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My brother James built us a custom designed steel stand for our tank, and brought it to us yesterday:

So, now we’ve got the tank about half full of water. The plants I ordered should arrive tomorrow or the next day, along with the heater and water testing kit. Then we can really get underway with this little project.

In related news, we decided to do a fishless cycle using ammonia to encourage and feed a bacterial colony. I finally was able to find decent ammonia at Wal-mart of all places. Every other bottle of ammonia I looked at foamed when shaken, but this stuff didn’t. According to Fishless Cycling Revisited the foaming means it has surfactants and other additives, which is bad for the bacteria. It was coincidentally the cheapest I found as well, at $.42/bottle. My neighbors have a small fish tank, so with a little luck I’ll be able to get a squeeze from their filter to put into ours and get the colony started. We’ll keep adding ammonia to feed the bacteria until the day before the fish go in. If all goes well we should have a thriving bacterial colony and be able to add quite a few fish all at once, instead of adding just a couple at a time.

Yesterday was the release date for the new U2 CD, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and, being a fan, but not one of those strange people who must have the CD at the midnight release party, even though they’ve already heard all the songs because they’ve been available on the internet for two weeks, I went and purchased it after work. Not two seconds after getting it home, sitting down, unwrapping it and setting it on my lap while I put the case away, my 19 month old daughter grabbed it. Of course I fairly instantly grabbed it back and told her “No, No!” There is no fiddling with Dad’s media in our house. Kids’ media is just fine. There’s a very large distinction between Dad’s and Kids’ media in our house. Anyway, that was that. I put it in the player, donned my Sennheisers and reclined to listen. First 4.5 tracks played just fine, the last half of track five had two skips in it. Track six was nothing but skips. Now, I have been suspecting that my old CD player is a little out of alignment so I was not terribly alarmed. However, when track six was nothing but skips, I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter. Marissa had put a nice clean scratch all the way across the disc, and gooped it up with her perpetually greasy fingers. The former, not a big deal because as any CD cleaning instructions will tell you it’s much less of a problem to have a latitudinal scratch than one “with the grain.” The latter, not a big deal because grease is easily cleaned from a CD by following said instructions. It just amazes me, though, that children can damage things so very quickly!

What did I think of the disc? Well, like most new music released by artists I have enjoyed in the past, it is going to take a little getting used to. It took about 6 months for me to really get comfortable with All that You can’t Leave Behind, but now it is one of my favorite albums. I can see the new one getting there too.

Haven’t said much about our fish project lately because we’re still waiting to get our tank stand finished so we can start cycling the tank. Since my last post I’ve upgraded the power filter on the tank to an Emperor 275. It’s a better filter overall, and from what I am reading it seems you can almost never over-filter your water. I also happened across a deal on a slightly damaged decoration over at Petco, so now we’ve got a dilapidated Roman Coliseum in the tank. We picked up a 10lb bag of black gravel to mix in with our riverbed stuff to darken the color a little and hopefully bring out the color of the fish. I have also ordered several other items:

-Various plants

The tank is 22 inches tall so I had to get some pretty tall plants. I went with Tetra Plantastics plants because their color was a little darker than the other plants we’ve seen in the stores around here and we liked that. They looked a little more natural. The plants are coming from thatpetplace.com since that seemed to be the only place I had heard of that carried Plantastics items. They have a huge assortment of other plants as well, though they seem to be a touch more expensive than other places.

Everything else came from www.bigalsonline.com since they have pretty good prices (a lot better than anywhere local… on the order of 40-50% less!).

-Visi-therm Stealth 200 watt Heater

Got this one on recommendations from various people.

-Mag-Float 125 Glass Cleaner

We knew that we needed a glass cleaner and the magnetic ones looked good. This one floats if it happens to get loose of the magnet.

-Tom Aquarium Digital Thermometer

This thermometer is a bit pricey, but it helps satisfy the geek in me. What can I say.

-Aquarium Pharmaceuticals Freshwater Master Test Kit

For testing the Ph/Ammonia/Nitrite/Nitrate levels in our water as we cycle and regularly after we get the fish into the tank.

-Marineland Emperor Cartridge - 4 Pack

Refills for our power filter which include fresh activated carbon and a clean polyfiber pad. The price on these at Big Al’s was approximately 75% less than in the local store!

Here’s the latest picture:

The intake for the filter comes pretty low to the gravel. I might shorten that an inch or two. Have to see what it is like once the plants are in.

