So many hobbies!

This was a very busy weekend. In fact, most of my weekends lately seem to be this busy.

This weekend, I wrapped up koji growing for my sake, miso AND shoyu projects. The sake is going very well and I expect it to be a great success. The miso and shoyu, however, are total experiments because of course I went off recipe and used spent grains from brewing instead of more traditional grains for koji. As a result, the grains were too wet I think for really good koji growth. Something was definitely happening, just not sure what. I think it would be cool to be able to sequence some of these home ferments and see what is actually going on in there. Towards the end, I think some yeasts started going to work in the spent grain koji, as it acquired a sort of sharp, alcoholic smell. Well, only thing to do is wait! The sweet miso will be ready in 4 to 6 weeks, the salty miso in some amount of months, and the shoyu in... a year! I tend to think that the salt will prohibit more ethanol production, but thats just a hunch.

ALSO, I am engaging in an expt with my fishtank. The poor fish have been lethargic and have had their dorsal fins down for quite a while. I have switched to a canister filter because I wanted to try to boost my plant growth, by reducing the surface turbulence and trapping the CO2 the fish produce in the tank. My oxygen is suffering, however, because I woke up this morning to heavily breathing fish with dark red gills. Turn on the air stone and they were fine in 15, but it was a little scary. Not sure if I should add more light so that the plants do a better job photosynthesizing - is CO2 still the limiting reagent, or is it light? I think there is a lot of confusion about this on the forums. People inject CO2 into their tanks but then have surface turbulence, which I would think would cause the CO2 to degas and regain equilibrium with the environment. Goldfish are really dirty, so I would think they would produce plenty of CO2. I don't really know though.

Anyway, I think my fish have some sort of parasite, they flash and yawn and twitch. PraziPro didn't clear it up so I thought maybe it is Trichodina? The stupid Petsmart and Petco here didn't have the Malachite Green + Formalin product I was looking for, so I ended up with this herbal stuff. Hopefully it works anyway because I hear the Malachite can stain the sealant in the aquarium. Weird. The herbal thing probably won't work but I guess its worth a shot since it's not an emergency. I turned the air stone back on for the treatment, to make the fish comfortable as well. The plants will just have to wait.

In other news, I have yet to start my presentation for Biophysical Society, which is in 2 weeks. And I also need to finish my design for Threadless so maybe I can win and go to Japan!!! Unlikely, but its worth a shot! Busy busy!