school which was only about 5 blocks away and when my shoes would get holes in them, I would get linoleum (which was flooring) from abandoned buildings and houses and put pieces of that in my shoes. When it wore out, I would get another piece.
(My Daughter doesn't believe we did that, but it was common practice)

Someone gave me a baby chicken and in a few weeks it grew to full size. Once, the thing followed me to school and the Principal had to call my Mother to come and pick it up.

Another thing I remember about grammar school. The teacher once called my Mother to school and told her I couldn't read and they were going to leave me back. I was a prolific reader and my Mother knew it so she took me and the Encyclopedia (big history text book like Google but you couldn't update it) to school.
The teacher and Principal were there and my Mother told me to open the book to any page and read it. I opened the book and started to read about President Eisenhower, (who was the President at the time)

The teacher asked my why I wouldn't read in school. I said those kids books were silly.
After that, they made me a reading tutor for kids who couldn't read.

Linoleum was a great find because we also used it in our "Zip" guns which was a piece of wood with nail in one end and a clothes pin in the other end. You stretched a rubber band from the nail to the clothespin and put a piece of linoleum in the rubber band. When you pushed on the clothes pin to open it, the linoleum would fly maybe 50'.

We had a large group of friends and once we dug an underground fort in an empty lot. It was probably 5' deep and topped with logs, then trees grew on it.
It filled with rain water and we forgot about it for many years. We remembered it when they were building a Supermarket there and a bulldozer backed over it and fell in. They had to get a crane to get it out.

We always had money because we were street smart. Main Street was about two or three miles away and we would take bubble gum, a sting and fishing sinker. You lower the weight through the subway grates down about 12' to pick up coins.
Those grates were to supply air to the trains below and they were usually on bus stops. The bus fare was 15 cents so people used to drop money there.
You could make a couple of bucks in an hour and the movies were only 75cents.
After we would collect all the change we would pick up empty bottles at horseshoe courts and take them back to the stores for the two cents.

I will finish this later.
 

Rybren

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Paul, while my Dad didn't have a fish market, I had a very similar upbringing and youth. I hadn't thought about banging those caps with a rock for a very long time.

I loved the smell of those things.
1594493317775.png

Thanks for the memories.

I grew up in little Italy in Toronto. Every Saturday a farmer would drive through the streets with a truck load of live chickens, ducks, rabbits, lambs, etc to sell to the locals who would then slaughter them or raise them and then slaughter them. I would help the farmer and he would sometimes pay me a dollar (which would buy a LOT of candy) and other times he would give me a baby chick or duck or something. My mother was a saint and would let me keep the animals, but once they were fully grown, I would come home from school to find out that they had "run away". We always had 'chicken' for dinner on those nights. :eek:
 

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You can mix it with that "Fish and Chips" you Brits like to eat. :cool:
Nooo that would be sacrilege. You eat fish chips and mushy peas with plenty of salt and vinegar. Thats it nothing else with it unless you want a few rounds of bread with it and a cup of tea.
BTW some years ago when we had seminars in this country. Martin Moe who was flown in from the US along with Forest Young, Albert Thiel and julian Sprung were presented with souvenir tea pots as we were told you can't buy them in the USA. How rude
 

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Chewing gum to pick up coins? You must have been wealthy by our standards. We used soap on the end of a cane to pick up coins from the grids.
We made dens with whatever was at hand usually waste timber. We also made our own games like hop scotch and other such.
In summer we would go to Stanley Park in Anfield Liverpool with jam sandwiches and a bottle of water. There we would catch tiddlers like sticklebacks. My first aquarium was a galvanised tin bath we would get bathed in on a Sunday night. This was kept outside hung on the backyard wall.
You earned any money you got doing chores and running errands. Mode of transport would be a steering cart or steery as well called them made out of some old wood like a plank and the wheels and axle from an old pram.
We mainly only had shoes for sunday. The rest of the week we would be in wellies or pumps, canvas shoe the forerunner for trainers.
On Saturday mornings we would go the pictures, your cinema and watch cartoons, Hopalong Cassidy and Flash Gordon. Once a month you could get in for 4 empty glass jam jars.
For a penny you could buy various sweets, your candy. 4 walkers or 4 black jacks Toffees. We had small parks called swings as that is all they contained with maybe a see saw and a roundabout you pushed.
However, we did have mobile phones. We made them ourselves from 2 tin cans and a length of string. No good round corners though.
My uncle bought the first TV in our road a very small black and white model. He kept the brightness turned so far down you could hardly see it. He thought if you turned it up brighter it would wear the tube out.
My uncle bought it with his back service pay he got from the army while he was a prisoner for war in Korea on his return home.
Happy times with hardly any money.
 
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Rybren, my chicken also "ran" away.
Atoll, we had to use a weight on a string because the subway grates went down like 12 or 15'. It wasn't easy to pick up coins from that height and when the trains would go by, like every minute, they made a wind that moved the string. :p

I am glad we are all Gezers and remember all that stuff. :)
 

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Rybren, my chicken also "ran" away.
Atoll, we had to use a weight on a string because the subway grates went down like 12 or 15'. It wasn't easy to pick up coins from that height and when the trains would go by, like every minute, they made a wind that moved the string. :p

I am glad we are all Gezers and remember all that stuff. :)
Remember? How could we forget them Paul. We did lots of things to keep us amused esp in the summer. Fathers at work, mothers busy with house work far too busy to look after u. We would be told to go play out so mum could do whatever in the house or go shopping. Nobody worried about crime nobody had anything of much value to robbed of. Front doors would be left open all day. You came and went as and when. On very hot days the tar would melt on the road. We would get ice lolly sticks and make tar bombs with them. The tar would be all over your hands and we used margarine to dissolve it. Main form of transport was trams, long since gone but making a comeback in some cities. Sometimes I think we make one step forward and 2 back but the backward ones aren't the good old days ones.
 

