Weather and other unchangeable truths...

Went out to the carriage company owner's farm to wash horses for downtown so that they are looking good for driving this coming week.  This is our big time of year!  Pretty ponies, pretty lights, pretty carriages, pretty snow...all of which lend to the popularity of carriage rides.  Since the boss lady had a pretty bad accident last week, a couple of us drivers volunteered to clean horses.  Thankfully, the weather cooperated until the last 15 minutes or so, being nice and warm and sunny with a small breeze.  Then the breeze decided to become unruly and drop the temperature pretty quickly.  Got a little bit of snow as I was heading back into town, which, since it wasn't too very cold yet, was mixed with goopy white mush which could, I guess, loosely be termed as "snow".

Tortured the dogs yesterday with a visit to the vet for their shots and River got an extra torture treat in the form of a nail grinding in the salon.  YAY!  No more pointy nails!  YAY!  No more rabies!

In tank news...got it nice and cleaned up.  Did a water change with RO water and will do another partial tomorrow.  Finding that my best bet for the types of plants I want is to mail-order the ones I can't get at my own store.  There are a few that I really like that are true south american aquatics, though I may cheat and use a few non-biotopic plants as well.  I really like anubias barteri nana.  The true biotopic plants I want to use are Cabomba caroliniana, Echinodorus sp., and Vesicularia sp..  Fish are still up in the air yet.  My heater is aiming at 76 degrees, which limits some of the higher-temp loving fish.  Looking at hatchets, cardinal tetras, corydoras sp., other tetras, and otocinclus cats.

Here's a pic of the settled tank with the driftwood and rainbow rock already set up.

Then  a pic down through the right piece of driftwood.

A look into the rock cave in the middle of the tank.

And a look through the left piece of driftwood.

Can't wait to see some life in there.  Going to take in a water sample tomorrow or Friday to see what the 25% change did for my pH.  Also learned that I need to buffer my RO water.  Going to be doing some research on how much to use as far as Baking Soda goes.