Tangboy's Blog

Hey what can I say, it’s the end of a great weekend and my mind is spent!

Lots of things going on at the White House! Recently I had a scan and my oncologist says things look great! We have done lots of remodeling in our house and Amy is starting to look at another one (her walk in closet)! School is great teaching teenagers all day long! Amy has a new job with a GI doctor here in Knoxville and absolutely loves it! My little brother and his new wife are in Korea being Missionaries! Tommy and his wife are in their new home doing some great things! I am lifting weights with a student and am putting my best foot forward to try and bulk up some because I’m a skinny little wuss!

It’s time for a shower and I need sleep so… if anyone still reads this let me know!

-geoff

Profound ya say? Never, none of my ramblings are profound just… ramblings…

Another week has come and gone and it just amazes me how fast things go by and how easy it is to forget whats important. I haven’t updated this in months, haven’t gotten in contact with anyone on myspace in awhile, been trying to weekly email some good ole pals of mine but it just seems like trying to run up a sand dune… almost futile. I am not even sure who all reads these sporatic blogs of mine since there isn’t anything “exciting” going on now that I am free of the cancer thing. Life just went back into routine, people lost interest, normalcy was reached.

So where does that leave me? Its 11:59 right now on a Friday evening ready to slide over to Saturday morning and I should be in bed. With school the way it is and my personality, the end of the year is just a crazy time for my students and I. Patriotic presentations last Thursday ’til late, papers being sent to the conference for safety committees, students grades being posted so they know where they stand, just so much to do.

I have 6-credit hours remaining in my Outdoor Education Masters… 6 little credits after the last 3 summers of classes. I have talked to my professor at SAU about what to do and he recommended doing an internship. I tried contacting a clownfish breeder I know from the local reef club but due to new insurance policies if you’re not an employee you are not allowed on the premises. I recently went to a camp down in the Smokeys with my students for a few days on an Outdoor Education trip and talked with the director at the camp. They have been looking/praying for someone to help with the rockclimbing and high ropes adventure activities… hmmm… sounds like something I could do. The funny thing is… I had already emailed the director asking if I could do an internship for him before I found out they were even praying about who they would get for the summer. Interesting how God just drops people into your lives at odd times so that things work out oh so harmoniously? So I will spend about 6 weeks this summer doing what I used to do at Summer Camp up at Camp Blue Ridge for 4 years! Of course I won’t get paid for it BUT it’s just Monday-Thursday each week, 10-hour days!

My older brother and his wife came down a week ago, he said they were coming to visit us but I know better then that! We went down Friday to Chattanooga to the awesome coral reef store 5th-day Creations just south of Collegedale. There is a Christian musical artist who turned a hobbie into a business and is taking care of an awesome fish store. When Tommy is in town we go down and try to work some nice deals on coral/fish for our home systems. I am a bit envious since his wife let him buy some corals for his birthday and he got this very nice Croacea Clam that has the most gorgeous blues in it when viewed from above.

Our saltwater fish/coral hobby is a great one. We’re learning some great values on stewardship and husbandry of things God has placed on this earth. The reefs of the world are under major attack from pollution and human expansion and keeping a pristine fish tank is a way to help keep a bit of the reefs alive and well. Plus if you set up a propogation system, you can raise corals and sell them to other people so that we’re not taking as many corals from the oceans.

So far Tommy has about 2 tanks up and running, a 29 gallon small reef and hes getting his 75 gallon system up and running efficiently as we speak. He has accumulated a nice variety of coral, a few different species of clownfish as well as some fun little invertebrates.

I have an 8g system in my office, a 40g setup in the living room, and a 20g propogation system in my office closet. So far I have been able to frag (cut small pieces of coral off of larger mother colonies and get them growing on their own) quite a few different pieces of coral in the last 6 months of taking care of corals. They are mostly the soft coral kind like mushrooms, zoanthids, ricordia, and leathers as well as some Large Polyp Stonies (LPS) like frogspawn, hammer, and galaxy.

