Peter Eichler
New member
WARNING: Self pity, sappiness, grammatical errors, and memories that probably don't mean a damn thing to anyone but me to follow :lol:
Thanks to my mom I have had an aquarium in my life from the time I was born. I can still vividly remember staring at our 29(ish) gallon metal frame aquarium for hours. It wasn't anything special compared to what was to come but I loved that damn bubbling treasure chest with the pearl in it.
As I grew I never lost my interest in fish and aquariums and by the time I was 11 I got my first saltwater aquarium. It was a very exciting time for me and I read every book I could get my hands on and and once again found myself sitting in front of the aquarium for hours every week. My stunning 35 gallon, complete with under gravel filter and sanders skimmer just plunked right in the tank. It wasn't long after my cycle that I fell in love with the various live rocks, anemones, and corals at the LFS. They did surprisingly well with two 48" shoplights hanging above my 36" tank
It wasn't long before I added two more tanks and was building my collection of marine specimens along with a healthy bit of salt creep on every surface of my bedroom.
My mom was great, she got into the hobby full force with me and helped suplement my meager income I had from making parrot playgrounds out of old braches and rope. She was also more than happy to drive me to the LFS any time I wanted. I was a pretty sad kid since my parents had gone through a very rough divorce and was constantly being uprooted from my srroundings. I won't go into my childhood much more or we'll have a novel rather than a short story. Basically, aquariums were something that made me happy and she did everything she could to encourage it.
When I hit 13 I got my first job, at a local fish store of course! I got to do all the grunt work but they also let me help the cutomers which I absolutely loved. By that time I had worked my way through every book and magazine on marine aquariums I could get my hands on and had plenty of trial and error of my own. Plus I got a discount which meant more aquariums and more salt creep
At the age of 15 I had so many fish to feed that the frozen brine and formula 1&2 just wasn't cutting it for me. I did hours and hours of research on the nutritional makeup andof various seafoods, algaes, and vegetables. My mom and I headed off to the local fish market with a shopping list. A few hours of chopping, cleaning, and processing and I had my very own fishfood (gotta love the old tupperware stackable hamburger thingies). I let a couple local fish stores try it out on fish they were having a hard time getting to eat and it was a success. It started out slow at first and the stores were using it mainly to feed their own fish. Then they started letting their customers try it and suddenly I was making fishfood far more than I really wanted to.
My mom and I ended up traveling to various stores in IL. and WI. selling my fishfood for the next few months. By the end of the year we had nice labels, better packaging, and two distributors picked the food up to distribute throughout the midwest. Shortly after that 3 other types of food were added to the line as well as feeding sticks for target feeding chunks of food.
After I turned 16 I was offered a managing job at the nicer of the local fish stores. By this time I had a fish room with about 20 aquariums set up for testing our fish foods, and breeding the Tanganyican Cichlids I had gotten interested in. In addition to that I was piecing together my ultimate reef aquarium (custom stand, canopy, and 125 gallons of goodness) as everything was overgrowing the 4 smaller reef tanks I had at the time.
Shortly after this I started my own aquarium maintenance company and was also teaching salt water aquarium classses in my home every few months. Don't get me wrong, I still did all the normal teenager stuff like playing sports and dating, but my aquariums were a huge part of my life. I was completely and totally hooked (I hate puns)!
Since I was doing the buying at my LFS job I was lucky enough to get the cream of the crop corals and fish for my personal aquariums. Including 300 lbs. of the most incredible live rock I've ever seen for my newly setup 125 reef tank. Gotta love discounts!
MY god this is turning out longer than I thought it would...
I LOVED this tank, it was my pride and joy and was a pretty spectacular display within a year of setting it up. However, I was starting to get burned out. Being blamed for customers in my maintenance business doing stupid things, and having to make massive amounts of that damn fishfood had turned my hobby that I loved into work. The maintenance cutomers were turned over to the owner of the LFS I managed and my mom was relegated to making the fishfood. Unfortunately about this time my relationship with my mom had started to sour. She was hired at my LFS, and let me tell you, being your mom's boss is not easy. Especially MY mother :eek1: I was also going through my "I hate my parents" and "why did you ruin my life" teenage years.
