Month: November 2010

Fishtank update

Kevin made a ton of progress out in the garage over the weekend on the new systems for the new tank. First of all, the new sink is installed in its new location (against the laundry room wall instead of the back wall).


I can’t even tell you how happy I am to have the old one gone and a shiny one with nice knobs in its place. He also made major progress on the new counters/furniture that will hold the pumps, skimmer, sump, etc. Lots of cutting and gluing — a few pieces clamped and drying shown here:


The weekends keep galloping by, but there’s been good, steady progress.

Meanwhile, our current tank is still trucking along. We’ve been putting off replacing any of the live rock or sand until the new tank is ready, and have been paying for it with some very high nitrates. So, stepping up the water changes, and Monday two weeks ago, Henry and I took a trip down to the fish store right after work to buy some new live rock for the refugium. It’s a huge piece, about 20 pounds, and will hopefully help stabilize things a bit.

It came with the neatest little white thick-bodied starfish (not sure if they’re friends or foe, but there are certainly a zillion of them, and we have enough experience with how irrepressible starfish are to just shrug and enjoy watching them on the glass). And here’s a shot of the tank mid-cleaning after blowing detritus out from under the rocks.

An hour after this activity once the sponges and filters have had a chance to remove the murk, the water always looks gorgeous and so clear.

And the mundane

I managed to clean half of the gutters during the kiddo’s nap on Saturday!

It was the easier half of the house, in that they are only a few rungs up on the ladder – the ones around the kitchen and garage are still left (too high for me, maybe Kevin will attempt them), plus the front of the house (skipped because I didn’t want to wake the toddler with ladder clatter). It’s been a windy, stormy fall so far, so this won’t be the last gutter cleaning of the year, but I still felt virtuous. Even more so for going out despite the rain, though that turned out to have a major upside – with the rain filling the gutters with water, there were almost no creepy-crawlies to contend with. I also pulled the little lines of moss off the bottom several rows of tiles, so big improvements all around.