I have become a bit bored with my tank, not only do I want to completely redo it, but I think want different inhabitants as well.  I have been considering discus for a long time.  The fish store  I worked at gets fairly healthy young discus in that do fine in our water, despite the pH being a bit high for what is normally acceptable for discus.  My only concern is that my tank is only 13" wide.  It is a 60 gallon tall tank.  I have seen some rather large discus so I'm not sure te tank is wide enough for them at adult size.  I suppose I probably have some time before they got huge though.  I would do a planted tank, as I love live plants and maybe 6 young discus and keep my rasboras and botias.  As the discus grew, I would keep which ever 2 paired off I think.  I don't think a 60 gallon is big enough for 6 adult discus for sure.  Is a 60 gallon even big enough for 2 adults?  I know people breed them in much smaller tanks, but I am wanting a display and I want for my fish to be comfortable and have decent lives.  They are more like pets to me.  My concern is that in such a narrow tank they won't have room to explore and entertain themselves. 

My blue ram breeding is going extremely well.  The rams are very popular in the stores and are selling well.  I added 2 more 30 gallon grow out tanks and have seperated out my youngsters I had kept into pairs.  I had ordered 3 blue rams from an alternate source to have some outside blood.  I paired them up with 3 of the hold backs, and sold the other 3 holdbacks to a store.  I now have 4 pairs (my origional pair and the 3 new pairs).  The 3 younger pairs haven't bred yet, but they do seem to like each other.  I kind of split up by going by who seemed to like who.  I have each pair in a 10 gallon tank, with fake plants.  I have the fake plants bunched up heavily in the corners and then a couple spread about.  This gives them the ability to hide from their mate if need be.  I have sponge and/or box filters running in all my blue ram tanks.  I currently have fry in all my grow out tanks except the new ones.  My origional pair breeds every 14 to 18 days on average.  I am feeding several live foods to the adults and the fry, as well as some high quality flakes.  I have spawn split between 2 grow out tanks currently, as I don't have enough spawns to warrant one tank per spawn.  This keeps the tanks cycled and gives the fry more room.  Some of my younger pairs are looking like they may breed soon, so hopefully I can start suppling my local stores more regularly.  I am currently breaking even on this project, I am hoping to start actually making a profit within the next few months.  I am thinking of finding a way to have automatic water changes done, but my snag here is that I need half the water to be R/O and half to be regular tap.  I suppose I could run 2 drip lines and one have an inline R/O?  More planning and thinking on this is needed.

I have 18 baby swordtails left.  I had 22.  I have them in a 10 gallon tank with some fake plants.  I am doing large daily water changes (about 2/3s of the water) and am feeding a few times a day.  I am feeding them flake food, first bites and frozen baby brine shrimp.  So far so good!

A new study shows that mosquitoe fish (similar to guppies) can count up to four.  I wonder how high cichlids can count then?

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/02/26/eafish126.xml

On several of my aquatic plants the older, outer leaves are dying off and if I look in the center, new leaves are growing in:)  I think I will go through and just cut off a bunch of the older leaves before they have a chance to die and rot in my tank.  It may make my tank look a little bit more bare than usual, but I think it will be healthier for the plants and the tank for me to do so.  It might even encourage faster growth:)

On another note, I am hoping that with spring approaching my characodon lateralis "los berros" will spawn.  I have had the heater turned down to 70*F most of the winter, as I was advised to cool them down a bit for winter to encourage spring and summer spawning.  In a month or two I will knock it up to 74*f or so.  I am sadly only left 3 juviniles, who now appear to be old enough to possibly start spawning.  The males are starting to get a red hue to them (adult males are red, juvies are a grey color) and the lone female is actually a bit bigger than the males are.  I have seen both of the males making attemps at courting the female, and their is usually at least one male near her at all times.  I think I am going to remove my harlequin rasboras, as they would try to prey on the fry for sure.  I think my botias will be safe with the fry, they have fairly small mouths and goodeid fry are usually quite large.  

For the last 3 days I have fed my fish in the same spot and about the same time.  Already they  have learned to hang out there and weight for food.  Even my normally elusive peckolita is sitting near the spot I have been feeding.  I've seen some videos of people who have managed to "train" their fish to do certain things, such as syngronized dancing, or to ring a bell, or move a small ball through a hoop in the water.  It is usually goldfish or larger cichlids that are used for these antics, but it seems that even rasboras and catfish can learn:)

My koi swordtails have given birth, well one of them at least!  I have 22 little swordtail fry.  I am going to go buy another small tank to seperate the fry into (a 10 gallon) and a sponge filter.  Are the fry all going to die because the 10 gallon will need to cycle? 

When you get several tanks going, this hobby can be expensive in the winter!  My electricity bill has been climbing with each tank that I add.  I have all of my none display tanks in a small room, I think i am going to try heat the room with a seperate little heater and see if that will cut down on costs at all.  Selling the blue rams is helping some with costs, but I would need to increase breeding I think to really see a dent, but then that also means more heaters.  Summer should be better, when it is naturally warm:)

I have a tentative plan for my reef tank, for when I set it up.  I know where I want to put it and everything, but here is my plan so far.

The tank is 120 gallons, reef ready.  It has a corner overflow thing and you can attach different pipes to the return to direct flow.

Power heads.  I will have a few power heads placed around the tank as needed to prevent dead spots and give a good current.  I am going to use maxi jet power heads and attach them to a wave maker.

I intend to have a 40 gallon long be the sump.  I will have a skimmer, a heater and some foam pads set in the sump for mechanical filtration.  I will not have chemical filtration.  The skimmer I am looking at is called the Octopus NW-150.  The reviews on it seem to be good and its not super expensive.   I will get a mag drive pump to run the sump.  I need to do more reading of reviews to pick out a good one.  I also need to do more reading about how fast the water should turn over.

I also want to have a refugium, I am thinking of using 20 gallon for a small refugium.  Is this possible?  Can I divert the water from the overflow into 2 tanks in the bottom, or connect the sump and refugium?  Can I just use part of the 40 gallon as the refugium?  

In the tank, I have read good and bad things about having a substrate, I decided against it.  It seems like it would be easier not to have one.  I am going to smear silicone on the bottom and then put sand on it.  After a few days, you brush away the extra sand.  This gives the look of having a sand bottom, but without the problems.  

For live rock, here i can get well cured live rock with the purple algae on it for $6.99 a pound.  Base rock is $2.99 a pound.  I plan on getting about 80 pounds of base rock and 40 pounds of the cured live rock.  I know the base rock will need to be cured.  Since this tank is new, I am going to let it cure in the tank.  This should cycle it at the same time I believe.  Once it is cured I will do a few big water changes and then buy the nice purple live rock.  A few weeks after i buy the live rock with the purple algae, i will start adding corals and inverts.  I plan on waiting at least a few months before adding any fish.   

So thats the tentative plan so far.  There will probably be some changes as I read more though!

I have been using the EI style of caring for my tank and my plants look amazing!  I really like it.  Infact, my plants are growing really fast, I need to trim some of them every week.  Stem plants seem to show the most affects with EI, but my swords and crypts are looking better than they ever have as well.  My swords have no little holes in them, like they often used to, and my crypts are incredibly full.  I also love having pressurized CO2.  Its nice to kind of hook it up and "forget" about it.  I really like the layout I went with for my 75 gallon.  It looks good and so far the pygmy sunfish really seem to like it.  It has many like bushes of plants and then some slightly open areas between.  One side is sort of thicker planted.  Kind of like the edge of a forest next to a meadow with bushes in it was the look I was going for, and I think I got it fairly close.