For the next year or two I continue on being a normal kid that just happened to love aquariums. I was into my reef tank more than ever now that I didn't have to take care of so many other people's aquariums. Wow I sound like a geek, I was quite the ladies man and athlete as well, honest! :mixed:
Then it happened, something that would change my life forever. My mother invited me and my sister to dinner one night (odd) because she had something to tell us. Her doctor had found a lump in her breast and she was going to get some tests done, but "it was nothing to worry about". Fast forward a couple weeks and a couple visits to University of Chicago Hospital and I was called into an office where I was told my mother had one year to live. I was devestated to say the least. I was also quite angry. My mother was the most loving and giving person I had ever met and it just wasn't fair. I've come to find out life usually isn't.
As much I felt for her, I couldn't help but still get into arguments with my mom. I think I was even angry at her for being sick, and something inside of me drove me to be mean to her. I think it was a natural defense kicking in, I thought it would make it easier when she died if she didn't like me and I didn't like her. I also has some issues with her from my younger years, but again, we won't get into that...
The fish room was torn down and turned into a room for my mother. She went through chemo, and showed some signs of improvement. At this time I had given up hope of going away to school at Scripps Institute. My brother and sister were much older than me, my brother had a successful career and family out east, and my sister could barely take care of herself, and my stepfather had to work to keep the health insurance. My mother wasn't sick enough and or our insurance wasn't good enough to have hospice care. So I took care of my mother. Well, she could take care of herself just fine but still needed someone to drive her 2 hours each way for chemo treatments and plasma. Chicago rush hour traffic, a cranky sick mother that didn't like the way I drove, and a mean son didn't exactly make for pleasant hospital visits.
After her first rounds of chemo she was doing pretty well. Back working with me (ugh!) and back to making the ole' fishfood. A year passed and she was still alive and outwardly healthy even though the cancer had moved to her entire skeletal structure. Then she got worse, then she got better, countless chemo treatments, hospital stays, nights in the emergency room, some new marrow treatment with some new fangled stem cell procedure (that was a hard one), and 4 years after being told she had 1 year to live she's still alive.
By this point I had managed to destroy any sort of civility between us. The 2-3 times weekly plasma and chemo she needed at UoC wasn't helping things. Sitting around in a room full of other cancer patients for hours while we often waited for a helecopter to land with her plasma didn't help matters either. It was also a hot miserable summer and she was in a lot of pain and not getting around as well as she used to. At that time the only thing we could really get along about was aquariums, my 125 reef was as stunning as ever and this hobby was still a strong link between us.
Then one day she was feeling much better and her most recent tests looked surprisingly good. She decided to take a trip to northern Wisonsin to see some relatives with her aunt. When she arrived home she was talking some nonsense about puppies in the van and how they were suffocating. It also seemed she was having a hard time breathing and not all together with it. So of course our first reaction was that we couldn't believe she had brought home more damn animals. She was always bringing home strays, nursing sick things back to health, whether they be people or animals. Nope, no puppies in the van, something wasn't right... We called an ambulance like we had done so many times over the last 4 years and headed to the emergency room.
This was routine at this time and I didn't think much of it. Once at the ER and after a doctor had looked her over we were informed that it wasn't good and we should start calling family. My sister was blubbering and my stepfather was being forced to fill out paperwork, so I got the unhappy task of making the calls. However, my mother being the fighter she is started to stabalize after they had sedated her and started to bring her fever down. Things were looking up! The doctors told us to hold off on the phonecalls... Out I go to call the same people I had spoken to an hour before and tell them to not make any arrangements. After reentering the ER and my mother's bedside it happens. That horrible, wretched long drawn out beep of someones heart stopping.
That was it, she was gone. Not quite how I had imagined it. No making my peace with her on her death bed like I had always imagined, no last I love you. Nothing but a skiny, bald headed, lifeless shell of what was once my mother. The one thing I had loved more than anything for most of my childhood; it was her and I against the world. The woman that had done everything she could to make a sad kid happy by buying him aquariums. The woman that I had tried to make hate me. Gone.
