I’m gonna be a dad in about a month. This has absorbed a lot of my time and attention over the last 8 months, and will shortly start absorbing even more of my time. I don’t remember what the previous post said about current and future plans, but that guy didn’t know he was gonna be a dad a year later. Have I done those things? I dunno. Maybe half? I’d have to go read the post, and I probably won’t.

I’m excited, nervous, terrified that my wife might be one of the 1 in 4 women who are gutted like a medieval battle death blow to deliver her child. I know it’s a regular thing, and I’m not a religious guy, but like, jesus christ. What a traumatic ordeal. And c-section or not, I have to just… watch? Hold her hand, and keep throwing out lines like, “You’re doing great, honey!” “It’s gonna be ok!” “Remember to breath!” This feels staggeringly inadequate compared to the magnitude of the experience my wife will go through. I’ve gone to the classes, read books, and yet… in the delivery room, this seems to be the extent of the help I can provide. It doesn’t feel like enough.

In the medium and long term though, what does this mean for my barely-not-a-hobby-despite-it-taking-up-all-my-time-shouldn’t-I-just-get-a-real-job-so,-do-you-do-this-full-time?-or…- business?

I don’t know yet. My wife is taking 3 months off. This will overlap with the latter half of 2024 koi season, but that doesn’t mean I can just leave her to raise our newborn alone. Neither my or my wife’s parents are local. While they of course promise to come stay with us and help, it wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t play an equal part during these first few, surely exhausting and confusing and joyous months. Depending on how things play out I may need to reduce my open hours, or open days. I may have to go back to selling fish by appointment, though I really don’t enjoy that strategy. I feel like the scheduling takes more time than it’s worth. I become the secretary to people I’m unaware of until the moment they need me to schedule something for them, around their schedule. I really do prefer having open hours like a regular retail store, even if it means customers occasionally arrive when I’m in the bathroom, or at my front door when I’m in the backyard. Or, shortly, when it’s my turn to hold the baby.

The long view is that I’ll be a stay at home dad (why did the acronym SAHD have to end up looking like someone announcing “SAD” with a huge sigh? I feel like this somehow contributes to the negative stereotypes about SAHDs). And while I do feel “always on” from April through September, it’s also true that I don’t have 40hrs of work per week over winter. And daycare is crazy expensive. And my wife has a great job. Being a SAHD looks like the right choice for a lot of reasons. I’m looking forward to it, even if it means my awkward little business stays awkward and little for the foreseeable future.

Hey Google Search Algorithm, how’s it going? I got a new post for you, fresh off the prefrontal cortex. Enjoy, and please add a description to my Google Search Result soon. I’ve done all I can; it’s up to you now.

It’s June 21st, the official first day of Summer. Spring started 3 days ago. Everybody wants to comment about it raining for two months straight. My favorites are the classic Dad Hot Takes like, “This is great for the reservoirs,” or “Oh yeah, we needed it, too,” as if they include themselves among the collective “we” of nature itself. They’re not wrong. It’s just a non-contributing statement. Everyone knows this and agrees – there’s no follow-up potential. It doesn’t add to or progress a conversation. But I digress. The rain was annoying, it slowed my tank building progress, but I made it through. It’s water under the bridge now. Right into the reservoir.

I got those tanks cycled using my army of goldfish, along with pre-cultured k1 beads and sponge filters, in two weeks (as opposed to the typical 6-8 weeks for dry start cycling)! My first shipment of koi arrived last Thursday, 6/15, and my first walk-in shopping day was the following Saturday. It went great, a lot of people came through! What a relief. I haven’t been in a position to support normal walk-in shopping in nearly two years. Operating by appointment, only selling koi by mail-in bulk orders, has been awful. Every phone call is this long speech full of caveats, apologies, and promises that I’m working to get back to a more normal shopping experience. Retelling the story of all the ways I’ve been shit on trying to run this little business, how I ended up in this confusing and irregular position, over and over. And that’s just the calls I get. I know the appointment requirement alone has been turning off hundreds of customers. There’s enough detail between Google Business and WordPress analytics to know the disparity between my internet traffic and actual calls/customers widened substantially since I lost the old shop. Suffice to say, it’s been super lame, and I’m excited for that stage to be over.

