One day you might realize that your down is up and your up is down. At first it is most disorienting. Your head spins at first as your world is violently shaken up like a snow globe, but eventually you accept the reality, or non-reality, of the situation. Acceptance of the situation is the first step to rehabilitation. The alternative is to go crazy.
Having your down become up is most frightening. What you thought was your base has now become your ceiling? This leaves a most unsettling feeling in the gut of your stomach, which, for a long time does not go away.
Feeder goldfish, after quarantine, make excellent fish. Seen here eating Chinese veggies. Photo by Don Tai
Not having money and wanting to keep fish had me researching all the possibilities. On one hand, I knew nothing about raising fish, so the possibility of killing a few would be a near certainty. On the other hand fish can be $3-4 each. Since I do not like to waste money that I do not have, I turned to feeder goldfish, sold for $0.18CAD each, here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Feeder goldfish, as I read on the internet, are full of diseases and will quickly die, so do not bother. On the other hand there were others who said they raised feeders to become large fish that were strong and healthy. I am decidedly in the latter camp. Feeder goldfish are goldfish, just that they have been badly treated. Overall feeder goldfish can be beautiful, graceful and easy to care for.
Lint in my Ralph’s Hard Dough bread: Found four pieces embedded into the dough, Photo by Don Tai
Furious was I when my daughter took out two pieces of Ralph’s Bakery hard dough bread, from the bread bag, to eat and there was some unidentifiable foreign objects embedded into the bread. These objects needed to be physically pulled from inside the bread. It looks like some white lint mixed with human hair. We later found two more slices with these fibers. I am unhappy. Here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, this is not acceptable practice. I will stop buying Ralph’s Bakery bread.
Tropical Tetra Tank with a neon tetra, 3 cardinal tetras, a white tipped tetra and a Gold Pristella tetra on the left rear of the tank. Note the neon tetra in the middle has his red stripe from mid-body to tail while the cardinal tetra on the bottom has a more complete red stripe. Photo by Don Tai
My friend Peter gave me his tropical aquarium, which includes tetras, cory (corydoras) catfish and a clown loach. All these fish I am unfamiliar with but with my recent goldfish experience on water quality (I was soundly schooled), we should have no difficulties having these fish flourish. They will be housed in Little Weed’s room.
Oivey It simply did not work. I followed the recipe they had laid out for the upgrade, ran upgrade.php and got this mess of an error message. I suppose in time I will figure it out or abandon the site. Thankfully it was a test site with nothing in it. A test upgrade is the way to go for Drupal, because failing on a production site would be catastrophic.
PDOException: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table ‘xxx_dxxx2.blocked_ips’ doesn’t exist: SELECT 1 FROM {blocked_ips} WHERE ip = :ip; Array ( [:ip] => xx.xxx.xx.xx ) in drupal_is_denied() (line 1895 of /home/xxx/public_html/xxx/includes/bootstrap.inc).
Recently a personal web site of a friend of mine was hacked by Mr.Moro the Moroccan Hacker. He had a cheeky message up on the site, which was then indexed by Google. It took Google a couple of days to reindex his front page. You would think that I would be personally very angry with Mr.Moro, but you would be incorrect. Mr.Moro was the first step in the solution.
Wet snowfall in Toronto, Canada on Wednesday Feb 27 2013. Note the thickness of the snow on the trees. The temperature was about 0C. Photo by Don Tai
We are Canadian and therefore we have winter. In winter we often get snow and did we ever get a dumping this Wednesday here in Toronto, Canada. We got about 20 cm of snow at 0C to -2C, making for very wet and heavy snow. Wet snow is difficult to remove because it is heavy with water. Still it really looked pretty outside.
We save money by automating, or so the City of Toronto politicians say. For the last couple of years there has been changes to our weekly garbage pickup, specifically trucks that have large claws that pick up our garbage cans and dump our garbage into the truck, all without the operator leaving his seat. There is also only one guy on the truck, saving labour costs. Of course there are other details to note.
Sometimes there are certain situations where a direct teaching approach is not possible. I found this out with newborns and fish. Firstly I am unsure if they are capable and secondly there is no direct feedback to tell you if they received the message. You then use the trial and error method: Try something and see if you receive a satisfactory result. Small goldfish are very skittish. This is reasonable because they are so small and have been largely mistreated. Here is how to teach them to eat vegetables.
Seachem’s Prime water conditioner will make City of Toronto water safe for your fish. It will remove chlorine, cloramine and ammonia.
Live and learn, unfortunately. Little Weed has taken up the hobby of raising goldfish. I, as the dutiful and enabling parent, need to work out all the little details of how to do this. He has agreed to dutifully do water changes, feed the fish and arrange the tank, so he does have enthusiasm. I have not raised fish since I was a kid about his age. So down we go to buy feeder goldfish. We already had a 10G tank, we bought him a filter, so what else could go wrong? It turns out, a lot, especially the water from the City of Toronto, Canada. Here is what I found out, the hard way.