Fast forward a few months (I know, anyone who has made it this far deserved a lot more fast forwards, sorry). I'm away on the east coast visiting my brother for couple weeks right after I moved in to my very first apartment. I didn't want to move my reef until after I got back. Unbeknownst to me at the time there had been a power outage at my house. So there my reef tank sat, motionless since the breaker in the powerstrip had been trpped. No phonecall from my sister or stepfather, they still weren't thinking straight and neither of them really liked our hobby. As time passed while I was at my brothers the tank began to stink from all the dying corals and fish. It seemed logical to my stepfather to pour a gallon of mountain fresh clorox into the tank to stop the stink since "everything was dead anyways".
It was months before I returned home to Illinois to empty out my tank. I just couldn't bear to see it and I didn't want to return to that house. It was all sold to a neighbor for a cheap price.
Losing the two things I loved most in just a few months took its toll on me. It's now nearly 8 years later and I've been going back and forth for years on if I want to of can set up another reef again. I've dabbled with a nano but it just isn't the same. I've also checked to see how things are going in the hobby here and there throughout that time.
So here I am, house poor (I bought my first house last year!), wanting a new kitchen, needing to redo some floors, etc. etc.
Just and aside, don't ever buy an old house with lots of character. "Character" is code for "really freaking expensive".
But I'm setting up a new reef tank next week! It's not something I should do, I should get new carpet that bedroom upstairs. But I'm doing it! I just got a used 65 gallon, I ordered my RODI system, I'll order my skimmer this weekend, and I'm trying to find some good lighting I can afford as well as live rock. It's not going to be easy, and it's going to be slow since all I'll be able to afford for a while is frags.
I didn't intend for this to be so long but and thanks to anyone that took the time to read my story. I guess I needed to do this. You know, tell some complete strangers a sad story about myself I've been thinking about my mom a lot as I get ready to set my tank up, this hobby is so entrenched with her memories. Its also been too long since I've written something. I used to keep journals, write poems, write short stories, and that all stopped when my mom died.
Sorry for putting everyone who read this through my therapeutic process. If nothing else, hopefully my babbling will make some of you hug someone you love a little more often. Or maybe even make you appreciate something you love just a little more.
Late in August will be the anniversary of my mother's death and I think I'll fire up my new reef tank for the first time that day. I guess this stray has finally come home.
So, anyone have some good tips on where to get some good live rock? :lol: <- kidding:eek1:
Thanks to my mom I have had an aquarium in my life from the time I was born. I can still vividly remember staring at our 29(ish) gallon metal frame aquarium for hours. It wasn't anything special compared to what was to come but I loved that damn bubbling treasure chest with the pearl in it.
As I grew I never lost my interest in fish and aquariums and by the time I was 11 I got my first saltwater aquarium. It was a very exciting time for me and I read every book I could get my hands on and and once again found myself sitting in front of the aquarium for hours every week. My stunning 35 gallon, complete with under gravel filter and sanders skimmer just plunked right in the tank. It wasn't long after my cycle that I fell in love with the various live rocks, anemones, and corals at the LFS. They did surprisingly well with two 48" shoplights hanging above my 36" tank
It wasn't long before I added two more tanks and was building my collection of marine specimens along with a healthy bit of salt creep on every surface of my bedroom.
My mom was great, she got into the hobby full force with me and helped suplement my meager income I had from making parrot playgrounds out of old braches and rope. She was also more than happy to drive me to the LFS any time I wanted. I was a pretty sad kid since my parents had gone through a very rough divorce and was constantly being uprooted from my srroundings. I won't go into my childhood much more or we'll have a novel rather than a short story. Basically, aquariums were something that made me happy and she did everything she could to encourage it.
When I hit 13 I got my first job, at a local fish store of course! I got to do all the grunt work but they also let me help the cutomers which I absolutely loved. By that time I had worked my way through every book and magazine on marine aquariums I could get my hands on and had plenty of trial and error of my own. Plus I got a discount which meant more aquariums and more salt creep
At the age of 15 I had so many fish to feed that the frozen brine and formula 1&2 just wasn't cutting it for me. I did hours and hours of research on the nutritional makeup andof various seafoods, algaes, and vegetables. My mom and I headed off to the local fish market with a shopping list. A few hours of chopping, cleaning, and processing and I had my very own fishfood (gotta love the old tupperware stackable hamburger thingies). I let a couple local fish stores try it out on fish they were having a hard time getting to eat and it was a success. It started out slow at first and the stores were using it mainly to feed their own fish. Then they started letting their customers try it and suddenly I was making fishfood far more than I really wanted to.