At school my biology students are supposed to be taking care of a 70g system but have had difficulty with access to the tank due to time constraints and that the tank is in the principles office. We have the typical “Nemo” and “Dori” clown and blue tang that all the kids want as well as a few little corals in there. Lack of funding is the biggest problem with the tank even though we have recieved quite a few donations.

I also have another 8g system behind my desk at work that houses a few corals and a mantis shrimp. If you ever want to see some ingenuity in Gods creatures, check out some of the videos of what mantis shrimp can do to a crab, snail, or human finger. They are the fastest feeding animal in the world and there is a great youtube video of a lady who has done some great research on these magnificant animals with the help of a BBC camera crew using some of the best high frame rate cameras.

My wife is enjoying the hobby a little bit even though it is rather pricey. She of course has her own hobbies. She enjoys her new Toyota Prius hybrid that has been yielding a great 50 mpg highway/city driving. Shes also been doing a bit of research on easy ways to be “green” around the house. So shes enjoyed recycling, energy conservation as well as some other hobbies like reading, bead work (sells bead lanyards at work for other nurses to hang their badges on), even cross stitch. Shes a very versatile young lady!

She has also been working 2-4 days a week as well as working on her Family Nurse Practitioners Masters online. These last few weeks have found her working on final exams since she was the first one done with her clinicals this semester. I am very proud of her sense of responsibility and eternal drive to stay focused on this Masters the last year or so. It hasn’t been easy and shes learned a lot of lessons in scheduling clinical hours through it all. We are both anxious for the day when she graduates in August and can get back to a more relaxing schedule for her that lets her enjoy some days off. Shes a very intelligent woman so I better be careful what I say!

It is now only 12:17 and I am starting to slide farther and farther down this sofa… the nap I took this afternoon for about an hour and a half didn’t help the idea of having to sleep tonight. The air is very warm and I am not a warm weather sleeper, I prefer it cold to the point of having to slide my head underneath 3 layers of down comforters for fear of my nostril mucous freezing and sophocating me to death in my sleep! Okay so maybe its not that cold but I at least like it cold enough to have a nice heavy blanket on me while my right foot is proped out from under the comforter for temperature acclimation purposes.

Ever wonder what it is to wonder and just write what pops into your head as you think it? Its kinda like speaking before you think, the kind of stuff that gets you into trouble at school when you were a kid but more fun. Especially if you can type just as fast as you can talk then its just like leaving foot prints in the sand as you run down the beach while large waves pound the surf spewing jellyfish in your way… you can see were you’ve been but can’t really tell if the next step you take will get you stung or not! I don’t know, senseless rambling is quite enjoyable at times.

In fact all that reminds me of the quote “Not all those who wander are lost” meaning that sometimes you just need to do something without cause, organization, thought, preperation, or coaching because you just feel like doing it. Like pulling the car over next to a park and just walking through the woods looking at only your feet. Or possibly sitting in the middle of a soccer field 30 minutes before a practice while you watch the butterflies flit across your vision of clouds skidding across the lazy blue ocean of a sky. Sensless ramblings and unpreped wanderings, I like the sound of that…

Reminds me of the portfolio I need to be working on for my Outdoor Education Masters, I have to sit down and try to synthesize my thoughts in an orderly fashion so that those issuing me my Degree understand where I have been, what I have done, where I am going and how I will do once I get there. The thing is I do’nt like portfolios myself even though I understand the importance of them. They are a great assessment tool for the classroom, professional development etc I just don’t like to make them! I just procrastinate too much with it. Its funny the things you tell your students to do because it’ll help them in life but then you don’t want to do them yourself.

Hypo… can’t spell the rest at this point and time so instead of misspelling it or looking it up in the dictionary, I just won’t complete the word but you know what it is. Amazing how we go through life with one viewpoint about how negative something is and tell people they shouldn’t do it etc and yet we do it ourselves… just funny how that is sometimes. Living your life as an example is not easy, not easy at all especially when you have people just waiting for you to mess up or do something wrong so they can shove it in your face. Humbleness is a great thing to have in those circumstances because you can accept that you messed up, learn from it, possibly teach someone about it while you’re pulling yourself off the ground, and then move on not letting it bother you anymore. We just like to hold onto things and take them very personal. I fail in that, taking it personally… it’s something I’m working on.

