Tank Shots! (and other goodies)

Tank on June 6, 2006
Okay, so I've been saying and saying for the last month that my tank is now a real tank. There's water in it; it's past the cycle stage; yada yada. Now I guess I should prove it with some pictures.

The first pic above is the day after the long long night I spent awake trying to fill a 90 gallon tank with about 45 gallons worth of rocks and water. Unfortunately I couldn't just pour RO/DI water than scoopfuls of salt and hope that the primordial soup mix will do right on its own. There were a significant amount of life being transferred from the 29 and after several hours... maybe even a full day, the tank finally cleared and so was my pic. Now, you would think with about 50lbs of LR that I'd be satisified with the tank, but boy were you wrong. This tank ain't for water, fishes or corals; it's for rocks! So off I went to pile on the rocks!

Tank on June 6, 2006 (afternoon)
Sadly, I simply could not stay away from my tank... even though I was working on like 4 hours of sleep and was working, I had to rearrange... I ended up building the first half of the wall during my lunch break, which you can see in the picture above.

Tank on June 8, 2006
Not satisified with the amount of rocks that were currently in the tank, I went and made a haste purchase with International Marine of Suck. Out of 55lbs, only one piece of rock made it pass the inspection (on the left). Yo, I'm as harsh as Gordon Ramsey when he's hungry. I expect fast but good work (rock) and as hungry as I am for rocks, I still won't accept it if it looks like sh*t.

Tank on June 17, 2006
So after getting rid of the 50lbs of bleh rock, I ended up getting another 50lbs from a local reefer who was tearing down his tank. The rocks here were so much purpler and prettier than the first batch that I was almost glad I waited the extra week to get them. At least this time, I wasn't producing raw sewage trying to cure some mail ordered rocks. YUCK! (Remember the word yuck?)

Tank on June 18, 2006
Just in case you thought my tank was a piece of art, this is the FULL MONTY shot of how ghetto it actually is. Auto topoff from a gravity fed 5 gallon jug... ain't technology grand? I guess I could have hid all the ugly equipment if I had gotten a sump, but at this point, I just don't roll like that.

Tank on July 3, 2006
Here's the tank over the fourth of July weekend. At this point, I've spent millions of dollars on frags from ReeferMadness and Marine Fish in Marietta. Thousands of gallons of water had been used and switched and hundreds of fish had been killed to feed the 2 or 3 that are currently in the tank.

Unlike the other more experienced reefers who preach critter kindness, my first fish that survived the ich cycle and the new tank cycle is technically my mandarin fish. I guess if you're a n00b, don't try this at home since dragonette fish are one of the hardest species to keep alive; I sometimes wonder why they are sold so cheaply... maybe it's because they are slow and are easy to catch. However, with my CPR HOB refuge and the 150,000lbs of live rock I have in the tank, I'm quite confident that there will be enough food for Mr. Mandarin for years (4) to come.

I'm now slowly trading frags and trying to grow out all the coral pieces that make up my frag tank, but hopefully sooner than later, this work of art will grow and mature.

Now, for the goodie... being a pro Google fan, I recently discovered that they do photo hosting online! If you're sick of snapfish or photobucket or other providers that sometimes will pull your picture due to bandwidth, I invite you to check out Picasa Web by Google. You get 250 mb of photo storage for free with an option to upgrade to 6 gigs of storage for $25 a year. Now, I'm not pro Google on everything they make because they do charge companies up the ass for some of their advertising solutions; but if there's one thing they do well, it's giving general consumers good tools for free/cheap.

Anyway, I know my tank pictures are probably not exciting to anyone except me, but if you've read this far, you may as well check out the web hosting tool for photos if you have a bunch of your own tank shots. Picasa is phototastic!