Weekend

I was going to talk about what we did on Friday, but I honestly can't even remember, so it must not have been anything too great. Oh yeah, I think we went to Home Depot and picked up some PVC pipe, and Marc and I constructed a set of weave poles for Bandit. I'd borrowed my dad's PVC pipe cutter this time, so cutting the pipe was a bit easier than when I used a hacksaw to make the jump. The weave poles turned out pretty nicely (I forgot to take a picture), although they're not the sturdiest, since I didn't use glue, because we needed to be able to take them apart easily for storage.

OH! I also installed the new power compact lights into the canopy. The screws that the kit came with were too long, so I had to jimmy it temporarily until I can get shorter screws. Other than that, it turned out pretty nice, and it's a heck of a lot brighter than the cheapy light we got with the aquarium. It has two bulbs, one that's a white, and one that's a blue, and the blue gives it a really nice ocean-y look. One more set of these, and we should be able to keep a few of the lower-light corals. I also forgot to take a picture of this, but I'll try to remember later.

Speaking of fish, I think we may lose our yellow tang today. I went to check on the fish this morning, and he was just kind of sitting on the bottom of the tub. He flitted around a bit, but not very much. Stupid puffer started nipping at him too, until I batted him away with my finger. I thought about moving the tang to our other quarantine tank, but I was already late for work, and it was going to take at least another hour to acclimate him properly. So, I'm prepared to see a dead tang tonight when I get home. Real bummer, since they'd all been doing fine for these past three weeks.

Saturday Sheep

So anyways, on Saturday, Marc's family came over for lunch. We went out to eat Armadillo Willy's, and I got the baby back ribs, which were pretty good. After that we hung out for a bit, before everyone went home. Marc and I then got changed, loaded up the dog in the car, and headed off to his sheep herding lesson.

Once again, I went in with Bandit with the sheep. It really isn't as easy as Jan makes it look. Half the time I didn't know what I was doing or where I was supposed to be going, and most of the time I was just trying to not get run over by the sheep. Poor Bandit was probably fairly confused. Jan was explaining to me what we were trying to accomplish (to get the dog to run wide around the sheep to bring them to me), and I started to get it on my last trip into the pen. It was tiring work! Marc took some videos of me stumbling around with the sheep, which you can see here.

After that, we stopped by Tower Records, because I had a $20 gift card from our company's Christmas party that I still hadn't used. I'd been wanting to get the movie Babe, which they had, and which coincidentally cost $20. I'd seen it before, but wanted to get in on DVD, since it's a great movie. So I watched that when we got home. It's such a cute movie, with a totally great message (about how an unprejudiced heart can change the world and people around it). And, dorky as it is, watching the sheep herding scene with the dogs going "come by" and "away to me" was pretty exciting.

That night, Marc and I watched Reservoir Dogs, which was good, but weird, which I guess is run of the mill for a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Sunday morning we went to a couple of fish stores to look for a new fish, but didn't find any that we liked. I think we might go with a hippo/blue tang, even though they're not the easiest to care for, but they're neat looking fish. We found a few, but only fairly large ones, too big for our tank.

We took Bandit to the dog park for a little bit, and then I drove down to Milpitas to watch LOTR: Return of the King with my brothers, for my third and final time. It was still awesome, even though the theater sucked, and someone spent the whole time coughing up a lung behind us. People, if you're sick, please don't go and spend 3 hours in a crowded movie theater. Seriously, common sense goes a long way.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to the bathroom and not wash my hands.