As for other cool shit I got planned: I got so much cool shit planned! You don’t even know, man! That’s why I’m gonna tell you! In a moderate length, enumerated list format!

1. Shubunkin Breeding: I’m gonna start breeding my own shubunkins. They’re super popular, more difficult to buy from wholesalers than you’d expect, and the quality range is very high and unpredictable. For example: the blue shubunkins are particularly popular these days, and I ordered what I thought would be 150 3″ blue shubunkins. None were the blue type, and while half have pretty good white/orange/black calico patterns, the rest are pretty bland white/orange or just plain orange. Like, 50 are orange. Yeah they probably have a couple of iridescent scales on their sides or something, indicating they have shubunkin parents, but it ain’t right to sell an orange goldfish as a shubunkin. It’s not what people are expecting, and they’re gonna be really hard to sell.
   
   So, I’ve got two really nice looking blue shubunkins picked out, and I’ll be setting up a spawning tank for them later this week. I know I’ll have to suck it up and cull some of the fry this time, but that’s the nature of the business. I didn’t cull anybody last year and now I have 100 tiny runts that are 1 or 2 inches long at 11 months old. I feed them and keep them in a nice tank in the basement but don’t expect to ever sell them. I’ve got them listed for 2$ and have zero takers so far.
2. Indoor Aquarium Fish Breeding: I need more to do in the winter, and would like to smooth out my income curve across the year. I’m going to start with breeding angelfish and bristlenose plecos, as those are common aquarium trade fish, and I happen to have breeding pairs of angelfish already. I also own a female bristlenose pleco who’s had babies before, and a male, but they’ve never met each other. We’ll see how that goes. I’ll probably focus on selling these wholesale to other aquarium shops at first. Pond customers don’t have as much overlap with aquarium customers as you’d think, and a small koi business is not where anybody will be looking to buy angelfish.
3. Pond and Aquarium Plants: I’ve been buying up various types of aquatic plants, and learning how to propagate them. Lilies are by far the most in-demand but I just cannot get my hands on any. I think the widespread dreary weather we’ve had this spring is affecting plant nurseries as well.
4. Cherry Shrimp!: The plants were initially just a component of the goldfish breeding plan. Specifically java moss. Java moss is a fantastic haven for microorganisms; various freshwater plankton that provide an excellent food source for newly born fish fry. I’ve had a clump of java moss under a grow light for about 3 weeks now. The hope is that I eventually grow a really big clump of java moss, and can tear off chunks to put in my fry tanks to provide food during the frys’ first days or weeks. It’s not not working, but of course a grow light over a fish tank is also going to promote algae growth. The algae plays a similar roll to java moss, but is harder to get a discrete chunk of, is choking out my java moss, and is kinda gross. Then I learned that cherry shrimp eat string algae, and are safe around fish eggs; they even clean the eggs sometimes! I don’t know if I’ll ever sell or breed the cherry shrimp but I hear they reproduce pretty reliably on their own. For now they’re just my super cute garden crew.
5. Maybe not staying a retail shop in the future: This is a big long term plan topic to tack on to the end of a list of shit I’m doing this summer, but yeah. Local small retail sucks, and doesn’t look to be getting better. Online shopping is crushing it. In particular, niche markets like pet fish are becoming very difficult to survive in while operating locally. I’ve seen two longstanding aquarium shops here in Denver close down just this year, and watched a lot of startups like myself fail as well. All I really want to do is breed fish myself. If I could get to the point where I was breeding batches of fish and selling entire lots to other aquarium shops, that would be way cooler than what I’m doing now. Or selling them online. Being a middleman has always felt disingenuous. “Wow, you have such beautiful fish here” is a strange compliment to process when I had no part in the creation of those fish. Yeah, they’re cool fish. But I just bought them from a big farm. The farm did all the cool parts. I want to do the cool parts too. Do I think I can be a commercial scale goldfish breeder entirely in my house? Probably not, but I should at least learn more on a small scale first. So that’s what I’m gonna do.

