Housework? What Housework?

Reef Happenings

After work on Friday, I went to Aquatic Gallery and purchased a blonde naso tang I had been eyeing there for a while. It was eating, and seemed healthy, so I decided to bite the bullet. It's about 5-6" long, about the same size as Dory (she might be a hair bigger), but it's already showing the start of some tail streamers (only males get them).

Dory immediately harrassed it when I first put it in. She is a relentless bully, that fish. The poor naso (who I want to name Norman, but am waiting to see how well he does first) hid for the first two days. On Sunday he was out and about a lot more, and while he and Dory got into the occassional scuffle, for the most part she left him alone.

I got a great picture of him, but forgot to upload it, so I'll have to post that tomorrow. I did manage to get some pictures from the tank up - it's just a few of the corals as well as the clam. You can see the picture of the brown montipora cap coral - from when I first got it, to just the other day, which was when it had been in the tank for 4 weeks. It's a bit hard to tell, but you can see that it's grown about 1/2" on the edges, and the color has changed from brown to more of a green. I'm hoping it will continue to color up over time. The easiest way to see the growth is from the "burn" spots in the middle - the previous owner had accidentally dropped salt on it, and the coral tissue receded in those spots. 4 weeks later, the spots have healed up significantly.

The new pictures can be seen here. On the third page, you can see a little pink coral, called a montipora setosa. I got this one for free, but at the stores they're asking up to $90 for that sized piece (it's about 1/2 inch big)!

I have quite a few more coral pictures as well as the Monterey pictures still to do.

Weekend

Deepali and Will and Elaine came over to our place Friday night. We rented Snakes on a Plane, but Deepali and Will had already seen it, so we just played Monkey Ball on the Wii all night, which was a lot of fun. My arms were actually sore the next day.

Marc had to go to work Saturday morning, and I took Bandit sheep herding. That was fun, except at one point Bandit had a whole group of sheep pinned against a gate, and I was right in the middle of them. One of the sheep had horns, and it rammed one of them right into my thigh. For a second I thought I was going to lose my leg, it hurt like hell. Thankfully, all I have is a yucky bruise from it. I think the dog bite was actually a lot worse.

Marc and I got back home at about the same time, so we had a late lunch and then took a nap. We ended up sleeping for almost 3 hours! I only woke up because my parents called to see if we wanted to have dinner with them. So we both got up and drove down to Fremont.

After dinner, we rented Flags of our Fathers. Leslie left because he had to go back to work (it was 10:30 at night). Kenny, Marc and I ended up watching the movie. It was pretty good. I vaguely knew the story about the Iwo Jima picture, but didn't really know the details. We'll definitely rent Letters from Iwo Jima when that comes out.

We slept in a bit Sunday, ran a few errands, and then generally lazed around the rest of the day. Neither of us really felt like doing any projects. I kinda sorta watched the Oscars, mostly while I was working on pictures and the fish tank. I thought The Departed was really good, so I had no problems with that winning Best Picture.