friday night was a date night for love-of-my-life karen and i… the kiddos were with their omi so we hung out and had a relaxing evening at home… had a fellow drop by to give us a quote on finishing our basement, had a drink or two, and caught up on some tv shows that we haven’t had time to watch… ’twas lovely…

the bad…

yesterday… the day i officially got old… for two reasons…

first… k and i dropped by the home depot… that gleaming orange beacon of possibility… and checked out some paint and carpet samples for the aforementioned soon-to-be-finished basement… whilst in-store we dropped by the most excellent and quite convenient tim hortons located therein… and were treated to quite possibly the funniest/most frustrating retail experience that i’ve seen in a while… behind the counter there were two kids that were truly inept… the lil’ feller that eventually “waited” on us was seemingly petrified/confused to be doing so… it was interesting enough to watch this poor soul deal with the public before us and then stumble through our order… when it came time to exchange funds is when it truly became great… our total was $2.93 (or about $3.11 USD… zing… hah) so i gave him $3.00… he says (and there’s no way to fully describe the sheer aggravating whinyness of his voice) “erm… we’re out of pennies” and gives me a nickel… i looked at it and said “so how are you gonna give me my change” or something to that effect… at this point love-of-my-life karen started edging away from the register… heading for paint and carpet land… the cute lil’ in-over-his-head feller shrugged his shoulders and said/whined “it’s only two cents”… so i explained to him that it was actually my two cents, called him a whippersnapper, and killed him… actually… after a second to process the situation i laughed it off and went to look at paint and carpet…

second… being as we’re about to embark on this basement thing all the crap treasures had to be moved out so whoever ends up doing all this stuff can see the floor… evidently that’s important… so i moved it all into our garage… and while in the past i could usually count on being a bit sore a day or two later from such an endeavo(u)r yesterday i was feeling it right away… by the end of the day my knees felt like they were going to explode and my body hurt all over… old… definitely old…

and the ugly… that’d be this debacle… looking for some kinda silver lining it becomes evident that a 1997 rose bowl rematch between the bloved buckeyes and my pal dw’s asu sundevils is a real possibility… and that’d be awesome…

a ruby red peacock (aulonocara (rubescens)) …

a trio of electric blue johanni (melanchromis cyaneorhabdos maingano)…

and some african non-cichlid catfish called synodontis multipunctatus…  which are very cool…

and along the way on our aquarium adventures i’ve discovered cichlid-forum.com… a very good site dedicated to these new  pals of ours…

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cichlid-wise… last weekend we added 2 demasoni (pseudotropheus demasoni)… 2 yellow labs (labidochromis caeruleus)… and a pair of hap ahli (sciaenochromis ahli)…

and the only non-cichlid addition of the week … a redtail black shark… (epalzeorhynchos bicolor)…

and our evidently super-hardy leftover pals the plecos (hypostomus plecostomus)are still in there doing very well…

we’re going back for cichlid-addition round two on sunday… the plan is to add 6 more followed by another 6 the following week… at which point we’ll be fully stocked for the short term…

lotsa fun was had… love-of-my life karen talked about it and posted some pics here… my favo(u)rite picture is yours truly fisting a wee little pumpkin with glee…

after recovering from the revelries on saturday we headed out to the fish sto’ to try to make sense of the fish situation… i mentioned our first wave of troubles here… unfortunately that wasn’t the end of it… we had (err… they had) the ick (ich) (f*cking ich as i like to call it)… and we experienced a near total wipeout of our tank… when all was said and done we had the two plecos (which is kinda cool because they’re my faves) and a black loach left…

so we took a water sample to our pals at big al’s… i was pretty tickled when my new best fish pal steve told me that our tank water was the best he’d seen in ages and ages… so the light was green… opportunity knocked… and k and i decided to answer and head to africa… our tank is now devoted to the african cichlids… which is kind of a big move… these fishies are kinda the link between fresh and saltwater… they’re a bit finicky… sometimes agressive… and don’t get along with the regular run-of-the-mill community-type fish… the cool thing is that they’re often pretty colo(u)rful and groovy lookin’ compared to the regular community folk… so i sorta feel like we’ve taken the step from aquarium neophytes to semi-experienced aquarist folk… apart from the fact that we just wiped out virtually our whole tank i guess…

anyway… we got some new dudes and dudettes to the aquarium today and we’ll add to them over the next couple of weeks… in a month we should have a pretty stylin’ and colo(u)rful tank… and as soon as i can figure out how to take some pictures of our new pals that are in focus and look good i’ll post ‘em…

a couple of months after moving into our new abode we bought a big ol’ fish tank… and it’s been the source of all kinds of pleasure for the whole family… i sure have gotten into it and have really enjoyed seeing it develop over the last year and a half…

well as we’ve rolled along we buy some fish… eventually some croak so we replace them with new ones… currently until recently we had a couple schools of tetras, 2 uber cool plecos, some silver scats, a couple of bala sharks and some loaches… all living peacefully… looking good… enjoying their 72 gallons of the world…

until recently, that is, because we’ve been right devastated but some kinda funk… as in “kill all the fish” funk…

it all started when we brought home the most recent additions… the silver scats… within a week we had some sorta fungus deal going on… so we treated the water and it seemed to stop it… we lost some lil’ fish pals but things seemed to stabilize and be ok…

until this eve… when i came home to find 6 dead lil’ fish pals… we haven’t had a month where we’ve lost 6 fish so far much less a day… including the remaining bala sharks and silver scats… well that sucks… primarily for them i guess…

i sure hope the rest of them apparently hardy fishies make it… this whole aquarium thing has become quite the groovy hobby and we’ve been pretty successful thus far… i don’t want to have to nuke the whole aquarium and start again…

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