Christians and history
This is a short piece I wrote a while ago in response to a friend of mine asking me what the point of studying history was, as Christians (her questions are included; she was asking from the point of view of being pasionate about both).
Of rainbows, filters and carpet algae
James noticed a dead rainbow this morning. Ajax was very unimpressed when I took it away from him; he wanted to suck her dry, or something equally gross. Sigh… I hope this won’t become a trend… no obvious symptoms.
I was looking in the main tank and noticed that the disgusting algae on the plants and gravel was managing to get everywhere and not necessarily be anchored down. So I had this brilliant idea of pulling it up with the net, which I proceeded to carry out. It came away easily, and was quite disgusting; lots of poo everywhere. It also came off the plants easily. The tank consequently looks a whole lot brighter, because instead of dark green the bottom is white-ish.
We also decided to do a water change; I think we probably did 40%, because we hadn’t done one in a while. I did some pruning and aquascaping while the water was down… and James decided to put the other filter on. He figures it’s a waste not using it… and I think he just wanted to fiddle. So he rigged it up, and it blasted water out. He’s now made the holes in the spray bar a bit bigger so that it’s not quite so violent, but I’m still a little unsure of whether the fish are going to appreciate having two sets of water pouring onto them. It does mean the tank is being filtered 10 times an hour… not sure if this is excessive or not.
I moved an Algae Eater over, to start him doing his job. I couldn’t catch the other one and decided to leave it a while, so he doesn’t stress out too much.
Fed Square and its books
I have been looking forward to going to the Fed Square book market on a Saturday ever since I found out about it, a couple of months ago. I was imaging heaps of different booksellers, at least some selling things cut-price… I was a bit disappointed. There were less than ten booksellers. Admittedly a number did have cheap books, but they were mostly second-hand (which is still fine). I did buy four books, but three of those were from the stall set up by Andrew’s Books, which I go to in Lygon St all the time anyway. Sigh.
I got: Unnatural Fire, by Fidelis Morgan (cool name), which I started reading on the tram although I haven’t even finished Genghis Khan yet (thanks to also reading Lantia on the tram home after I bought it); it seems like a Restoration version of I, Claudia, which is just fine with me – female protagonist/detective, etc.
Limbo, by Andy Secombe; not sure whether this will turn out to be a waste of time or not.
The Stone of Heaven (Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade), by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, which looks really cool.
On Histories and Stories, by AS Byatt, because I think I should get into more lit crit and I’ve heard of Byatt and she seems cool.
The Lost Kingdom of Lantia
Picked this up for $5; I knew it was going to be a kids’ book, but that’s partly why I got it – I’m realising I should teen fiction so that I can genuinely recommend books – current ones – to my students. Anyway; it’s by Maggie Hamilton, and I actually thought it was set in Melbourne, until at the end I read she’s based in Sydney so I guess it’s actually set there, although there was no mention of a bridge or Opera House which I thought was odd in a book about kids on holidays.
Overall I guess it was OK; as I read it I thought using the name Lantia was a bit dumb since it was quite obviously about Atlantis (magical kingdom destroyed by volcano) – at the end she does indeed say the book was inspired by her fascination by Atlantis, so I’m relieved the name wasn’t just a really poor way of covering it up. The writing was all right; I found it a bit basic, but I am well out of the target audience. The one thing I found incredibly annoying was her use of rhetorical questions all the time, and in italics. Why did she feel the need to do this? (Ha ha). It really, really got on my nerves.
I think I would recommend it to a kid; one who wasn’t a totally avid reader, but was looking for something fairly engaging and possibly a bit challenging, for younger teens.
Five neons
Yes, another two dead neons this morning. Very disappointing. All the fish in there are going to have to stay in there another week or so I think, because of this. It occurs to me that having so many fish doing quarantine together was not a remarkably good idea – I thought so at the time, too, I was just a bit greedy… ah well. Here’s hoping.
Great Sermon Illustrations I have known
This is going to be a constantly-updated entry, as I come across humorous sermon illustrations. Most of these, I would bet, will be from Rob Miller (UniChurch minister) or Richard Condie (SJ’s vicar). It was inspired by last night’s, which was…
God // Renovation Rescue: he moves in and remakes what he find (Rob).
Stay tuned for more insights.
Dead neons… and the Colombians
Looking at the qt this morning, we discovered that there were two dead neons. I had noticed on Saturday that there were two or three with very pale colour, and we’re guessing these are those. The others seem to be all right, although none of their colours are particularly brilliant. These guys might stay in the qt a little longer. We also decided we were being hopeful, the other day, counting 10 neons still there: there are certainly only 7 now, so the weird thing with the snail was a dead neon.
Meanwhile, back in the main tank, James dropped in some flake and claims the Colombians acted like piranhas, or like they hadn’t been fed in weeks – went crazy and gobbled up the lot.
Fish diary…
James managed this afternoon to get all of the entries from RandomAlex #1 into a readable format. However… they all have to be manually entered on to this site. That’s a lot of cutting and pasting. James said I had 110 entries, fish + books + other stuff, which to me soounds ridiculous but I could it could be right. So that’s what I’m doing now… all for the benefit, hopefully, of some beginning fish keepers who will profit from our stupidity/naivety.
New fish…
Feeling slightly guilty about this, but too late now. James and I had an argument this morning and so James decided to take me to Coburg to say sorry (we were already in the car). I was a bit annoyed by this, as I didn’t think we should get new fish, but James insisted and said he wanted to look at tanks anyway. So we went.
They had a tank full of Madagascar rainbows. They were 4 for $10. Yes, we got 8. I think this will basically make our tank full, as they may end up getting to 4-5 inches each. If the tank wasn’t well filtered and heavily planted (well, it will be more so eventually) I would never have considered that many. Originally I only wanted 4… This of course means that I don’t have to name the two lonely rainbows. The chick at the place said, too, that they’re quite hard to breed.
We also got 8 Colombian tetras, because they are beautiful (sort of light blue and pinkish), and were also 4 for $10. We decided to put them straight into the main tank, rather than overloading the qt. We’re going to leave everyone in the qt for another week or so, and so gradually move them over. The tank will look awesome then!
Randomly Yours, Alex 