Mr Burns
Aquarium Advice FINatic
Today was offically the last day of class for the summer quarter at the university of cincinnati, so i did what any exhausted, broke college student/aquarium geek would do....spend money!! and spend i did 
there is a new aquarium adventure store that opened up three weeks ago and i had heard good things about them, so i had to make it out there asap. wow, was i impressed. that's an understatement, really. just the number and diversity of aquariums and stands was awesome, like nothing i've seen in a local cincinnati store before. so i walk back to the fish and think, this is soooo nice! for the first time ever, i got a chance to see royal farowellas swimming around in groups! big groups of almost every fish you could ever want, even the freshwater rays that were about 7" in diameter. and the plants...that's what really got me. for the first time, there was actually a good choice of extremely high quality (dare i say, show quality?) plants. FORTY PERCENT OFF!! you can't beat that with a louisville slugger. so i grabbed up a couple bunches of lilaeopsis novae-zela, ludwigia repens, a crypt wendtii, and some water sprite. i had no reservations buying more than i thought the tank would allow b/c the prices were so good. next up: a new fish...
i had been trying so hard for the longest time to find somebody locally that sells bulldog plecos. i absolutely love plecos, but most of them get too big, like my common pleco right now. so there at aquarium adventure, right by the plants were three tanks of bulldog plecos. for me, it didn't get any better than that. i was in aquarium geek heaven. next up: driftwood...
i had walked over to the decorations section and only found some massive pieces of driftwood that wouldn't even fit in my 85gal. kinda disappointing. or at least, it was until i walked over to to the section where the actual tanks and stands were on sales. each tank had a few pieces of driftwood in it that were for sale and clearly priced. i went row by row studying the pieces until i found the right piece. there had been a particular shape and form that i wanted for the 10gal, but i seriously don't think i could have designed a better piece than what i found. it was perfect malaysian driftwood at a reasonable price. i was set. time to go home.
while floating the bulldog, i started taking out the plants that were already in the aquarium...the java fern, anubias, and rotala indica. i cleaned off the driftwood and began attaching the fern and anubias to it with rubber bands (which i prefer.) yadda yadda yadda, an hour later i have a very very nice planted tank set up that needs a 50% water change and tests done to determine what fertilizers are needed. only problem, my python can't reach from the hall bathroom to the 10gal. that was kind of a bummer, but my DVD copy of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism came in the mail while i was gone, so i popped that into the computer and watched that. about a half hour into the documentary, the doorbell rings. UPS guy with my python extension, flourish iron and excel, and my rio 50. things just couldn't get any better, let me tell you. i'm like a pig in...well...i'll let that one go.
here are some pics from today:
there is a new aquarium adventure store that opened up three weeks ago and i had heard good things about them, so i had to make it out there asap. wow, was i impressed. that's an understatement, really. just the number and diversity of aquariums and stands was awesome, like nothing i've seen in a local cincinnati store before. so i walk back to the fish and think, this is soooo nice! for the first time ever, i got a chance to see royal farowellas swimming around in groups! big groups of almost every fish you could ever want, even the freshwater rays that were about 7" in diameter. and the plants...that's what really got me. for the first time, there was actually a good choice of extremely high quality (dare i say, show quality?) plants. FORTY PERCENT OFF!! you can't beat that with a louisville slugger. so i grabbed up a couple bunches of lilaeopsis novae-zela, ludwigia repens, a crypt wendtii, and some water sprite. i had no reservations buying more than i thought the tank would allow b/c the prices were so good. next up: a new fish...
i had been trying so hard for the longest time to find somebody locally that sells bulldog plecos. i absolutely love plecos, but most of them get too big, like my common pleco right now. so there at aquarium adventure, right by the plants were three tanks of bulldog plecos. for me, it didn't get any better than that. i was in aquarium geek heaven. next up: driftwood...
i had walked over to the decorations section and only found some massive pieces of driftwood that wouldn't even fit in my 85gal. kinda disappointing. or at least, it was until i walked over to to the section where the actual tanks and stands were on sales. each tank had a few pieces of driftwood in it that were for sale and clearly priced. i went row by row studying the pieces until i found the right piece. there had been a particular shape and form that i wanted for the 10gal, but i seriously don't think i could have designed a better piece than what i found. it was perfect malaysian driftwood at a reasonable price. i was set. time to go home.
while floating the bulldog, i started taking out the plants that were already in the aquarium...the java fern, anubias, and rotala indica. i cleaned off the driftwood and began attaching the fern and anubias to it with rubber bands (which i prefer.) yadda yadda yadda, an hour later i have a very very nice planted tank set up that needs a 50% water change and tests done to determine what fertilizers are needed. only problem, my python can't reach from the hall bathroom to the 10gal. that was kind of a bummer, but my DVD copy of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism came in the mail while i was gone, so i popped that into the computer and watched that. about a half hour into the documentary, the doorbell rings. UPS guy with my python extension, flourish iron and excel, and my rio 50. things just couldn't get any better, let me tell you.
i'm like a pig in...well...i'll let that one go.here are some pics from today:
to put some organic super concentrated house plant food into my first planted tank. Needless to say, I had about every kinda algae bloom possible. I think I even might have created a couple of new species. 8O It took me weeks of daily water changes, lotsa prunning, scrapping and more cussing than I care to admit to get that tank straightened out. It was a lesson I'll never forget 
)or some other red plant, but even with the lillies yours looks alot better 
