Fishtank Funkiness

So, remember I told you I had better pictures on my camera that would really do the whole fish tank funkiness factor justice? Well, without further ado, I give you: Fish tank FUNKINESS!!

One of our friends helping move these said, "I am pretty sure there's a cure for Cancer in there..."

Duckweed, get your Duckweed here!

NAS-to-the-TY!

And then later after they all were sitting in the garage, we washed out and cleaned out all of the tanks:

in the process of cleaning, filling, scrubbing, sorting gravel and  flushing out to clean some more!

Ooh, shiny!

I think more of the plan for this weekend is to rebuild the stand. Once the stand is built, we can paint it, and bring it into the house to start putting our "fish room," aka normal people's living room - back together again.  It is quite the room of chaos down there right now - tanks on the floor filled with fish in them. I fee like I am in a hatchery when I walk downstairs, and BOY did it SMELL like one in that room for awhile! Our garage sure smells pretty funky too. With all of the gravel out there, not to mention the 55-gallon tank with about one million snails still trying to cling to life in there, it is smelly.

Oh, and I did have this picture from my camera from about 2 weeks ago...one single leaf changing colors in our tree... fall was coming! Now almost all of the leaves have changed and a majority of them have already fallen. Guess that means it is almost time to hit the apple orchard!

-LD

Sew not me...

For the past few years, maybe 5, I have wanted to prove to myself that I can, in fact, sew with a sewing machine. Not just sew in a straight line, mind you, but actually do some "trickier things," like blind hemming pants, or sewing a button hole. These are all things that my Grandma K can do in her sleep and my Grandma N could also do while unconscious, before the Dementia set in. So, take that, two Grandmothers who rock the house at sewing. For real. Grandma K used to sew her own clothes, my aunt's ice skating outfits, and alter clothes for people on  a regular basis. I always went to her to hem my pants. Yes, being short has me almost ALWAYS needing an inch or three off the bottom of most pants I purchase.

I decided to try and be more self-reliant. I purchased my first sewing machine at a Black Friday sale at Walmart. Everything about that previous sentence is wrong on so many levels. But I digress. Right after I got the machine, set it all up, took a class from my Grandma K about sewing and I was off. The machine worked great. Until about the 4th pair of pants I was going to hem, the machine almost literally fell apart on the table. I donated the machine to a charity after thoroughly reading through the manual trying to figure out where I or it went wrong. I never could figure it out or what happened, so I decided to donate it to someplace that might have more than a slight figment of a clue as to what they were doing.

Fast-forward to more recent time after we had moved into our house. Grandma K had been doing one of her routine "house clean-out and donate" bouts, and decided to part with one of her old Singer sewing machines that she wasn't using as much as her new, shiny Husqvarna digital sewing machine. This is the same machine that she first taught me how to sew with, and I was so excited to get it home and start up my dusty "interest." I struggled through a few more pairs of pants and fixing some shirts, but never really got the full hang of it the way my Grandma K could effortlessly hem and press a pair of pants in about 5 minutes. Seriously.


Well, this weekend, I ran over with my bag of dress pants, capris and jeans that I was looking for lessons on how to alter. She helped me do one pair and then I told her that I would take it from there, as I needed to practice so that I could eventually get it. I came home, and tried to pick it up again today on her old machine. Everything looked weird and I became so disappointed in myself that I could not, for the life of me, blind hem a simple pair of pants. I was a failure. But, I am not going to give up! I am going to ask my Grandma if she will come over to MY house and show me on her old machine here, how to do it all. That way, maybe she can watch me and see and correct things that I am doing incorrectly and fix bad habits now, rather than later, if at all.


Well, I am off to enjoy the last few hours of the glorious weekend,
-LD

Ain't Nobody Gonna Bring Me Down!

So, today was the second day in a pretty awesome week thus far!

I am sick of people using social media to just whine and complain without any suggestions for change. It just gets old, so, I thought I would post a happy post!

The weather here in MN is B-E-A-UTIFUL with temps in the high 70s to mid 80s, the fall colors are in peak status and looking awesome, work is keeping me busy and I have been getting noticed by more people and really able to help out others in the company.

Here is a quick peek at a road near my work from the other day, right by the river:

I think I might have mentioned this earlier, but have you noticed how pimped-out the school buses are nowdays?! I was behind this one the other day and was like, wow, these things are starting to resemble space shuttles!

Also, I mentioned in the last post about the pending fish tank exchange. Well, it is currently underway! Derick and crew went over to the man's house from Craigslist to pick up and pay for the six-40 gallon breeder tanks, the stand and a ton of accessories! Here are some of the "before" photos of what we were working with...

I will post more photos once I download them from my camera - these were taken from where the tanks are currently sitting - in our garage, until they are all cleaned. Derick and I got the gravel out of 4 of the 6 tanks on Sunday of this past weekend, rinsed them out and rinsed out the gravel. I also hand-picked through all of the gravel picking out the "gems" from the gravel...marbles, square pieces of decorative glass pieces, etc. It is going to be a lot of work to get them all cleaned and where they need to be, but once they are cleaned and the new stand is built and the fish are placed in their new homes, it will be worth it and we will be able to sit back and watch 6 different species of fish in different tanks, not to mention a number of 10-gallon tanks beneath the 6-40 gallon tanks! We are going to have to have a Doberstein Aquarium grand opening!

-LD