First off, I failed to go to school today. It was the coffee. And Mr. Ye. I got instigated to skip school, and was half-unsure. So I drank some freshly-ground, freshly-brewed black coffee just for the heck of it ... and cripes. Still awake and tingling at 4am. Needless to say, I woke at 8am feeling all nauseous and ill. Hung in between life and death for a few hours, then went out to buy piping (yx calls me Mr.Mario everytime I fix up my tank's hardware! grrr ....) and the elusive weird 3-pin adapter. Turned out that this sort of 3-pin plug arrangement is only used in the Phillipines, ROC and PRC. Oh well.

Fixed everything up without much of a hitch, fired the external pump up, and BRABRABRABRABRA!!! OK, it wasn't so noisy, but still it was shocking. It's still humming away now, and I'm loathe to strip down all the piping and take a look at what's making all the noise. But it's really not good to leave a 5000L/hr pump making so much noise ... there's a saying in the reef community, "In a reef tank, good things happen slowly while bad things take no time at all". OK, really must get down to doing it soon, lest I get another saltwater flood in the house. Dad's been pissed off at me already, shan't do anything to get his temper up even more. Also, another reason why I think the pump's malfunctioning - I did a circulation pattern test of the tank itself, and the outlets of return1 and return2 are facing each other - however, the old one (2400L/hr) is hitting the new 5000L/hr outlet so hard it deflected the current! So .. something's really wrong. OK, taken that the new return has triple-tee with 3x 90 degree elbows in the piping, which really could have caused some head loss, there's still no way this could have halved the output! Yikes ...

OK, I'm rambling. Prolly cause things are once again getting out of hand. Was in a bad state during the weekend trying to make sure we have a case to present on Tues for Prof. Woo's renal tutorial, and whacking myself on the bottom to really sit down and complete that darned writeup. GAH. I'm still not finished with it!!!!!! HELP!!!!!

As fate would have it, the pump forced me to dismantle it and find out what's wrong. Or rather, my anemone crawled in (will write down the story of my carpet anemone one day) and half of it got shredded by the propeller. The other half was mercifully cold-euthanised and discarded. Took some pics, shall post it next. Well, after dismantling the pump all the way down to the propeller, it's now working at full blast! My ... so, yes. I *was* under-utilising the pump before this.

OK, time to go to bed, wake up early next morning to take a luxurious hot shower (rarely spend more than 10 mins in the shower every morning nowadays ...) and off to a good day at SGH tomorrow. Youth, youth! Where art thou? OK, talking tommyrot already.