Before the Monster
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: Headstong - Queen Of The Damned
As the end of September I have had 3 months of experience with keeping fish. Megan was the one who got me started in this. I think she was talking about want to keep Nemo fish for a couple of months before I said what the hell and broke down and did it. Mostly what finally convinced me to do it was Megan telling me that her boyfriend said "If my idiot uncle can do it you should have no problems". I will say at the beginning I made a lot of dumb mistakes. I went the LFS and started looking at the supplies I would need. My first intent was to do a 5 gallon nano reef so I was looking for rock to start with. Now I had just started to read about setting up a tank and all I knew so far is that I need to cycle my tank. After talking to the guy that works with the fish I was sent home with a box of salt, some biozyme, and three small rocks for my regent 5 tank. I am a major supporter of ebay, is where I had gotten a hydrometer a few weeks before. So I set up my tank and thanks to my book I had learned that you can cycle a tank just by feeding it like there was a fish in the tank. After 2 weeks of this I finally got a test kit and started testing my water. My water actually tested fine except a small amount of nitrite. About a week later when I was going to test my water I noticed that there was brown algae all over my tank. About this time I discovered the Talking Reef podcast on itunes and there was a show about cycling that talked about how there is a algae bloom at the end of the cycling process. I this made me happy and what made me happier still was the fact that the water tested good. So the next day we went to the store and I bought some live sand, a couple more rocks, fish food, and after an argument with the fish lady a small three stripe Damsel that Megan named Damielle. You'll find Megan names a lot of the stuff before I can come up with a name for it. Over the next month I started planning to do my 55 gallon tank, I listened to more podcast, read stuff in the forums, bought more creatures and read another book. Also during this time my mom was whining about the fact that that is all I see to talk about. The problems? I bought a falco hawkfish and a clown fish a week after I bought the damsel. The clown fish was small so it went into a one gallon tank in Megans room and the hawkfish went into the 5 gallon with the damsel. I think in the next two weeks all the fish went into bigger tanks. The clown went into the 5 gallon and the other two went into a ten gallon. Also during this time I tried to reseal the 55 and failed. During this time Megans boyfriend bought her a blue mandarin. When this happened I realized that I have never told her that she needs to check and see what the fish eats and anything else she can learn about fish before she buys it. About a week later I finally managed to feed it some baby brine shrimp. Unfortunately something caused the death of the mandarin, the snail, the two blue legged hermits, and Nemo. The only thing alive in the tank was a bunch of white squiggles and a red wormy thing with what looked like it had thorns on it, it looked like a bristle worm. So now ive got my damsel that my mom renamed Dumsel, Shrimp the hawkfish, Sandy the sand sifter star, a snail, and 2 blue legged hermies I named Sara. Currently I'm planning a 180 gallon reef ready tank I'm getting from Mo the new pet shop owner.~ Regina