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I’ve always loved trains, so I figured it would be pretty hard for me not to like this movie. I had no idea, however, just how much I would like The Polar Express. It was magical… I don’t think there is another word for it. My son sat, staring straight ahead, with his mouth open, for the entire run of the film. Even my 20 month old daughter, who usually fidgets and wanders back and forth in front of me during movies at the theater sat and watched most of this one. After it ended my wife said that she had needed to go to the bathroom for more than half the movie, but had held it. If you had ever been to a movie with my wife, you would understand, given that, how much she liked it. If you haven’t seen it yet, please go.

I did a really stupid thing this morning. It’s a bit of a long story. Every year, on the day after Thanksgiving, Erica goes shopping with her mom and sister. They’re typically gone about 12 hours and so that leaves me with the kids and not much to do. This year on the spur of the moment I asked the kids if they wanted to go see a movie. I gave them the choice of The Incredibles or The Polar Express. Jonathan said he wanted to see both of them, but ended up choosing The Incredibles. I told him we would go see the train movie for Christmas Eve.

So, as Christmas Eve approached, being the techie that I am I purchased matinee tickets online for the first show of the morning. This morning we all had breakfast and piled into the car in enough time to get to the theater by about 20 mins before the show started at 10:40am. Of course when we got there the show had already been going fro about 20 mins… because it actually started at 10:05am. Duh. So much for me being a smart guy. Erica even told me she had been thinking it started earlier than that. She should have mentioned that at 9am… not 11am. Oh well. We’re going to the 3:45pm show now. Two sets of tickets for one movie. Nice.

The fish are now in. We’re the proud owners of 10 neon tetras, 3 zebra danios and 3 otocinclus catfish. They all went into the tank today and the tank is now covered on two sides with Christmas wrapping paper so the kids can unwrap it and discover their fish tomorrow.

I haven’t posted an update about the fishless cycle in a while, so I’ll do that now. I finally started getting nitrite readings about a week and a half ago. They steadily climbed, then I started to get a little nitrate. I kept adding about a milliliter of my ammonia solution each day and things seemed to progress well. I also finally found a local(ish) store that sells Marineland Labs “Bio-Spira,” which is the only cycling product that people seem to recommend. Since the fishless cycle was not really complete (meaning zero ammonia and zero nitrite) before I put the fish in I added some bio-spira last night after changing about 60% of the water to remove the built up nitrates. That should ensure that there is enough bacteria in the tank to convert the fish waste to nitrite and then nitrate. I’ll monitor the levels over the next few days and do frequent partial water changes as needed.

It’s awfully exciting to finally have the fish in the tank, though the danios are the only ones brave enough to swim around much so far. The neons are all hiding in the back at the bottom of the tank and the otocinclus are hiding among the plants. Hopefully they’ll all warm up to their new home and become a bit more active by the time the kids see them tomorrow.

Yesterday we attended the first of a certain type of event that I am sure will grow to number in the hundreds. I am speaking, of course, of the school program. It was Jonathan’s “Challenger School - Room 4 Winter Program.” The 20 or so kids in Jonathan’s class performed about 10 different Christmas songs and danced a little for us. It was really cute. I think our initiation as parents is now complete. We’ve experienced the circumcision, the diapers, the baths, the illnesses, the weening of the pacifier, the constantly buying new clothes, the cleaning up of vomit, the potty-training, the chauffering to a hundred different places, the homework and the first school program. The only thing left now is the paying for college.

This is teh funnay.

I got a small taste of what eternal damnation must be like. I awoke in the pitch darkness at 2:55 this morning with “The Greatest Love of All” stuck in my head. Gah!! No,… no! Make it go away!

After consulting with an online forum on fishkeeping, it seems I was mistaken to follow to the letter the directions on fishless cycling. I’ve now made a major water change in order to bring the ammonia level in the tank down to between 1 and 4 ppm. The group opinion on the forum was that I wasn’t seeing any bacterial activity because there was way too much ammonia in the tank. So, for anybody who happens upon this and is going to do something similar, you can avoid the pitfall I was trapped in for a week by initially adding ammonia to bring the titer to between 3 and 5 ppm, then add no more ammonia until you start to see the ammonia level drop and the nitrite rise. My ammonia level was off the charts for a week because I kept adding ammonia. I don’t know how much I ended up with in the tank, but it was a lot, it took almost a complete water change, (done in several steps over almost 24 hours) to get it down to a manageable level. I’ve also added a bit more seed material from my neighbors tanks today, so hopefully I should be in good shape.

Okay, so we’re a week into our fishless cycle, according (mostly) to the instructions in Chris Cow’s article. I added ammonia to the tank to get it to ~5ppm on the first day. It took about 15ml of my ammonia from Walmart. I added the same the second day, and of course the measurement was through the roof. I decided to cut back to just 5ml per day so it wouldn’t get out of control. So, I’ve added 5ml each day since the second. Here’re the measurements so far:

So, as is plainly obvious, nothing is really happening yet. I added some gravel from an established tank yesterday, and assumed (perhaps mistakenly) that I would see some nitrite pretty quick, but I haven’t. So, I’ll keep following the directions for a few more days before I begin to panic that we won’t be ready for fish by Christmas.

So we got our plants, etc., yesterday and I added them to the tank. Several of the plants came with a bonus plant along with the one I ordered so there are more plants in the tank than I was planning on. It’s a good thing because it would have looked a bit bare…. And I thought I ordered too many.

I also took an initial ammonia reading of between 0 and 0.25 ppm, then added 10 ml of ammonia solution to the tank. I’ll let that sit for about 30 mins then take another reading.

The pH reading was a bit high… 7.4ish, so I’ll have to get something in there to lower that a bit in the next day or two. I am surprised our tap water is so acidic.

Here’s what the tank looks like now that the plants are in: