visiting Holland

We have been in Holland for the last several days, and I have not spent a lot of time on the computer. I wanted to take a moment to post a few pictures though, to let you know what we have been up to.

We visited Peter and Anne's house...


to celebrate my dad's birthday. (Here is Mom cutting the special cake she baked.)


We enjoyed the nice (relatively cool to us) weather by going biking, including an extra-long ride today.


We went to the beach a couple times, and I went swimming while Brian made some carefully crafted sand castles.


We introduced Mom and Dad to Rockband. They both gave it a try and decided it was hard and a good way to learn rhythms. Dad especially favored the drums.


Also while we have been here, there has been construction during the day. As you can see, the siding is on the 3-season porch and it is really looking like a part of the house now. The inside is also almost complete, and the floor goes in next week (I think). Pretty cool!

Soon we will travel north to see family and, fortunately for everyone, we are bringing our furry friends with us! Here are a few friendly photos to remind you that this is a good thing!

Chewbacca:

Rex and Eve:

And of course Brussels (he wishes he was a Woo alum too):

See you all soon!

A few pictures of new coral

Here are a few pictures of our new coral. This first one is a toadstool leather. We just got it, Hanneke actually bought it. It's a nice yellow color and it, along with the other two below, are in the small tank we have.

This next one is called a large polyp Duncan's Head. It was the most expensive coral I've bought but I was surprised they had it and it was half the price I expected from shopping for it online for a while. This first picture is of it during the day. This coral is one I purchased.


As you can see in this next picture of it, taken at night, it has nice neon green in its center. It is a stony coral so in time it will grow more branches (if it does well, that is) and more polyps. If it grew more and I was inclined to, I could use bonecutters and cut off a branch and give it to a friend, trade it, etc.


Finally, here is the other coral Hanneke bought. It is called a sun coral and the picture is taken at night because the tentacled polyps you see only come out at night. This is Hanneke's coral and it is the first one we have that requires target feeding. Our others are primarily photosynthetic, though they also filter feed. This one is carnivorous and needs to be fed brine shrimp or phytoplankton. Han does both with a turkey baster. It's a pretty cool coral.



Here's one last picture of our small tank overall. In it you can see the bright orange color of the sun coral under the lights. There are some snails crawling up the back. You can see that our candycane coral, the purple one on the right, is repairing itself - those lines of goo coming off it are it self-repairing.

See you all soon.

Hanneke in the news

Here's a recent story on her project with the SciGirls Camp.

SciGirls Story

Pretty cool, huh? She put a lot of work into the camp.

Fifth of July (Han)

In celebration of the long weekend, we took a day trip on Saturday to St. George Island with our friend Vincent. It was a bit of a drive, but the state park is really nice so I think it was worth it.


The first thing we did once we arrived was get out of the car and take a hike. It was needed after the long ride. The trail led us through a sandy area of wild Florida, with a marshy zone to the right and many types of trees and shrubs. By the time we got back to the car, we were pretty hot.

After the hike, we were planning on going kayaking by renting kayaks from the park. I didn't call them to get the price ahead of time, and the rental prices they wanted were more than we were willing to pay (they wanted $80 minimum for us to use them for the afternoon). Although we were a little bummed that we weren't going to kayak, instead we found a place on the beach for our picnic lunch.

The clouds were forboding, but the sky above us was bright blue, so the majority of the storm stayed over the mainland.

We had a pleasant lunch on the beach (sandwiches, pasta salad, grapes, vegis), watching the clouds, the waves, and the sea birds. The bird below is the one who hopped nearby and got rewarded by Brian with a bit of his sandwich. Immediately afterwards, a couple more birds hopped hopefully in our direction.

Brian and Vincent spent a lot of time sitting on the beach, talking and watching the water.

Meanwhile, I was swimming and looking for seashells. I even saw a tiny fish, who swam up to me when I was standing in shoulder-deep water and seemed curious about what I was doing there.

The clouds slowly drifted out to sea a little as the afternoon progressed, and it rained a little while I was in the water. But the main part of the storm blew eastwards. Here you can see some of the contrast between the clouds over the water (lighter) and the clouds back towards the mainland (darker).