Since I am in the updating frame of mind, here’s an update on my ‘74 Chevy:

It’s been sitting there since July. The branches have been in there at least two months. I haven’t had time to cut up the branches and get rid of them, let alone work on the truck. I go out and start it and let it run for a few minutes once every couple of weeks just for kicks. It still runs pretty well considering what bad shape it is in. Makes me sad to think of it just sitting there, though.

I finished Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World two days ago, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about it since then. Some reviewers on Amazon and elsewhere have complained that it lacked an explosive ending, and I can see their point. Getting to the end of a 2700 page story and finding that things just sort of… keep going on.. can be a bit of a let down. And yet, things didn’t just keep going on. I believe that Stephenson’s purpose when he set out to write these books was to show just how important the time period was to the rest of history. Everything changed in those few years at the end of the 1600s. People will likely look back on the end of the 20th century the same way in 400 years. I feel privileged in a certain way to have been able to witness the enormous technological advances made in my lifetime. Maybe that’s another reason Neal wrote the series at this time. There are definitely some parallels. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed all three books, more so than any other historical fiction I’ve read. I don’t know what Neal Stephenson has up his sleeve for his next book, but I am eagerly awaiting it.

Along with our tank came a box containing about 33lbs of gravel. As it was freshwater aquarium gravel he gave it to us free. I’ll take whatever I can get for free.

Today I rinsed it and added it to the bottom of the tank. The process of rinsing went like this:

-Transfer gravel to large rubbermaid
-Use garden hose to flush lots and lots and lots of water through the gravel while stirring the gravel around with hands
-The dirt and muck in/on the gravel floats to the top of the water and can easily be removed by tipping the container
-After several (about 15 or 20) cycles of this I turned the hose on full, left the container level and used the water pressure to stir up the gravel directly. The dirt still foated to the top of the container and over the sides when it filled up, but I didn’t have to have my hands down in the cold water and gravel to stir it up

I hate to think how much water I used for this process, but I think the gravel is plenty clean now. Then I used a smallish tupperware to move the gravel from the rubbermaid into the tank. Here’s what it looks like so far:

So we now have our aquarium, courtesy of a salt water fish dealer in Sandy who had a 37 gallon tank special ordered and never picked up, so we got it for a pretty good price. It’s a 37 gallon All Glass aquarium with a deluxe hood. We were lucky to find one that big that would fit in our limited space. We have about 30 inches of width left in our front room and that’s where it had to go. The tank is 30″ X 12″ X 22″ high. I have to say it looks pretty big even sitting next to the 45″ big screen. Erica wants to have plenty of fish, including a couple of largish ones, so we’ll definitely be able to use the size. It came with a 170 GPH Penguin Bio-wheel filter, but I think that may get exchanged for something bigger. People seem to recommend pretty serious over filtration, which I guess sounds like a good idea. We’ll see.

So, Phoebe’s intake manifold was fixed last Thursday. Friday night we drove her about 60 miles round trip to eat dinner with Erica’s family. We discovered during the trip that the cruise control did not work, nor did the fan direction controls on the heater. It also seemed to be idling a little rough at low RPMs. The check engine light came on Saturday morning when I drove it a little more. I popped the hood and found a loose vacuum line, which I figured could be the cause of the air controls, but I thought the cruise was all electronic.

Today we took her back to the shop and had them check her out again. Now everything is working fine. I guess that one loose vacuum connection affected all of the symptomatic systems. Cars are way too complex these days.

So we call our car Phoebe. My wife picked the name. Anyway, she is at the shop still, and the diagnosis is a broken intake manifold. Total cost of replacement including another flush and fill, oil change, new spark plugs and wires is $500. It could have been a lot worse.

That’s right. Everything is falling apart. I took my truck to the shop on Friday because it seemed to be acting weird and was getting really erratic gas mileage. That turned out ok. I took my car to the same shop on tuesday because it needed new tires, an oil change, radiator flush, etc. That was fine (other than it cost me $600 total!!) until last night when I was driving to work to do some late night router maintenance. I rounded the last corner and suddenly the engine starting running really choppy and the check engine light came on. By the time I got down the road a couple blocks and into the parking lot I could smell burning coolant and see big plumes of white smoke coming out the tail pipe. So I did the stuff that needed to be done last night and fortunately my boss was there with me and was able to give me a ride home. The tow truck just picked up my car and dragged it back to the shop.

To add insult to injury, the remote control key fob for the alarm on my truck broke this morning! Everything is breaking.