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Reading this thread is like a walk through history. Love the stories and identify with some of them. First T.V. in our house was the day Kennedy was shot and my dad borrowed his aunt's T.V. and may have bought it from her later. I was only 4 but remember the T.V. Played outside and roamed as far as I wanted as long as I could hear dad's whistle or the triangle mom hung on the back porch to call me home. Creek in the backyard provided fish, crayfish, snapping turtles, snakes and plenty of entertainment. Had a stainless steel aquarium at about 5 and loved to watch the guppies and sword tails and corie cats. Spent hours catching crabs and playing in the tide pools in CA until we moved to KY and had the creek in the backyard. Loved the carefree days of childhood in the 60's. Lighting bugs and praying mantis...cap guns, fire crackers, watermelon, summer camp...I have had a good life up to the last few minutes. What is not to love about running with friends in the neighborhood and playing hide and seek after dark!

You guys started it!
 
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On the day of my confirmation I was all dressed up in a new suit, tie and new shoes. Me and my friend went to the park and rented a small rowboat. Our "friends" called us over near the side of the lake because they wanted to tell us something. We rowed near them and they started throwing cherry bombs at us.

One went under the boat and made a huge hole. We sunk.

The water there was only a few feet deep and we had to walk through the mud to the cement side of the lake and climb out.
We were full of mud and my new shoes were ruined.
I couldn't make up a good excuse for ruining my new suit and shoes so my Mother beat the C_ _ p out of me.

Of course we also lost our deposit on the boat and I doubt I ever had a new pair of shoes until I got married. :(

I did however have a bicycle. No one bought me one so I went to what we called the "dumps" which is now a park and I found a bike frame, tires, chain etc. I had to keep putting tape on the tires to keep them together but it worked just fine.
I always used to say, "anyone can have a new bicycle, but I built it". I still have that attitude today. :cool:
 
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Paul B

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Thats also how I got my cars. Bits and pieces and I basically built them. This thing was a Simca. Yeah, I know, I never heard of them either. I think we got it for $8.00. We re built it and sold it for $75.00.



Thats me on top with the hair. Then I bought a Chevy Impala for $8.00. Thats what the junk yard gave you for a car. I had to put a carburetor rebuild kit in it and sold it for I think $250.00.

I bought a fairly new Audi very cheap because one of the connecting rods broke through the side of the engine and it really needed a new engine.
I put a piece of steel over the hole, installed a new piston and connecting rod which probably cost me less that $20.00 and sold that for a few grand.

And it kept going on from there and I was making a lot of money after work fixing cars. Even more than I was making as an electrician apprentice.
I didn't have a new car until after I was married for about 10 years.

I always had money and always will because money is all over the place, you just have to be a little smarter or faster than the next guy. :p

Aftre we were married, in the early 70s I bought this Willy's Jeep for $700.00 and my wife didn't talk to me. She also wouldn't ride in it.
Then one Monday it snowed 18". I plowed the Grand Central Parkway from our house in Queens all the way to the Chrysler Building in Manhattan and parked on the sidewalk right in front of it.

All of Long Island followed me in.
As a matter of fact, that gray plate under the door was from one of the radiator covers in the Chrysler Building.

You couldn't see the sidewalk. There were no 4 wheel drives at the time unless you had a military Jeep like this or an International truck.
I went in to the "Pay Phone" in the lobby (Google it) and called my shop. They told me, are you crazy! Go home.

So I plowed the Grand Central Parkway all the way home (all of Manhattan followed me) and I drove through the New York Worlds Fair because I couldn't see a road.

I made $1,800.00 that day plowing snow which was quite a few months salary because as an apprentice I was bringing home maybe $70.00 a week.

My wife never complained about that Jeep again and every time it snowed, I cleaned up.
Like I said, money is all over the place and I always made it. :cool:

 

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Nooo that would be sacrilege. You eat fish chips and mushy peas with plenty of salt and vinegar. Thats it nothing else with it unless you want a few rounds of bread with it and a cup of tea.
BTW some years ago when we had seminars in this country. Martin Moe who was flown in from the US along with Forest Young, Albert Thiel and julian Sprung were presented with souvenir tea pots as we were told you can't buy them in the USA. How rude
You
Nooo that would be sacrilege. You eat fish chips and mushy peas with plenty of salt and vinegar. Thats it nothing else with it unless you want a few rounds of bread with it and a cup of tea.
BTW some years ago when we had seminars in this country. Martin Moe who was flown in from the US along with Forest Young, Albert Thiel and julian Sprung were presented with souvenir tea pots as we were told you can't buy them in the USA. How rude
You can have the wife but do not mess with the fish and chips EVER
 

Mastering the art of locking and unlocking water pathways: What type of valves do you have on your aquarium plumbing?

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