Long Weekend, Part 2

On Saturday we started gutting the house. I went through the closet & my bedroom and started throwing stuff away with extreme prejudice. I've already chucked out three big boxes of stuff, and have a table ready to depart as well. Not surprisingly, it took a long time. After that, we played some Heroic Halo 2, and are now pretty close to the finish (huzzah!). Around 7, we left for Target/Petsmart/Walmart to do some shopping for the house. Here's what we bought:

• Target
• Dinner, I guess. We ended up grabbing pizza in the Target cafe - pretty gross, actually, but we were all a little low on blood sugar and consequently cranky.
• Walmart
• Waffle Iron (yay! I've always wanted one!)
• Pots and pans - a very nice house present, since all we've ever had was cheap dollar-store items
• A new knife block (our old one was held together with packing tape) with unserrated edges, so we can sharpen them
• New cooking utensils, like spatulas, flippers, cooking & measuring spoons, and a meat thermometer
• A new flat griddle for french toast
• Petsmart
• A flourescent tube for the light on the tank, although it looks like we need a whole new light strip, because the light won't stay on
• Fluval filter media (pre filter, carbon, and peat granular to handle mechanical, biological, and chemical filtration, respectively)
• A new bubble wall, for water aeration
• A new manual tank vacuum, to get the yucky stuff out of the gravel

Sunday morning I got an early morning call from work (I'm on call for two weeks at a time, with a two week break in between), but managed to get everything working. Yay for me. Otherwise, it was more of the same - got up, made breakfast, including waffles on the new iron, played some computer games, screwed around. We watched The Aviator on Sunday afternoon, and I recommend just turning the movie off after the first hour and 30 minutes -- the last half is depressing and slow. After the movie, I washed all the old gravel for the big tank, put together the Fluval with new media, placed the fake plants, and organized a bucket brigade to start filling. It didn't take too long, and the filter started right up as soon as it was primed. By this morning, the water was crystal clear. I still want to add a background, and maybe throw in some feeder fish to get some good bacterial growth.

A good, relaxing holiday. On Thursday, I thought the weekend would last forever. On Sunday, I wanted to know where all the time went.