My mom and I ended up traveling to various stores in IL. and WI. selling my fishfood for the next few months. By the end of the year we had nice labels, better packaging, and two distributors picked the food up to distribute throughout the midwest. Shortly after that 3 other types of food were added to the line as well as feeding sticks for target feeding chunks of food.
After I turned 16 I was offered a managing job at the nicer of the local fish stores. By this time I had a fish room with about 20 aquariums set up for testing our fish foods, and breeding the Tanganyican Cichlids I had gotten interested in. In addition to that I was piecing together my ultimate reef aquarium (custom stand, canopy, and 125 gallons of goodness) as everything was overgrowing the 4 smaller reef tanks I had at the time.
Shortly after this I started my own aquarium maintenance company and was also teaching salt water aquarium classses in my home every few months. Don't get me wrong, I still did all the normal teenager stuff like playing sports and dating, but my aquariums were a huge part of my life. I was completely and totally hooked (I hate puns)!
Since I was doing the buying at my LFS job I was lucky enough to get the cream of the crop corals and fish for my personal aquariums. Including 300 lbs. of the most incredible live rock I've ever seen for my newly setup 125 reef tank. Gotta love discounts!
MY god this is turning out longer than I thought it would...
I LOVED this tank, it was my pride and joy and was a pretty spectacular display within a year of setting it up. However, I was starting to get burned out. Being blamed for customers in my maintenance business doing stupid things, and having to make massive amounts of that damn fishfood had turned my hobby that I loved into work. The maintenance cutomers were turned over to the owner of the LFS I managed and my mom was relegated to making the fishfood. Unfortunately about this time my relationship with my mom had started to sour. She was hired at my LFS, and let me tell you, being your mom's boss is not easy. Especially MY mother :eek1: I was also going through my "I hate my parents" and "why did you ruin my life" teenage years.
For the next year or two I continue on being a normal kid that just happened to love aquariums. I was into my reef tank more than ever now that I didn't have to take care of so many other people's aquariums. Wow I sound like a geek, I was quite the ladies man and athlete as well, honest! :mixed:
Then it happened, something that would change my life forever. My mother invited me and my sister to dinner one night (odd) because she had something to tell us. Her doctor had found a lump in her breast and she was going to get some tests done, but "it was nothing to worry about". Fast forward a couple weeks and a couple visits to University of Chicago Hospital and I was called into an office where I was told my mother had one year to live. I was devestated to say the least. I was also quite angry. My mother was the most loving and giving person I had ever met and it just wasn't fair. I've come to find out life usually isn't.
As much I felt for her, I couldn't help but still get into arguments with my mom. I think I was even angry at her for being sick, and something inside of me drove me to be mean to her. I think it was a natural defense kicking in, I thought it would make it easier when she died if she didn't like me and I didn't like her. I also has some issues with her from my younger years, but again, we won't get into that...
The fish room was torn down and turned into a room for my mother. She went through chemo, and showed some signs of improvement. At this time I had given up hope of going away to school at Scripps Institute. My brother and sister were much older than me, my brother had a successful career and family out east, and my sister could barely take care of herself, and my stepfather had to work to keep the health insurance. My mother wasn't sick enough and or our insurance wasn't good enough to have hospice care. So I took care of my mother. Well, she could take care of herself just fine but still needed someone to drive her 2 hours each way for chemo treatments and plasma. Chicago rush hour traffic, a cranky sick mother that didn't like the way I drove, and a mean son didn't exactly make for pleasant hospital visits.
After her first rounds of chemo she was doing pretty well. Back working with me (ugh!) and back to making the ole' fishfood. A year passed and she was still alive and outwardly healthy even though the cancer had moved to her entire skeletal structure. Then she got worse, then she got better, countless chemo treatments, hospital stays, nights in the emergency room, some new marrow treatment with some new fangled stem cell procedure (that was a hard one), and 4 years after being told she had 1 year to live she's still alive.
