petluvr

So I will be training for a new job, selling insurance in the upcoming weeks. In the past my work attire has generally either been scrubs or a nice pant suit. Now I'm trying to wrap my head around business casual. I have several pairs of Legend Wash Pants from Eddie Bauer as well as a couple of Legend Wash Blazers from them. They fit fabulously and are a big staple for my non-work wardrobe, but do they fit business casual, or are they simply casual? Thoughts?

So culturing copepods isn't working out so great thus far. I've tried both the Tisbe and "Tigerpods" kind. The cultures do fine for about a month and then crash. Agh! Anyway I digress.

My silly mandarin has finally decided he could condescend to eating brine shrimp nauplii (three months later and close to starvation...). But personally I don't think that represents a terribly balanced diet so I'm trying to find something else to supplement the brine shrimp with that I might actually manage to keep in continuous culture for longer than a month.

I've heard rotifers are comparatively quite easy and reproduce very quickly. Anyone had any success getting blue mandarins to eat them? Also, would they be helpful or at least not harmful (given the high bacteria loads that tend to go with them) for my primarily soft corals?

Any other food items you've had good sucess getting mandarins to eat? Preferably that will grow like gangbusters on live nanocropolis cultures? (I've got an insane amount of that growing.)

On a bit of a nostalgia hunt. Specifically I'm trying to find the original Descent and The Secret Island of Dr. Quandry. I found "free" downloads that require you to visit sponsors websites and give out a crap load of personal info. Sorry, not for me. Anyone have any truely free ideas? Or failing that, a place I could get my hands on a CD hard copy for money?

I drive a small 92 toyota truck that still runs great, but it looks totally terrible. Ideally it needs repainting, and considering I spend a lot of time in it and often eat two to three meals a day in it as a result, it's looking embarrasingly cruddy, and the inside is starting to smell stale, regardless of what a do air freshener wise. It's beyond my basic DIY wash, vacuming it out, and using a little armorall on it routine, so I'm looking into having it detailed. I have two questions:

Am I right in my suspicions that this will get the interior perfectly clean and smelling spiffy and breathe some new life into the paint? (The entire interior is vinyl if that helps.)

How long does it take to have the car detailed? Can it be done while I wait? Is it something I could do on my lunch hour? Or is it a leave it in the morning and pick it up in the evening kinda thing?

What do you think of a blue mandarin goby, a royal gramma, and a percula clown sharing a reef tank? Any issues with compatability? Any particular order you'd add them in? Other tips?

I've kept freshwater tanks for years, but my current 20 gallon is my first planted aquarium. So far it's going well, the chemistry is stable, and the critters (pair of honey gouramis, half dozen zebra danios, and five amano shrimp) and most of the plants (umbrella plants, dwarf baby tears, and what I think is some kind of liverwort) are doing really well. The amazon swords though, that I really wanted to be the focal point of the tank are nothing to write home about. They're green and surviving, but they're no bigger than the day I planted them (3 months ago). My understanding was that they were fast growing.

I've got eco-complete substrate in it, driftwood, heater, aquaclear 70 filter, and a 65 watt high efficiency/output florescent light fixture. I supplement with flourish, flourish excel (carbon), potassium and iron, but they're still shrimpy.

So I started doing some research and found many who suggest that swords are heavy root feeders, so I need to find a way to get and keep more nutrients at the root base of these plants. Which eco-complete may not be terribly great for. I know jiffy pellets are used to start hydroponically grown terrestrial plants for exactly this same reason. I also know peat can be added to the filter to soften and acidify the water, but I'm wondering about using them to pot the swords before burrying them in the substrate.

Has anyone ever used them in an aquarium? Did they help? Did they screw up the water chemistry? Any other ideas on how to coax along baby swords?

So I'm working on changing around some fish and I'm restocking my nifty 20 gallon nature aquarium. I absolutely adore the dwarf honey gourami that I moved over from a smaller tank I used to have on my desk. I've heard some of the gouramis like their cousins the bettas don't get along very well with their own type and may become very territorial. Anyone know if that holds true for honey gouramis? I was thinking of making it a species tank and housing five of them there.