Friday, February 15

Fun week!

February 10th (Sunday) we had a gas leak... the gas company came out and turned our gas off. It was about 4 degrees outside. After a quick trip to wal-mart and lots of towels around all the aquariums, we managed okay. It never got below 62 in the house. I took the cold sensitive dogs to my parents' house. Roofus, the sheepdog, was in sheer bliss. He loves cold. I had to move all the birds into the kitchen near a big space heater.

The next day when I got an emergency plumber to fix the problem, the gas company said they wouldn't turn it back on until the following day. Mickey called them back and they were out ninety minutes later. :) You don't appreciate things like heat and hot water until you've been without them! My hot shower that night was absolute heaven.

My Cladiella coral (aka colt or blushing coral) came out fully two days ago. I was pretty happy about that. I haven't seen it fully expanded in what seems like a couple weeks, at least. My duncan coral, though, has taken to not being fully extended. That just started yesterday, not sure what it's deal is. I want to take a photo of it for a photo contest, and I'd rather he was out completely. I've been fiddling with macro mode and I got a few neat shots.

Popper starts flyball tonight! I'm excited. We have jumps and stuff at home, but we don't have the room to put all four out at the same time, and it's too cold to do it outside. He's really wimpy about cold weather (he has dingo fur after all, very thin) so I worry about him at the place... it's not heated at all.

Here's a cool photo of Merlin I got last week. Isn't he cute? I wish he would bring the ball back. He's a very nervous dog, I'm not sure how successful we'll be, but at lessons the woman doesn't even try to get him to get the ball. He's already a pro at coming and going over the jumps, so really it's kind of a waste of our time if we're not going to introduce the ball. He gets the ball every time at home, so he needs to be exposed to it in class as well.

I've been adding flyball designs like crazy, some breed specific. Go look! Buy stuff. :) Keep my pooches in flyball class!

Wednesday, February 6

Moving Corals Around

Aside from being harassed by five stir-crazy dogs all day (it's been POURING rain for several days now), I moved a lot of my photosynthetic corals from my seven gallon nano to my ten gallon nano. I recently got an awesome Current USA Orbit fixture with lunar lights that blows away my piddly lighting on the bowfront. I left the pulsing xenia in the seven for now; I want to see how the other corals react to a 4x more wattage light. Normal tanks have 4-5 watts per gallon - my tank has 8! They're chilling on the bottom right now, I'll see how the are tomorrow.

I can't wait till flyball friday... Mickey is going to run Merlin so he gets used to be handled by him, and I'm going to take some photos and videos. If I get some good ones I'll post them. I am a fairly decent photographer so I think we can assume I will get some nice shots. ;) Popper starts flyball the following friday. I feel bad for Roofus but he's a giant breed dog, in addition to being clumsy, and I just see flyball as being very bad for him! I definitely need to walk him a lot that day so he isn't so depressed when the other boys leave.

I bought two Honeywell air filters after my last bird filter bit the dust. It wasn't working well anyway - with all my critters, I could dust, and two days later, it would look like I hadn't dusted in a week. How obnoxious! God knows what was going on in our lungs. After I plugged them in it took about fifteen minutes and I felt WONDERFUL. If anyone is interested, they are the Silent Comfort, model 18155 I believe.

I've been working on the store a lot. Sometimes it feels like it's an uphill battle. :(