More photos! Of plants!

The balcony grows and thrives. Well, the plant life in it, that is.

The window box I showed to you earlier has developed quite nicely into what I had in mind. Once the ivy grows a bit bigger I'll be a happy girl. If only the weather would be more cooperative, haven't been able to sit outside and enjoy the pretties for too long.

The veggies in their green box are doing well too, it seems. The box seems rather small these days.


Yum yum yum!

(I have no idea if the radishes are supposed to show like that? Should I cover them up or leave them be?)

My Weekend by Morrgan

This weekend, it was time for a ladies' sauna evening. Off to a lakeside cabin a group of us fine ladies went and arrived after much (mis)adventure with missed buses, forgotten bags and car trouble.

What a pretty view awaited us upon arrival! After the enjoying the surroundings a bit, there was much sauna and swimming in the lake. Joy.

We even spotted a couple of lizards.

But oh noes! Rain!

Lots of rain! The most rain ever* poured down from the sky!

(Click on the photos for bigger versions, to see how the lake looked like it was boiling from all the rainfall.)

* This may or may not have been an exaggeration.

Fortunately we were inside the cabin by then, with much drink and foody delights such as this strawberry dessert. Mmm.

The only problem was that the conversation tended to turn into shouting, in order to hear and be heard over the rain and thunder.

Just as dinner was finished and we were ready to head out to the bus stop, the rain ended and we got to enjoy the setting sun on the opposite shore. A suitable finale for our little weekend excursion.

The Fishy Project continues

As is probably easy to guess, I have been busy with the new fish tank. It's fun work though. =) Here's the current view from what has already become my favourite spot on the sofa.

As you can see it's still quite unfinished, but it's getting better every day. (Excuse the thermometers here and there - there's a new heater in there and I want to be able to easily check that it's doing its job properly.) I thought I'd show these work-in-progress photos as well, to see how the aquarium develops.

For the tech-curious: the blue thing in the back left corner is the biological filter I built, a so-called Hamburg Mattenfilter according to these principles. It's basically a cylinder with a bottom, made of blue foam and containing a water pump. I made one for another tank 5 years ago and it's worked well, although for this I changed the design a bit.

The first few fishies were moved today: a twig catfish (Farlowella sp.), a red-finned or rainbow shark and a bunch of upside-down catfish.

This guy or gal, called Red-Eyes Jr, is the red-finned shark. There's only one because they get very territorial as adults, but s/he's still quite young and seems rather social - s/he's quite taken to the catfish and likes to swim along with them around the aquarium.

Here's a couple of the upside-down catfish. As the name says, the swim mostly upside down which looks awesome. :D They're also lively and really fast, they can swim from one end of the 160 cm long tank to the other in just a few seconds. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised that they have been happily swimming around even with the lights on, I didn't expect that. There's 8 of them now, but another 7 should arrive this weekend, making a decent-sized group of them.

That's all the photos for now, more coming later I bet!

(Aaaaand finally an obligatory fish safety bulletin: if you're setting up a fish tank from scratch, adding fish this soon is not a good idea. Fish produce nitrogen compounds that turn into ammonia/ammonium, which is poisonous to the fish. In a mature aquarium, the ammonia/ammonium is quickly changed into nitrite (a litte less dangerous), which in turn is changed to nitrate (fairly harmless). All this is done by certain bacteria, which need to be grown in the tank before fish can be added - this process is called "cycling". In this case, I moved over not only the fish from the old aquarium, but also the mature filter, some sand and decorations - all of which contain the "nice" bacteria that are mentioned above. I'll also be checking the nitrite & nitrate levels regularly just in case, so the fishies will be safe.)

IT IS HERE

It has arrived! My new aquarium is here, with its delicious 160x48x48 centimeters and 370 liters (that's about 63x19x19 inches and 98 US gallons for you non-metricians). Yum! =) It was custom-built with special measurements and a stand that goes with our bookshelf, and was brought into our livingroom on Friday (sooner than I expected) by the guy who made it and his son. A handmade aquarium and stand fits a crafter, I suppose?

The new tank is inspected by my giant knitted Pleko. He's quite interested in that big piece of wood, I think.