About a month behind where I wanted to be so far this year, but koi tanks should be running in the next few weeks. All the snow and rain we’ve had in April and early May this year kept me from building. Can’t use power tools when water is falling out of the sky. I’d hastily drag out and assemble my chop saw table whenever the weather forecast promised a few clear hours, make a little progress, just as hastily take it apart and dump it all in the laundry room again when the rain would come 30 minutes early, then shop vac the wood dust and plastic shavings off the patio while hunched over the vac motor to keep it dry. Took me as long to think of a way around it – a pop-up canopy to work under – as the weather delays lasted. I think it’s rained twice since I bought the damn thing. I guess the shade has been nice.

Also, took me close to a week to work through The Mystery of The Missing Lava Rock. Lava rock doesn’t work as well as expanded clay pellets as an aquaponic grow media, but it works pretty well and is way way cheaper. I probably could have gotten all the lava rock I needed from a landscaping supplies vendor for 300$, vs the 1660$ Amazon price for the expanded clay beads I’d need for the season. But nobody, not a single landscaping supplies place in the Denver Metro, had any. I searched in a full hour circle. Finally I lost my cool on the phone with one of the phone reps and when he said “No, we won’t have any this year,” I shouted “WHY THOUGH?” Then I promptly apologized for my tone and promised I wasn’t mad at him, just that I’d been searching for lava rock for a week and really thought that it was one of the most popular decorative rocks ever and it should be everywhere and it doesn’t make any sense that I can’t find any and what the hell is going on. The guy was super nice about it, and told me that I was right on all counts, and deserved to be confused. But, he told me, the only lava rock mine in Colorado is closed for the year, and nobody wants to ship lava rock in from farther because of the increased shipping costs. He said the only place he knew that had any were the 0.5 cu ft (3.74 gallons if you’re interested) bags at Home Depot/Lowes. Indeed they had them, but the mark up on those tiny bags is crazy, and I would have had to buy 128 of them, way more than any store has. The total price would be about 1200$ and I wouldn’t have it all until the middle of June. For the quality loss compared to clay beads, and delay, the cost savings weren’t worth it.

I searched lava rock wholesale operations all across the country, and while I found some, the shipping prices were indeed extreme, especially on the volume I need – 400 gallons. It’s too little for true bulk rates, which come by the truckload, but still a large volume and weight. In the end I couldn’t find any way to buy wholesale lava rock for less than the 1660$ price tag on the clay balls, and admitted defeat.

Well, I still needed 400 gallons of grow media, and the bags of clay beads on Amazon are 6.6 gallons each. Surely I could find a better way to order the clay beads in bulk, right? Wrong again. Nobody sells it by the shovel full, because apparently most people use these things as a drainage layer in the bottom of plant pots, and the most popular volume to buy is a one gallon bag. Most people use, like, 30 clay balls, not 30,000. I found the same 6.6 gallon bags on a few gardening supplies wholesale websites, which could shave off a few hundred dollars from the total, but these poor Not Amazon businesses had to charge for shipping, like regular people. Shipping the clay balls from these companies came out to 1100$, vastly outweighing the savings on the item price.

So, begrudgingly, I once again bought the majority of my total supply costs for the year on Amazon, at regular Amazon retail price. Because somehow that’s the cheapest way to do things, even at small business scale. And because of this strange confluence of events, I got to tack on 1300$ to my expenses, and lost nearly a week of work hours to figuring my way through The Mystery of the Missing Lava Rock.

