GREAT. Damaged by glasses, need to get a new pair. "Damage" would be understating it - the entire earpiece on the left has been disembodied. This comes from falling asleep with them on, and later squashing it to a pulp. Hell, even the lens fell out after I spent 10 whole minutes groping to find the specs - hate being totally blind without glasses. Time for Lasik.

Still having that feeling I SMSed you about, Mr. Ye. It's almost like a post-Friendster visit sort of thing, but different. Suppose I'll have to brush it off and get on with stuff that needs to be done. In any case, it'll be a good primer for those weeks alone in Glas. Just that .. it really isn't a nice feeling. Been years since I felt it in such magnitude. Perhaps I really shouldn't have gone off Prozac. Oh yes - discovered that Guardian actually sells St.John's Wort extract! But I digress.

Seeds all sown, except for the tuberous Drosera species. Waiting to get my ass down to ordering a set of T5 lights to install in the bedroom so I can have the benefit of cool air to get those darned winter-growers to start flourishing. Almost 50 pots full of seeds sitting in the garden now, CP seeds take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 years to germinate, so hopefully there'll be a nice surprise ready by the time I get back. Also tried making smoke water last week, but made a shitty mess of the whole place... darn those Australian species that depend on forest fires before they will germinate!! I heaped up all sorts of odds and ends, anything from leaves to toilet paper, burnt them and threw the smouldering stuff into a container of water, then shook it vigorously to get the smoke to get into the water. After that, it was a gruelling 30 minutes of sieving out the soggy half-burnt particles, and the water's ready. Much bloody easier to just buy smoke water pads from chemical supply stores, it's filter paper impregnated with the stuff that you just wet and use.

Oh yes! An update on the tank! After last week's blackout at home (and subsequent 1 day of 33C in the tank and 2 days with only 250W of light instead of the usual 400W), my rose anemones split again. To recap, I started off with 2 different clones. Clone #1 is the original lavender-tipped rose bubble tip anemone, while clone #2 was added much later and is a flourescent orange in colour. Clone #1 split into 2 last year, and so did Clone #2. So at the last count, I had 4 anemones in the tank. Last week, one of the progency from Clone #2 split yet again! So now 5 anemones! =) Yes, I'm breeding anemones so I can eat them later. Make hay while the sun shines. Pulsing xenia colony has mysteriously disappeared after I accidentally raised the carbonate hardness in the tank too rapidly, from 7dkH to 14dkH. Everything else didn't seem to have sustained too much insult, however. This is extremely odd, given the numerous reports on how Xenia actually prefers harder water.

Have to find time to do some tank-priming beforie I leave, so that there's excess capacity for mistakes to occur (touch wood!!). Everyone else at home's pretty much tank-illiterate. HypoC should be so familiar with this - tanks are so personal, it's unlikely that anyone - other than the one who set it up - would know which knob is for what, and which plug to turn off in case of a sucton overflow. So far, the plan is to:

1) Wash the calcium reactor, run it for 4 weeks plus manual addition of Ca/Sr/Mg supplement to bring Ca2+ to at least 450ppm, then switch the whole thing off before I leave. This piece of equipment is most prone to failure, simply because I do not have a solenoid valve to control the CO2 injection. During a power failure, the circulation pump in the reactor stops working while CO2 continues to be injected, resulted in a column of trapped air. When power comes back on, the siphon is broken by the trapped CO2 column, and no water circulates into the pump while the propeller continues running until it burns out and causes a massive circuit trip at home. Not nice.

2) Turn on the chiller input/output to highest possible velocity. Takes up much more wattage, but lessens the risk of clogging (and coming home to find cooked prawns floating in the tank).

3) 50% water change, throw in 1 bag of carbon, 1 bag of denitrator resin and 1 bag of phosphate-adsorption resins. Not a big fan of chemical/artificial filtration, but it does leave some room for errors.

4) Feeding will be a huge problem. Reckon I'll have to call home every night to pester my sisters to feed the tank. No more gross home-made fish food, it'll be those commercial frozen mysis shrimp, all already packaged in convenient cubes. 1 cube a night, not too much work eh? Scrap the plankton dosing and micron-sized treats for the filter feeders .. it can't be helped.

Grrrr ... and need to set up an automatic watering system. Can't have the help splashing chlorine-laden water on my poor plants, and it'll be too much to ask for her to hook the tap up to the deioniser everyday.

And now, to scheme the exact details on sending lovelies (plants) home.