Shopping

Been an awful day, felt rather down. So yx decided to go shopping with me! We went to one farm, picked up a lovely piece of elegance coral - it was going for pretty steep, and I only wanted to buy that, but yx really wanted the pink-tip long tentacle plate coral, so we got that as well. Only that the stupid man quoted a DIFFERENT price both pieces; another man at the farm quoted me something else. The plate was only $5 up from the original quotation, but the freaking elegance was DOUBLE the price. Walked out of the shop without buying anything (lousy customer treatment ...), got home and typed a post to the local reef club warning other members about the shop. The power of information - feeling better already!

So instead, we trooped down to CoralFarm which was 2 streets away, and picked up LOADS of other lovelies at a quarter the price I'd have paid for just the elegance! Bought a very nice blue sponge, bright yellow sponge, a yellow leather coral, a pure white x'mas tree coral and a delicious red gorgonian (sea fan) with white polyps.

Now, gorgonians are really colourful and add a lot of texture and shape to the tank, but they are picky - most are not photosynthetic, and will have to be fed. It just so happened that my family decided to go down to Hong Leong Gardens to dine at Minoru, our usual authentic Jap restaurant. (It's extremely dear but worth every cent, BTW). Since Henry's shop was just there I popped in and bought a jar of frozen cyclops. The beautiful man gave me his usual Henry Platinum Quality - he knew I was going to have dinner, so he offered to wait till I'm done before I collect the cyclops, even though he would be closing soon. And after that he even wrapped the jar up in some extremely thick foam insulation material (most other shops give you newpaper wrap, at most). He even threw in some cyclops into his own tank to show me that gorgonians eat that stuff, before I bought it. Now that's some service!

Just fed the cyclops to the tank - and as one of the US Reefers describe, this product is "reef crack" ... everyone loves it! My fish were darting around at it, the carnivorous corals caught it, and best of all - I saw the gorgonians eating it! =D

I'm very excited by the success .. if I'm not careful I'll end up buying loads of gorgonians. Good thing they are cheap though! Most reefers can't be bothered to feed them (or are just plain ignorant - "what? those things can eat?") so the shops usually sell them as "coral for rent", as I term commonly-available but doomed corals such as goniopora, cauliflower coral and many gorgonians.

Enough bout my little glass box.

Kept thinking today's Sunday, and had to be reminded more than 4 times that I do not need to go to CGH tomorrow. Hmmm ... a sign that I can't wait for school to start again? *grin*