Using this post to save what the front page said for 2022, and because Google Search really wants my website to change sometimes. What do websites do if they just provide factual information that would never change over time? Like all those websites from 2003 describing a math or science proof? Slowly slip into the void? Like we’re not gonna change Boyle’s Law any time soon. Shout out to NASA: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/aboyle.html

Spring/Summer 2022

MHK is operating at limited capacity while I build new tank systems this year.
Crucially, I have moved the business to my house. The main difference is that I’m not allowed to operate a walk-in business at my house, per the Englewood Zoning Code. I’m only zoned for home office so I can get in trouble with the city if I produce too much car traffic. So for now you gotta call me first and schedule a time to come by. Maybe I can find a work-around in the future but for this year that’s just how it be.

Well Jeez What Am I Selling Then?

I don’t have a lot of capacity at home so I can’t stock koi on-site yet. But I have a bunch of goldfish! So for now I’ve got:

6-7″ Shubunkin Goldfish 20$
6-7″ Sarasa Comet Goldfish 15$
6-7″ Comet Goldfish 10$

Koi Pond Pack Delivery!

These are wholesale rate bulk orders that I deliver to your house and install in your pond. These are big boxes so mostly good for large ponds or stocking empty ponds. Following prices include shipping and delivery. If listed prices are higher than you remember, you can blame the insane current cost of shipping.
Koi:
100x 3-4″ 650$
60x 4-5″ 650$
40x 5-6″ 650$
24x 6-8″ 650$
14x 8-10″ 650$
10x 10-12″ 700$
4x 12-14″ 550$
6x 12-14″ 650$
3x 14-16″ 650$

Goldfish:
Comets: 150x 3-4″, 75x 4-5″, or 50x 5-6″ 250$
Sarasas: 150x 3-4″, 75x 4-5″, or 50x 5-6″ 300$
Shubunkins: 150x 3-4″, 75x 4-5″, or 50x 5-6″ 350$

Butterfly koi come with a 20% upcharge because people have decided they are cooler and should cost more, so they are more expensive for me to buy. We usually can’t pick the color types unless I find a special deal at a particular wholesaler but the trade-off is they’re pretty cheap, and in my experience they’re plenty cool looking. If I ever do find fun special deals I’ll make sure to list them here! Give me a call/email for more info!

Services:

Adoption and Rehoming

I get a lot of calls asking if I’ll take or buy people’s fish, so I’ve decided to start saying yes, with the long-term goal of shifting my business into a non-profit animal shelter for fish. For now, adoption and rehoming projects will be priced on a case by case basis as my holding capacity is limited. Adopted fish will receive necessary medical care and be kept in clean quarantine tanks until new homes can be found for them. Their subsequent adoption fees will scale with their cost of care moreso than how pretty they are. I will not buy your fish. More detailed information about adoption and rehoming will show up on a dedicated site page once I figure out more legal stuff and write the page.

House Calls – 200$
(+50$ if you’re more than an hour drive)

If you’re new to ponds, just bought a house with a pond, or your fish are sick or dying and you don’t know what to do, this may be for you! Includes a lesson on pond-keeping basics if necessary, and sick/injured fish diagnosis. From there we can put together a treatment plan for you to do at home, or I can take your fish and treat it in one of my quarantine tanks, detailed below. If you’re a ways out, the extra 50$ really helps me stay calm while I’m stuck in traffic on the way home 🙂

Noninvasive Medical Care – 10$/day

I’m not a licensed veterinarian, so I can’t do surgery on your fish. Luckily, most medical problems fish face don’t require surgery. If you don’t have a quarantine tank and don’t want to make one, I will take care of your fish in one of my quarantine tanks. They are disinfected and completely dried between uses and will not transfer pathogens from previous patients. Common ailments for this service include fin rot, ulcers, swim bladder infections, dropsy aka kidney infections, and constipation. Recovery from these ailments typically takes 2 to 6 weeks but can take longer. I cannot 100% promise your fish will live, as is the case with all medical care services. Space is limited so please inquire by phone or email. Do not just show up with a fish.

