Weekend progress

• Yesterday we made our annual family trip into the fish pond store to get our starter fish for the koi pond. I've spent the past several weeks pumping out the murky nasty water that has been in it all winter long and then raking out the huge amount of nasty deteriorating leaves left behind. I'm being serious here when I say you could fill half of Wesley's room with the amount of leaves I removed from the pond. It's a job that I absolutely hate every year but once it's finished I truly love having the koi pond. It's a very peaceful area of the property that I tend to gravitate towards when I'm outside.
  
  We only got three medium sized fish this year to join the 12 or so that survived over the winter in our upstairs bathroom. You might remember I had originally saved around thirty last fall, and we are down to twelve. I've learned that a 40 gallon stock tank can successfully only hold about 10 fish. They might have faired better if I was religious about once a week water changes but they were lucky to get once a month water changes. Taking 10 gallons of water out every week got really old. This fall I'm only going to save the really large fish, the tiny ones I'll let Mother Nature take care of.



• For my birthday I got a Garmin GPS unit. Now this is something I would have never spent the money on myself since we are home bodies and don't tend to travel much. But we are really having fun with this thing. We actually all loaded up in the van yesterday just to drive around and try it out. I guess I didn't know that you can look locations up on it. I assumed you had to have an address in mind. We could be in town and look up restaurants within a 10 miles range. Very cool piece of electronics. I'm really looking forward to doing some geocaching. I think when Wesley gets older we could have a blast doing that during the week. Our little adventure.



• We've been battling an ant problem in our kitchen for a couple of seasons now and we've tracked it to the fact that we never completed the caulking job around the window. I tiled the backdrop back in June of 2007 but never felt confident with caulking to complete the job. So the ants have been taking over. Yesterday we caulked the kitchen and, surprise, the ants are gone. I feel like an idiot for not doing it sooner. The confident builder came from using a nifty tool called a Pro-Caulker. This is a "As seen on TV" product and it worked great. It made a smooth edge that I cleaned up with a sponge. It is so nice to see the kitchen project finished after nearly two years.


That was our productive weekend, hope you all had a nice one.