Christy's Reef

So last night while viewing my tank and taking some photos I stepped on something. At first I thought it was a piece of rubble rock from mounting various frags. Upon further inspection I found that it was a hermit crab. I guess he had packed his bags and was off to greener pastures. I hope he made it there. Poor dried up thing. I've had a few of them relegated to the sump ever since the "clam incident" and I guess he wasn't having fun down there. Hopefully he didn't encourage the rest of the crew to follow suit.

So the ballast fairy finally came, unfortunately she didn't leave a "electrical wiring for dummies" handbook. My old ballasts only had 3 wires, all of which are used. The new ballasts have 5 wires. I have no idea what the extra two do. Maybe they just make the lights better :P Anyhoo, there they are sitting on the floor. I suppose its one step closer to actually getting them attached to the tank. Perhaps tomorrow I'll have another go at them.

I also got some new additions to the tank. Three new bali acros, a ricordea and some other junk that I've already forgotten about. Various frags and such, and a kick ass blastomussa that was donated by my friend Rich. It looks a bit rough but damned cool colors. Yes, yes I know. Photos! However with the excitement of the ballasts and all it went like this. I got the ballasts home and promptly went to attach them to the tank, I opened them up and was like "whew! look at all those wires, that ain't good". Then I remembered that someone wanted a "before" and "after" shot of the tank during the lighting upgrade. Of course I can't just take a photo with the glass looking all scuzzy. So I cleaned the glass really nicely. Then of course I knocked something over, so I had to spend some time righting it. After that, I decided that a few things needed to be rearranged, so I got that all done. I also spent some time inspecting various grape caulerpa patches, deciding on whether I was happy with them or not. I also inspected the two really bad patches of brown slime algae I have growing on my Tunze powerheads and had a look at my sea swirl which I'm thinking about swapping out for a new wavysea thingy that I read about on the internet. The algae patches seem to be okay for now, I'm temporarily holding them in check but really, I'd rather they were gone, and as usual I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. After that I dried off and got my tripod out to take a photo. After the photo shoot, I decided to have another go at the ballast wiring, doing various searches on the internet and such. And well, it sort of ended there. You know how the internet sort of puts you in a time warp? Well thats where I've been. Its now lights out, the ballasts are sitting on the floor and I have one photo to show for my actions.

I suppose tomorrow is another day ;)