Sometimes I ask myself what you people want to hear about my boring old life.  Nothing, I think, and therefore it’s SO easy for me to blow off blogging and instead mess with the fish bowl, or boil eggs, go to the library, or make piles of laundry all over the house.  That’s been it lately.  A whole heap load of regular old crap that no one really needs to know about.

So anyhow, you wanna hear about my fish bowl?!  I can tell you’re just brimming with excitement.  I’m so excited about it.  I’ve been trying to take pictures, but it’s the basement for one, and we are not the neatest in the midst of a project for two.  Both good reasons why you aren’t seeing it yet.  It also takes us some time to get things done on account of us being cheap, I mean CREATIVE.

You see, hobbies are EXPENSIVE if you aren’t careful.  We have determined that pet keeping may be one most expensive hobbies we have around here.  You can get a bunny for like $30, but the cage is $75, bedding costs $20 a bag, and then there’s food, timothy hay, toys, etc.  The bedding is what really gets me though, because rabbits can stink up fresh bedding in about 20 seconds flat.  By the way, have you ever tried to cut the toenails of a bunny?  Did you know that bunnies can and will occasionally bite?  Oh yea, thanks Easter Bunny!

Anyhow, back to the fish.  The tank was a steal from Craig’s list (purchased about a year ago when I was working full time).  It was previously a reef tank, and when purchased we also got a huge skimmer, and three pumps, and two wet dry filter boxes, lots of lighting ballasts and hoods and bulbs… tons of stuff that we didn’t really need.  So right off the bat we’re going to recoup some of our money when we get off our butts and sell it off on Craig’s List ourselves.  We made our own wet dry filter from an old 55 gallon tank that we already had, so all that cost anything was a piece of acrylic from Home Depot and some silicone to hold it together.  We had to buy the lumber to build the tank stand, and the walls to the room, but the door came from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore for $5.00.  We also got a bar sink and countertop from ReStore with a whopping total for that setup at $5.00 as well.  I cannot stress enough what a HUGE help it is to have a sink right there next to the tank.  I drained the entire tank last night, and I didn’t have to lug buckets, and not one drop of water hit the floor.  Not ONE!  Anyhow, the sink stand was made from warped pieces of scrap wood left over from another project, and since it is function over fashion, it’s the best $5.00 we’ve probably ever spent.  The tank is 190 gallons, and based upon the info given on a bag of gravel at the pet store, you are supposed to have a certain amount of gravel in the tank.  I can’t remember exactly how much you’re supposed to have (and I’m too tired to attempt any math tonight, so sorry if you start to think that I’m an idiot when I finish this sentence), but when I calculated it at the store it was going to cost approximately $200 for enough gravel in the tank at $20 per bag.  Yes I know that’s 10 bags, I’m not that tired!  I just don’t know how much was in each bag.  We went to Home Depot and instead bought pea gravel for $2.53 per bag.  We needed 5 bags.  It looks better, too.

Here’s the kicker.  This is my fish tank, they will be my fish, my project, my responsibility, but my husband has his heart set on having moonlights on the tank.  I can’t tell you why, he just decided.  I think it was even a condition of helping me to get it going.  We found a light fixture at a local pet store on clearance that had moon lights in it.  They wanted $600 for it.  ON CLEARANCE!!!  Bitch, please!  My husband bought 6 blue led night light bulbs from Menards for $3.99 per two pack.  He went to the garage and fetched a 6 bulb cord we haven’t been using from our Christmas village, drilled 6 holes in a piece of thin plywood to fit the bulbs through, and hung it over the tank.  Voila!  Instant moonlight.  For how much?  Twelve dollars, which is a savings of like $588!  Who can beat that?  He even put it on a remote control for me.  So sweet.

So yes, we’re STILL working on the tank.  It seems like it’s taking forever, and it probably is.  Our goal is to get fish a week from this weekend so that we can empty the tank one more time and cycle it, redo some of the pipes that we think could work better, and move the pump which is currently in a spot that we’ve decided is difficult to access once the drywall goes up.  I just don’t know what we’ll do with all of our free time once this fish tank is done!  Oh right, watch fish swim around in the fish tank.