After a while, I convinced the boys to get in the water too. We swam for a while and got tossed around by the waves. (Here again you can see the clouds over the land, contrasted with the clouds over the water.)

To finish off the day, we rented a four-person bike vehicle (called a surrey) and rode around the island for an hour. We looked at all of the vacation houses and enjoyed the cool sea breeze.

After grabbing a bite to eat at a local restaurant (I got the catch of the day, which was snapper), we headed for home, covered in sand and a little burnt, but happy.

Fourth of July update (Brian)

Hi everyone. Today we had a good Fourth of July. We started out with some tennis this morning with two friends from work. It was fun and I feel like I'm making progress on my serve, which is encouraging. Then we had two other friends over for some grilling. Here's a picture of that:



Then we hung out around the apartment some. While Hanneke was working on things outside, I did some gardening. I put in some new flowers, moved some grass to a new area, put in what will later be part of a small solar-powered waterfall, and did some trimming of other bushes. Here's the waterfall/pond, which is just a muddy hole for now:



Here is a bed of flowers Hanneke bought and I put in:



And here is a lantana bush we put in. They reportedly help repel mosquitos, but in any event they look nice and require little water:



After gardening and cleaning up, we went to a dinner where one of Hanneke's friends proposed to his now-fiance. Here's a picture from that:



Finally, we came home from dinner and lit off a few fireworks that we got in a pack from Walmart a month or so ago. The 1 minute video below is of the main one. It was a cheap pack, maybe $10, but I was surprised that Walmart-level fireworks do what the one in the video does. It was fun:



Not much else to report. In other good news, additional research indicates that only Palythoa species of the Zoanthidae genus potentially contains palytoxin and zoanthus species, which appears to be the kind we have, does not contain it. Still need to look into that more.

Hope you had a good Fourth. We look forward to seeing you all soon.

Recent events and an unfortunate turn in our tank

Things have been going mostly the same lately. I was glad to get my second tennis racket restrung last week and now I'll be able to keep playing whenever I break the strings on my main racket (they are old strings). I had forgotten how many string varities there are. Han and I have been playing tennis together more often lately. We still play with two other friends on weekends and gradually we seem to be drumming up more interest among our other friends in joining us.

Work has been going pretty well. I completed a major assignment a few weeks back and it was very well-received. I have lost my perception on what is "average" work and what is "excellent" work it seems. I felt my work was better than sufficient but it was deemed impressive by multiple individuals. For whatever reason, as a result of the compliments I feel like I should have worked harder instead of feeling satisfied that it was helpful to the Court. In future news, I have an assignment for the coming months that I predict will be divisive because it's a difficult issue of some importance. We'll see how it goes.

In an unfortunate turn of events, I recently learned that some of our coral are a potential health hazard. The problem corals are our two zoanthus polyp colonies, the green and purple things from the videos on the top rocks. I had done research on zoanthus (species)/Zoanthidae (genus) but never came across any information indicating they were dangerous. As it turns out, some specimen in the Zoanthidae genus (which includes palythoa, protopalythoa, and zoanthus species) contain a neurotoxin named palytoxin. Palytoxin is an incredibly complex molecule that is also, depending what source you read, either the first or second most toxic organicly-produced compound on Earth. It is fatal in humans at a dosage of less than 5 micrograms and fatal 50% of the time at a rate of less than 100 nanograms/kilogram. While it's only released defensively, such as when cutting zoanthus, I would never have bought something that has such properties if I had known about it. Zoanthidae are remarkably common and people all over the aquatic trade frag them (i.e. cut them). I can find almost no reports of serious injuries or deaths. And given that some major retailers don't even mention the risk (aka all of those I shop at do not mention the risk at all), I have to believe that the information I have so far is incomplete. Still, I'm not happy to learn this. It will very possibly lead to my carefully getting rid of the Zoanthidae we have. For more info of the chemical sort, go here: http://www.cbwinfo.com/Biological/Toxins/Palytoxin.html.

This is an unfortunate development; zoanthus are by far the most impressive coral in color variety that I've seen. But it's just not worth the risk.