The first year I opened my business, I could not get my website or google maps listing to show up with relevant search terms no matter what I tried. Eventually, I caved and paid for a 1hr lesson with a WordPress person on how to webpage good. Everything I looked up beforehand told me there was a place in my webpage code where I could add keywords or search terms. The woman giving me the lesson told me that existed but no longer worked because Google decided it didn’t like being told what search terms to use. And that I’m not allowed to get to that part of the code with the WordPress Portal anyway (why tho?). Now, the only way for your page to appear higher in searches was based on how often you updated your website. If it stays static forever, Google deems you unworthy. Google craves new content. So she said I had to make a blog. It was the easiest way to add new content to your page. I hated the idea and didn’t do it for two years. I still hate the idea. But here I am. And you know what the worst part is? My monthly internet traffic is 5x what it was last year.

Ugh.

Back in May a conversation with a few friends set in motion what may be my defining event of 2022. I’ve known both of these guys since college, and they both have ADHD. One made a comment to the effect of, “and we all have ADHD too.” I replied “well y’all do at least, I’m just a spacecase.” My two friends went on to explain that they’d always been sure I had ADHD too, and didn’t know I wasn’t diagnosed or treated for it, and suggested I get tested. After talking it over with my wife, I decided to get tested. It didn’t happen quickly, of course. Getting anything scheduled in the American Healthcare System is a chore, but after a few office visits, multiple choice exams, and zoom calls, it was official. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD at 34. What a trip.

I’ve been taking adderral daily for about a month now. The first few days were intense. I built an entire aquarium system from spare parts the first day because my 10″ and 12″ plecos weren’t getting along and needed to be separated. To be fair, I’d been putting that off for a few months, so I’m glad I did it. But I had a lot of other things planned for that day. Now that I’m more used to it, that urgent mystery motivation from the first week doesn’t come through but simply starting work every day doesn’t feel like scaling a wall. I can stick to one task at a time, start to finish. Unrelated ideas certainly still float through my head from time to time, but I don’t seem to drop what I’m doing and head off to pursue them anymore. It helps with numerous smaller things as well. Driving, reading, sorting bills, keeping the kitchen in order. Is this what being “normal” is like? Doing one thing at a time may sound both reasonable and trivial to the 5 people who end up reading this, but it’s a profound change from how I’ve bounced and tumbled through life thus far. With all that said, however, I must admit I still lose my keys and shoes quite often.

If you ever frequented my shop on S Broadway and got the sense that I was flying by the seat of my pants, I now know that you were right. There were always no less than 3 half-finished projects on display throughout the store. It wasn’t that I hadn’t had time to clean up before I opened the store. The store being a mess wasn’t even a problem I was avoiding. It was a non-issue. This seemed normal to me. It’s how I’ve always lived. I lost track of how many times I’d be talking to a customer and suddenly bolt towards the sound of splashing water because I’d walked away from a running hose to greet them a few minutes before. Guaranteed I told myself, “don’t forget this hose is on,” while letting go of the hose, and it had left my mind by the time I’d asked, “Welcome, how can I help you?” If you ever experienced things like this and came back anyway, I truly appreciate it!

Lastly, if any of this feels familiar to you, consider getting tested for ADHD yourself. If you’ve been called a space case, an airhead, or lazy your whole life, but swear you’re trying your best, this could be you. If you daydream, constantly have music in your head, or lose track of your belongings most days of the week, this could be you. ADHD isn’t just bouncing off the walls, being hyper or extra. The storm, the static, the noise, can all be internal too.