I enjoy Algebra right now… I’m actually teaching Geometry to my 9th and 10th graders but we’re in a section that contains a lot of Algebra and that is taught next year. So that means I have to teach the Algebra the same time I am teaching the Geometry… makes for an interesting class when you have a couple students not even on the same subject you’re teaching. So the question is can you solve an equaiton when you know that the opposite interior angles of an inscribed quadrillateral are supplementary and you know that the interior angles are 2x, 3y, 4x, and 6y? Lots of algebra to solve for a variable and then using that variables equivilant in a substituted equation to solve for the degrees is fun… just takes time to see it.

I feel very pastey and white… as in I need a tan. I spent a spring break a few weeks ago in Hawaii of all places and I look like a Beluga whale from the arctic at my darkest. My lovely wife on the other hand could be as white as ever and still be standing next to me and people ask if she is part native american! Dang beach babies…

Cachi is a Chinchila donated to the school, funny little thing that looks like a squirrel and a rabbit got a little tipsy one night and had a wee little one. Body of a rabbit, head and tail of a squirrel and ears of the culmination of two satelites that fell off a roof and got stuck on either side of the rabbit/squirrels head… softest fur in the world and just as cute as a button… or at least a button that looks like a satelite wearing rabbit/squirrel creature with soft fur…

Ramblings… have I mentioned how much fun it is to ramble…

12:34

You would think, a 2-hour delay at school would make a teacher happy. You know how it was when you’re a kid, get to sleep in another 2 hours woohoo!!!

Today just didn’t seem to flow though, had fruit delivery early (9am-10:15) then had class starting at 10:15 etc. Kids were just over excited especially after getting yesterday off because of ice on the roads etc. Started loosing my voice at PE so we’ll see what happens, pray for me!!!

If you read this post a comment!!!

Did some climbing at Horse Pens 40 last weekend. Was a good time and it was probably the last time climbing with the HP 40 crew from SAU since many have graduated and moved on. *sigh* I’ll have to start getting some new people to go with me, or go somewhere else with kids!

Update is overdue!

I hardly update anymore because really I don’t think many people read this still. I have people approach me and ask if I have put up anything new lately because they haven’t checked it in awhile, which of course means they haven’t read anything since about a year ago when I was finishing up treatments etc.

I guess I will start with this past summer: The classes were a struggle this year since they required so much study time. The Educational Research was rough and even now I am still not done with it. I have to do some research and then type of results etc and submit it by December 7th. If I pass that class I will have only 6 credits remaining out of 34 required for my Masters. I could have crammed in a frew more credits this summer but I was amazed out how quickly I got burned out of studying. Even now I have difficulty concentrating on a serious topic for more then 30 minutes.

After 6 weeks of summer school I took a few days for myself to get rested up and then ventured up to VA to do some work with my older brother Tommy. Did some odd jobs here and there like some demo work for SVA in their lobby, some refacing work for a family that Tommy did a tile job for, and making a nice little desk for my mother from a piece of SVAs old receptionists counter. Overall it was a nice week up in VA seeing the family and just taking it easy.

I had another few days to myself once I returned back to Knoxville and then hit the “get-ready-for-school” phase. I actually found it difficult getting into the classroom to prepare lesson plans because of the intensity of summer school. I was not able to concentrate on anything that required academics. So I played handy-man and janitor or whatever else needed done.

A big project that I worked on a lot was getting the 85 gallon reef tank ready. I made lots of contacts with companies for donations of salt, chemicals, test kits, Reverse Osmosis units, and a slew of other things. We also had a chruch member come in and make a custom hood to cover the lights and top of the tank that is lockable to keep the fish and lights safe from greedy hands. He also refinished the cabinet base so that it matches the hood and is also lockable.

