I'm glad you got a chuckle from my sig quote. I was raised in southern California and it sounded so "valley girl" to me that I loved it, plus I do follow the sun.
My outside pond has been very stable for several years now, it took it awhile to get there probably because it is concrete and the water here is very hard to start with. The lilies bloom all year but more towards the end of the rainy season which is now. I usually have one or two blooms but if I get in there this week and fertilize I should have 4 or 5 at a time for the next couple months.
The inside pond in our entry hall, it only gets sun for a couple of hours during the summer and only light the rest of the year. I haven't been able to grow anything in it because there just isn't enough light, I do have bog filter boxes above it with pothos and philodendron growing bare root in the water. I could add grow lights but electricity is pretty expensive down here and I decided it wasn't worth it. I have cichlids in that pond, they have made way too many babies so I will have to get in there and catch some of them soon.
The pond on the roof is a cattle trough with lilies I'm growing out and more mollies and guppies. It cycles from green to clear during the year, we seem to have algae in the rain here and it is difficult to keep it clear in the rainy season. It gets full sun all year and the water is in the 90's F in the summer. It's hard to keep the plants fertilized enough, they burn through it so fast, so none of the lilies up there have very large pads or blooms.
This is the hall pond during the hour or so it gets direct sunlight.