Not much. And a lot of things. In September and October, concurrent with tearing down and moving out of the shop, I built a very janky swimming pool pond in my garage for the refugee koi and goldfish I failed to sell. You can see that on my Instagram! Satisfied with the build, I drove out to California the day after closing the shop to see my parents. Between manning the shop every day and covid, I hadn’t seen my family in over two years. Wife and dog came along. Dog met the ocean for the first time. Saw my grandma. It was nice.

I spent the winter sometimes decompressing, sometimes depressing. Losing the shop was not easy. I spent 3.5 years of my life on a passion project and it crashed and burned. I was and am sad about it, and feel pretty justified in that sadness. I considered numerous other career shifts. Get an electrician or plumber or both certification. Go to vet school. Go back to paleontology consulting. Go back for my paleontology Ph.D. Be a bookkeeper or secretary for some high-paying money-moving company. Become, at 34, a CIA Agent. Thanks, Dad, for the helpful suggestion. My aunt’s wife’s grandpa was a CIA Agent, or something, so they could get me in. Such was the claim, at least. I intended to go snowboarding a lot, but the winter was pretty global-warming-y. I found out I have ADHD, another Very Cool thing to do at 34. Suffice to say, it’s been busy having no business.

In the end, I’ve decided to stick with Mile High Koi, but with a twist. First of all, it’s going to happen in my little backyard at home, so I won’t be a walk-in business anymore (or the city will get mad at me). Rent was a gruesome spectre at Broadway Square and I barely broke even while paying it. I pretty much just ran the store for two years so I could make my landlord money. Secondly, I’m going to shift towards aquaponics. Aquaponic Farming seems like a fantastic environment for raising koi and goldfish. It fits a lot of productivity into a small space, which my yard happens to be, and either makes me or other local businesses food. This will take quite a while to build though so, as I predicted last July, I doubt I’ll have much to sell for spring/summer 2022. I’m thinking goldfish on-site + koi mix-pack delivery. Hit me up, dogs.

TL;DR The Project is on-going, The Dream is still alive, but it’s been rough going so far. As I understand it, such is the case with most Dreams.

People definitely show up if you sell stuff at 50+% off. It’s not a sustainable model though.

08/02/2021 Update:
A big thank you to all the customers who’ve come in over the past month! The sale clearly piqued some interest, and as of today I’m sold out of koi.
There are plenty of 5-6″ Shubunkin and Sarasa Comet goldfish left though so I’ll be dropping those from $25 down to $10 for the rest of the season!

Running your own business ain’t easy. Nor is making a website JEEZ. I’m moving old main-page posts to a blog-thing page that will hopefully be linked at the top of the main page if I can figure it out. Mostly for myself, but also for anyone interested in the history of my little business. Below is the post as written then.

7/14/2021 UPDATE

It’s sad to say, but I will be closing the store at its current location as soon as I can sell the fish that still live here. In mid April, the Autonation dealership in the neighboring lot bought our shopping center for $9m and are kicking out all the small businesses they can. I could not negotiate a buy out of any sort, as they chose to simply wait out my lease and refuse to renew it. While my lease doesn’t end until June 2022, this is a very seasonal business and paying rent over the winter just to move out at the start of next season isn’t worth it. And so, I lose by default.

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who supported me over the past tumultuous year. Opening during the Covid pandemic was certainly not part of the plan while I built this store for most of 2019, and to have survived at all was a miracle. Spring 2021 has been remarkably successful, and this has really helped me motivate to continue the business elsewhere. That said, the original store took me nearly a year to build, and moving out after the summer was not part of the plan either, so while I’m not giving up forever, I don’t expect to be operating in a significant capacity by Spring 2022. My current projected course of action will be to build a smaller facility at my house and operate largely by appointment. TBD.

I will keep the business phone number active and be available for house calls, pond care tutorials, and sick fish diagnosis and treatment. I’ll also probably end up with a lot of leftover food if you’ve been enjoying the Kloubec Koi Pellets I use here at the shop and need to buy more.