So far the tank has salt water running, sand in the bottom, and a nice ball of chaeto (benificial algae) rolling around in the refugium. The principle is super excited to have the tank in her classroom since the Firemarshall will not allow us to keep the tank on display in the hallway due to it being a possible firehazard. Sunday I will pick up a load of Live Rock (porous rock that has benificial bacteria in it to break down ammonia, nitrite, and nitrates) so that we can get the tank stabalized for livestock.

As you notice I am writing this about 2am on a Saturday morning and you are probably wondering what I am doing up. I grabbed a bit of a nap after dinner this afternoon and it has thrown off my sleep so I have spent the last 2 hours reading the final chapters of book 5 of Harry Potter. I’ve been reading the Potter books gaining some understanding of what some of my students are blabbering about in class and using it as a learning experience of how dangerous fantasy can be if you are not grounded in reality. Even reading C.S. Lewis can be dangerous if children are missing the proper Spiritual concepts that are meant by the author. Anyway enough of that…

Monday I saw my oncologist and he said that my latest CT scan was good. He doesn’t forsee a need for me to have another PET or CT scan for awhile and just asked me to get a chest X-ray in January sometime and some blood work done. God is good, not in the fact that I am cancer free but in the fact that He is looking out for each one of us. Remember that as you go through this weekend and next week that if God is our top priority, nothing can stop us from being happy even when we’re persecuted.

Sorry to those who want constant updates. With school being so hectic I barely have time to breath.

Here is a quick run down of the last 5 weeks of my life.

First week of school I had research class from 8-11 which required me to do lots of daily assignments, chapter readings, and tests to study for.

Second week of school found me with research class from 8-11 requiring daily assignments, two tests to study for, and a draft of sources for my research project. I also had Health in the Outdoors from 1-4 which required a group unit plan, daily readings and reactions.

Third week of school me studying hard in research from 8-11 requiring daily assignments, two chapters to study for and the first draft of my research proposal. I also started an Environmental Ministries class from 12-4 with daily readings, 5.5 page reaction paper and nature collection box. After that class I had to drive 30 minutes to a Language Arts class in the Out of doors from 5-8 that required daily readings, unit project, and daily journaling.

Fourth week required research from 8-11 with a final chapter test and final cumulative test as well as final presentation of research proposal and oral presentation. Environmental Ministries from 12-4 paper was due etc. and Language arts from 5-8 we had to teach our unit. Needless to say it was a hectic week.

This fifth week was rather relaxing. Since Amy worked two 12 hour shifts and an 8 hour shift I didn’t make it home and started this week in the dorm. I only have class from 8-12 at the Nature Center in Chattanooga and the teacher has asked me to drive a school van with students to class. So up at 7, driving by 7:30 to be at class around 8. It is a great class on how to create outdoor education sites to promote nature learning. Wonderful class and it requires lots of reading, a proposal to an inner city school of possible site locations and a project for our own schools to create some outdoor sites.

This last week will be my final week for the summer and it will be packed mostly with a little studying and hopefully lots of rock climbing! I have gone twice in the last week with some of my fellow students and have been having fun.

Hope everyone else is having a great time this summer. Have a grand weekend and I will see some of you soon!
-geoff

Howdy

Well once again the summers find me at SAU. I am here studying to finish up my Masters. Due to poor planning, poor health last year, and laziness, I am will not be graduating this summer. I will probably do an independant study and internship to finish off my credits but will not “graduate” until next summer. That’s fine with me, I have no worries and just want to finish out the year.

I am taking a killer research class now that I am pretty worried about. My wonderful wife tells me to let God take the stress and it’ll be alright but I fight to hold onto it for some reason. It’s hard being down here by myself and being pounded by a jam-packed schedule. For two weeks out of my 6 weeks I will have class from 8am-11am, 12pm-4pm, drive 30-45min, 5pm-8pm, drive back 30-45min. I am worried, deeply troubled but I am going to trust the Lord with it. As I listen to Casting Crowns song, I will praise you in the storm, I am reminded that I don’t have to do it all by myself.