By this point I had managed to destroy any sort of civility between us. The 2-3 times weekly plasma and chemo she needed at UoC wasn't helping things. Sitting around in a room full of other cancer patients for hours while we often waited for a helecopter to land with her plasma didn't help matters either. It was also a hot miserable summer and she was in a lot of pain and not getting around as well as she used to. At that time the only thing we could really get along about was aquariums, my 125 reef was as stunning as ever and this hobby was still a strong link between us.
Then one day she was feeling much better and her most recent tests looked surprisingly good. She decided to take a trip to northern Wisonsin to see some relatives with her aunt. When she arrived home she was talking some nonsense about puppies in the van and how they were suffocating. It also seemed she was having a hard time breathing and not all together with it. So of course our first reaction was that we couldn't believe she had brought home more damn animals. She was always bringing home strays, nursing sick things back to health, whether they be people or animals. Nope, no puppies in the van, something wasn't right... We called an ambulance like we had done so many times over the last 4 years and headed to the emergency room.
This was routine at this time and I didn't think much of it. Once at the ER and after a doctor had looked her over we were informed that it wasn't good and we should start calling family. My sister was blubbering and my stepfather was being forced to fill out paperwork, so I got the unhappy task of making the calls. However, my mother being the fighter she is started to stabalize after they had sedated her and started to bring her fever down. Things were looking up! The doctors told us to hold off on the phonecalls... Out I go to call the same people I had spoken to an hour before and tell them to not make any arrangements. After reentering the ER and my mother's bedside it happens. That horrible, wretched long drawn out beep of someones heart stopping.
That was it, she was gone. Not quite how I had imagined it. No making my peace with her on her death bed like I had always imagined, no last I love you. Nothing but a skiny, bald headed, lifeless shell of what was once my mother. The one thing I had loved more than anything for most of my childhood; it was her and I against the world. The woman that had done everything she could to make a sad kid happy by buying him aquariums. The woman that I had tried to make hate me. Gone.
Fast forward a few months (I know, anyone who has made it this far deserved a lot more fast forwards, sorry
). I'm away on the east coast visiting my brother for couple weeks right after I moved in to my very first apartment. I didn't want to move my reef until after I got back. Unbeknownst to me at the time there had been a power outage at my house. So there my reef tank sat, motionless since the breaker in the powerstrip had been trpped. No phonecall from my sister or stepfather, they still weren't thinking straight and neither of them really liked our hobby. As time passed while I was at my brothers the tank began to stink from all the dying corals and fish. It seemed logical to my stepfather to pour a gallon of mountain fresh clorox into the tank to stop the stink since "everything was dead anyways".It was months before I returned home to Illinois to empty out my tank. I just couldn't bear to see it and I didn't want to return to that house. It was all sold to a neighbor for a cheap price.
Losing the two things I loved most in just a few months took its toll on me. It's now nearly 8 years later and I've been going back and forth for years on if I want to of can set up another reef again. I've dabbled with a nano but it just isn't the same. I've also checked to see how things are going in the hobby here and there throughout that time.
So here I am, house poor (I bought my first house last year!), wanting a new kitchen, needing to redo some floors, etc. etc.
Just and aside, don't ever buy an old house with lots of character. "Character" is code for "really freaking expensive".
But I'm setting up a new reef tank next week! It's not something I should do, I should get new carpet that bedroom upstairs. But I'm doing it! I just got a used 65 gallon, I ordered my RODI system, I'll order my skimmer this weekend, and I'm trying to find some good lighting I can afford as well as live rock. It's not going to be easy, and it's going to be slow since all I'll be able to afford for a while is frags.
I didn't intend for this to be so long but and thanks to anyone that took the time to read my story. I guess I needed to do this. You know, tell some complete strangers a sad story about myself
I've been thinking about my mom a lot as I get ready to set my tank up, this hobby is so entrenched with her memories. Its also been too long since I've written something. I used to keep journals, write poems, write short stories, and that all stopped when my mom died. Sorry for putting everyone who read this through my therapeutic process. If nothing else, hopefully my babbling will make some of you hug someone you love a little more often. Or maybe even make you appreciate something you love just a little more.
Late in August will be the anniversary of my mother's death and I think I'll fire up my new reef tank for the first time that day. I guess this stray has finally come home.
So, anyone have some good tips on where to get some good live rock? :lol: <- kidding:eek1:
I'm also happy to hear your cat is on the rebound!
