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Aquarium over the Years

Sometime in the 90s I won a goldfish at one of those rigged carnie games at the county fair. What followed is a very common narrative for new fish keepers: I loved the fish, kept it in a bowl on my nightstand, overfed it, and it died within a few days from a lack of proper equipment and my own ignorance. Some years prior the family had made an attempt at a small aquarium, and the results were similar. I find these outcomes odd, considering my father is an environmental scientist with a specialization in decomposition. I would have thought that an intimate understanding of the nitrogen cycle would have armed him with some background on cycling aquariums, but maybe his experience was limited to the terrestrial variety, or more likely – he was just absent-minded and didn’t care about keeping pets.

Despite the initial failure, my interest was piqued, and so began my lifelong involvement in the hobby. In the beginning, it was mostly trial and error, until I acquired some books on the subject (the early days of the internet didn’t have much to offer), and I finally understood how nitrifying bacteria prevented the water column from going toxic – not to mention the limitations on the total bioload tanks of a certain size could maintain. These are lessons that curiosity and experimentation continually forced me to relearn, but what fun is a hobby that doesn’t allow for constant tweaking?

I maintained a 10 gallon tank throughout high school and college, eventually getting a 29 gallon from Liz, which I kept in 4 different apartments and now currently resides in the house. Its size is just big enough to give me options, without being so big that I’d worry about the floor joists (one day I’ll have something huge). It is this tank that I’m documenting here, since it existed in the time of digital cameras and smart phones. So here’s a fun look back in my personal aquarium history of this particular tank:

The metadata on this file doesn’t include a timestamp, but I know it’s before the smartphone era. I started off with a jungle theme.
A later photo, from 2014. I always did enjoy the cardinal tetras.
2015. Note the light. Around this time I retrofitted two light housings to fit two T8 fluorescent bulbs each, and bolted them together. I was able to start growing many more plants after that.
2018. It would appear that I did some pruning. Eventually the plants took over the bulk of the tank and I wanted to give the fish more space. I was probably suffering some algae problems at this point too.
2020. The aforementioned jerry-rigged lighting system that I retired in favor of a modern LED setup. I was pretty proud of this though. I had mounted contacts and ballasts, and those clips were even holding a moon light.
2020. A later shot with the LED lights.
2023. Finally tired of the anubis-centric plantscape, at Liz’s urging, the tank was nearly completely gutted. This is probably the most professional it had ever looked.

And here’s where things went wrong:

  • I started dosing Flourish Excel (polycycloglutaracetal) to control algae. Excel has algicidal properties, and it worked well for a time at keep algae to a minimum while supplementing the plants with additional carbon, but it turns out that more than just algae is sensitive to it. The moss effectively died off, and the vals melted. I won’t be using it anymore.
  • We had an extended power outage. A filter not running will turn anaerobic, which meant my tank had to cycle again. I lost fish as a result.
  • I mistakenly set the needle valve on the CO2 tank too high. This asphyxiated half the remaining fish.
  • I pulled the dead moss and other dying plants out of the tank, and in the process disturbed the substrate sufficiently as to circulate toxic anaerobic microorganisms and kill off the remaining fish.

I hadn’t intended to reset the aquarium this year, but events necessitated it. With some lessons learned on caution and chemical dosing, I’m back on track to what will hopefully be once again a pretty tank, this time with mollies!

2025.

–Simon

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Honey-Glazed Salmon

Salmon’s an acquired taste. One of my sisters never liked it as a kid, and I know a couple adults with a lasting aversion. Of course, like chicken, salmon’s flavor profile is strongly influenced by preparation. Everyone appears to like Lox. My mustard-baked attempt, however, was not well received. This honey-ginger glazed version went over better, although the kid complained about ginger. Ah well – can’t please everyone.

It’s important to pull the salmon at 120 degrees (provided it’s been properly frozen prior).

The foodsaver also shorted out during this project. But it was just a bad power cord and I was able to cut out the bad portion and re-splice the wires. Not a project that warrants its own post. But still worthy of mention because – manly skilzzz!

–Simon

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You’re Doing it Wrong: Ground Beef

I’ve talked before about how you’re probably cooking meat wrong, because you’ve probably listened to a bullshit article that was regurgitated second-hand information that swam the backwaters of the internet cesspool until the original source was lost to digital entropy.

Meat Myths

I get it. Spending 5 minutes instead of 5 seconds to verify information and perhaps seek out alternate opinions is hard. You just want to get back to wasting time on ADHD social media feeds. And if you’re bothering to still be reading this post at all, you’re probably angrily scrolling past my intro to get to the information.

But the real tragedy is SEO – search engine optimization. They won the algorithm battle, and search engines no longer prioritize delivering meaningful content. I usually ignore page 1 search results by default now.

Okay okay, so on to the real article.

Store-bought ground beef sucks. Here’s what you can get:

  1. Pre-packaged tubes. This is throwaway meat from the worst livestock, and an amalgam of pink slime and pure fat – often from different suppliers, mixed to the USDA-certified proportions and squirted into an opaque tube so you can’t see the contents. It will be greasy, dry, adulterated with lots of water, and if you get sick you’re out of luck because no single slaughterhouse of origin can be pinpointed since their contracts prohibit the manufacturer from listing them on the package and the FDA will never be able to track it down as a result and so other people will get sick too.
  2. Low-cost bulk case meat at your local grocery meat counter. They would like you to think this is a bargain because they’re grinding up all their scrap meat, so you might be getting ground prime ribeye after all! And indeed you might be getting some of that. But the bulk of these grinds isn’t trimming, it’s frozen blocks of bull meat. How do I know? Because I used to do this myself as a college job. Of interest to me is I don’t know how to find a source for the giant meat blocks. It’s very well hidden from internet sleuthing, so it must be a USDA supplier arrangement with ConAgra or something, with commercial license required. But here’s what the machines look like: https://berkelmiami.com/collections/frozen-block-chippers/products/biro-fbc-4800ss-frozen-block-chipper. Basically, junk meat is frozen and molded into blocks designed for these machines which slice them into chips that will fit into a grinder. Mix the chips with the day’s trimmings, and there’s some ground beef. It’s actually not too bad, but there’s still the issue with questionable multiple suppliers and the subterfuge that annoys me. Plus, we can do better.
  3. Local grocery packaged ground beef, labeled. The labeling is no joke – you can’t lie about this, but the USDA still allows a degree of fudging the words. If it’s expensive, it’s probably what it says it is on the package, but it’s still a gamble and could just be what the bulk meat is in the case, albeit with a hefty markup.
  4. You pick out meat and and ask the butcher to grind it for you. Probably your best option, if you trust what’s going on back by the grinder. And how clean that machine is.

What’s the point of this post? No reason, other than this information doesn’t appear to be available anywhere else, and certainly not in once concise location. And it’s all part of my perfect burger journey. Don’t trust beef you didn’t grind yourself. Grind your own.

–Simon