Amy too has her hands full with classes, work, clinical hours. In fact I believe she has a harder schedule for longer and I am sitting here whinning about my patheticness. Keep her in your prayers as she faces this summer and the classes it brings. Shes a wonderful wife and I love her to death!

Everyone have a wonderful evening and say howdy when you can!

-geoff

Well everyone is still alive in the White House. Lots going on with the end of the school year etc.

Amy is now done with her first semester of her Masters in FNP (Family Nurse Practitioner) and did an awesome job. Her next semester will be a little more difficult because of scheduling of classes and work but shes a tough one and is working through it. She has a few weeks off which she will use to rest up and prepare for the next let of her education.

I leave Sunday for my class trip, get back Wednesday night and leave Thursday afternoon for Toms wedding. Graduation is the 24th, last day of school is the 25th. Then I start school beginning of June! Time is flying by and there seems to be no time for anything.

The tank is doing well. Will get some updates and pictures. Current additions are two “Turbo” snails, Narssarius snail, and a Bicolor Blenny (named Lenny). Lenny is hilarious and adds a lot of character to the tank. My littlest hermit has recently molted but still has not moved out of his original shell. He used to be the medium sized hermit but the original smallest hermit has surpassed him and moved into a large shell. The now littles hermit hasn’t been moving much and I am affraid he might be passing along to Davey Jones Locker. Time will tell which seems to be flying along quickly.

Dakota, Cheyenne and Ashe are thriving as ever. The dogs love that it is spring as they run around the freshly cut grass etc. Cheyenne is loving the tank but is not happy at the new cabinet it’s on because he cannot simply sit on the ground and pounce at the fish. He has to get up on the sofa now to do that.

I need to get back to class now that the kids are done with practice work. Everyone have a great day and check out Matt’s info for some interesting recent updates!

I decided to swing on by and check out some of the live rock stock at the fish store. They had a few nice pieces so I went ahead and picked up some. Also asked one of the regulars about some of the creepy crawlers that would help do some maintenance inside the tank. Here is what I ended up picking up.

3 pounds of live rock.
3 blue legged hermit crabs.
1 8 oz. PurpleUp

The live rocks help keep the tank filtered, create room for bacteria to grow, and provide some places for the fish to hide. The hermit crabs are a fun little asset to the tank because they are pretty humorous to watch, clean up left over food the fish don’t eat, and also eat the pesky algae. The PurpleUp helps promote algae growth (the good kind) and help replenish some of the calcium levels and other stuff. I’ll let ya know what else is going on and keep you posted.

Today, March 16th, we experienced our first lost to our marine habitat. During the first week of the ammonia and nitrite cycle, we lost one of our three “cycling” fish. Our Green Chromis Damsel passed through the giant porcelin gate to the deep abyss. She shall be missed, especially since that’s the one that Amy picked out! The other two Blue Devil Damsels are fighting along pretty good, no signs of Ammonia stress or Nitrite stress even though the levels are high. I tested the levels today and each of them are at the toxic level which is a good thing.

Ammonia should be on the down hill slide, Nitrite on the up hill as well as Nitrate. The Nitrite will soon level off and head down hill too as the Nitrate will rise and level off for good. The bacteria that take care of the Ammonia will be established, then bacteria will take care of the Nitrite creating Nitrate.

To keep Nitrate from getting to toxic levels water changes need to be made every 2-weeks or 4-weeks depending on the health of the tank. Good rule of thumb is 10% water change every 2-weeks for optimal health.

Once the Ammonia and Nitrate levels are zero, then we can go ahead with some more sensitive fish and invertebrates. We will add a new item about 1 per week. Probably start with a Firefish or Jawfish, then a Banded Coral Shrimp, Clownfish, Hermit Crab, Arrow Crab. Then after about 4-6 months depending on how well the pH and other levels are, we’ll start with the bigger dollar items the corals! First on the plate would be an anemone for the Clownfish for the clownfish to start the symbiotic relationship and because they are cheap!

The tank is fun so far now that we’re past the “set-up” stage and are starting to understand some of the quirks to being a marine tanker. We’ll keep you posted!