This is a dream-come-true type of thing. I've been planning and saving up for this for years, and now with the new apartment I'm finally able to get a nice big aquarium for my fishies. I'll combine fish from two of my old tanks into this one, but there should be room for one or two new species as well.

(By the way, the piece of wood in the left corner is heavy. It occured to me, as I was dragging it home through town from the fish shop, sweating and gritting my teeth in the hot sun and with passers-by looking rather amused, that I must really be some kind of an idiot. Why else would I not only do things like that, but pay money for this "pleasure" and be ridiculously happy about finally being able to get this expensive and heavy log? Yeah. Sounds like an idiot to me.)

It is almost as long as me. =)

The wood is scrubbed (ugh) and the sand is washed (UGH). I skipped the last 20 kg of sand and went for "only" 60 kg. The sand looks great, natural-looking with a reddish tint, but it is awful to wash. I've rinsed it at least a billion times and the water is still cloudy. I believe the result will be worth the back ache, though. The good news is, all the annoying labour is done and now it's on to decorating it and other such fun bits! Yay!

Current status: Half-filled and full of tiny dust. Not quite there yet.

FREEDOOOOOOM! Or, an interesting fishy tidbit.

While impatiently waiting for my new big tank to arrive (oh yes, it's on its way, all 160 cm of it), I have been amusing myself by looking up various fish species and planning what to put in said big tank. I came across this video while looking up info on hillstream loaches.

"Muahaha! Your silly glass boxes can't keep ME inside! FREEDOOOOOOOOM!"

As is often the case with seemingly baffling fish behaviour, it has its roots in the way the fish behave in the wild - in the case of this climbing action, it's how they travel past fast currents. Here's a neat article for those inclined to read more about this behaviour.

Hey ho, to the Medieval Market we go!

It's once again time for the Medieval Market here in Turku. I've gone to see it almost every year since I moved to Turku and it's all kinds of awesome.

This time Mr Morrgan and I went with friends - the more the merrier. The ladies went wild amongst ye olde market stands of all kinds, while the gentlemen seemed more at home at the "taverns", sampling the traditional Finnish beer sahti.

As a friend of fine beers, I had to try the drinks too though. In the first of these drinky places I preferred the honeyed mead, but in the second the sahti was excellent. This second place, advertising its drink with a guy shouting "there's not a more miserable sight than a thirsty person!", also demonstrated the different steps of of making sahti (pictured on the right here). This was the first time Mr Morrgan had tried sahti and I expect that any day now he will drag home some vats and juniper branches and start up his own sahti brewery.

Other handicrafts were both demonstrated and sold at the market, which was perfect for a crafty soul like me. I found a few things to take home too. I bought a wooden pendant from an Estonian lady and a really cool silver snake (or maybe dragon...?) ring from a Swedish lady.

The wooden pendant caught my eye with its stylized shape and was just too neat to pass by. More examples of the makers' work can be seen online.

The snake ring, which I had to name Edmund, was just perfect in that it's a more subtle design than the others I've seen. This one doesn't overdo it, plus I like the snake's little smile!

Things that grow and thrive. Plus a new creature!

There are chairs! And more flowers! And a box with planted radish and spinach seeds!

Project Wonderful Balcony goes forward. Next up will be a small table to put between the chairs and which will carry the smaller basket, now on the other chair in the photo.

The green window box, barely visible on the bottom right, was more a spur-of-the-moment kinda thing. I really, really wanted to plant some seeds. Like, really. So I got a box, some radish and spinach seeds, and did indeed plant some seeds. They have grown well, my little pretties. The speedy radishes showed themselves in just a few days (the photo on the right shows them the day they came up, the one on the left shows them a day later) and a few tiny spinach plants have made themselves known today.

(Seriously though, where do such absolute desires come from, anyway? "Today, I must plant some seeds! YES!" Is this entirely sane?)

Already I have spent several evenings in the beginnings of my little balcony garden. Mostly reading, but a few days ago I made this little guy, Edmund the Frog. As you can see on the right, he immediately approved of the flowers.

(Gardener-Morrgan's Hint of the Day: The Phlox he's hiding in has a lovely scent.)