Nothing Like a Nice, Relaxing Evening of Ultimate Fighting

Fast forward a bit to Stacey and Shane’s new house. We spent most of the night in the living room, watching a sugar-fueled Jasmine play around. Here she is with my cousin Haley.

Nesta, one of the nicest doggies in the world.

Around now, Andrew, Jordan, and I accompany Shane to go visit the house where all his fish are at. Shane specializes in raising, breeding and selling Discus – a type of fish I had never really known about, until he showed me his setup.

He’s does some local sales, but the bulk of his business is done online. I think he’s shipped fish just about everywhere.

This is the inside of a rather large tank/area where all the water is treated, prior to it going into the tanks. There’s also some kind of heater in there, that gets it to the proper temperature.

I don’t know the specifics behind this, but I remember Shane talking about all the steps it took to prep the water. Temperature, ph balance, stuff like that. He really goes to a lot of effort to make sure his fish are healthy and treated right.

I’ve been meaning to document his setup for some time now, as it totally blew me away the first time I saw it. He spends a great deal of time with his fish, cleaning the tanks, make sure the temperature is just right, preparing water, feeding them, caring for and isolating any sick fish, keeping an eye out for fish that might be ready to mate.

This is one of the more impressive features of the setup – each tank has its own separate line for water in and water out. Shane set it up this way so that each tank would be isolated from its neighbor. If a particular tank gets hit by an illness, this setup ensures that it won’t spread to all the fish.

The setup is really amazing – there are all these tubes/pipes running along the ceiling. It’s a remarkably well-thought-out system.

The orange thing is, I believe, a breeding cone. When two discus pair off to mate, they need a surface like that orange guy to lay their eggs. Some of the tanks held several fish, some were reserved for couples who were on the verge of coupling.

Shane, showing Andrew and Jordan how the tank system operates.

These fish really are quite gorgeous. I don’t think my photos do their colors justice.

After feeding everyone and cleaning the tanks, we all headed back to the house. Jasmine was still awake (amazingly), and stayed up with us pretty late into the night. All of the cousins spent the remainder of the evening lounging on the couch, watching a few rounds of Ultimate Fighting on TV.

Ahh, the holidays. :)