When hobbies collide and spiral.
The heatwave knocked me out. My fibro does not like heat. Neither does the meniere's. So as soon as the heatwave was over I was into 4 days of migraine flare up, tinnitus being stupidly loud and my ear feeling like someone has syringed too much water into it.
The migraine finally subsided and then I decided to really pull a tendon in my ankle which has left me not able to walk too well for the last few days.
On top of this I have a thing on my lower eyelid that might be a stye (very small and no one except me has actually noticed it) but it's now been there for two weeks and showing no sign of going anywhere. It only hurts if I poke at it or put a warm flannel on it. I'll try and get to a doctors if it doesn't show any sign of going in the next week.
But despite all these setbacks, I've still managed to get my shelldweller tank up and running, an aquarium with different snail species and a large jar (that I will upgrade further later on when they've grown a bit) with six juvenile blue jelly shrimp. The small water louse colony that also inhabit the jar has been there for a while now and doing well so I figured as my most stable and safest environment I'd put the shrimp in there. It's been three days and all still are accounted for and one has successfully moulted so I'm tentatively keeping my fingers crossed. The dead leaves from the cichlid tank get thrown in there as well as a hefty dose of green water to feed the small also resident daphnia population.
My cichlids refuse to eat the cichlid food I brought for them so that is being used powered up to fuel biofilm growth in the snail tank and the odd tiny sprinkle in the jar.
I'm having to maintain green water for daphnia to feed the cichlids, but the local bitey-fly population have kindly donated their larval offspring as fish food too so that's helping to give my indoor daphnia cultures some breathing space to grow.
I'm not too worried about the population in my tub crashing. I'm starting up a second water louse colony in there which helps with clean up and better survival, I've thrown in a creeping jenny to hang over the edge, if nothing else it adds a prettier focal point to a grungy green filled tub on the windowsill. If it looks like they're not faring too well before it all settles, I've got a large 25 litre bucket out in the garden with daphnia, copepods and its own resident populations of fairy shrimp and water louse. So I have back ups.
I wasn't intending on keeping fish again but I wanted to grow some houseplants and I am notorious for killing them far more than I do garden plants so I had the idea of growing them in my old fish tanks, as I needed to do something with them. Then they'd be needing fertiliser and it kind of spiraled from there.