csammisrun

…because I have a fiancée!

Courtney’s ring - green sapphire, 3/4 carat brilliant round, in a white gold setting.

More pictures on Flickr.

We got new living room furniture!

Bookcase, coffee table, loveseat. The big bushy plant on the left of the bookcase is a prayer plant, the smaller one is a dwarf umbrella tree.

The loveseat and dining room table. Also pictured: French horn and spider plant.

The couch and a small palm tree (I think) on the wall facing the bookcase.

Our new vacuum (thanks Bed Bath and Beyond gift card contributors!) and one of the reasons for it.

Haha, misleading post title!

2009 is proving to be a great year for organization, and Courtney’s at the forefront of this trend. Her car’s trunk has been getting on her nerves for some time now. Its collection of jumper cables, dog blankets, empty shoe boxes, and god-knows-what-else has been rattling around in her mind as much as it has been in the trunk. But no more, thanks to one (extremely cold) Sunday’s worth of work.

The trunk of Courtney’s Accord, Stanley.

The plan was to create a shelving unit in the trunk. A trip to Home Depot netted some fine shelving racks which we cut up with a saber saw and positioned with zip ties.

The rack was designed to hold one largish under-bed box, and a smaller box for smaller things. A piece of PVC cut to size, drilled, and zip-tied on prevents the smaller box from slipping.

The most difficult part of assembly was creating pillars that would attach to the car’s frame and allow the frame to hang down about a foot. No zip-ties here: small bungee cords were looped through the pillars to hold them to the shelf, which were then hooked to the frame…

…which took forever and involved a lot of very cold hands and awkward angles, but it worked! We eventually replaced the bungee cords on the back with (you guessed it) zip ties. After three times losing the very taut cord down in the PVC and having to re-run it, zip ties looked reeeeally good.

Hooray for organization!

There are more photos on the Flickr set “Junk In The Trunk”. This project had way too many fun names

Just to update my previous post, the new topoff is done and operating nicely. All the pictures are up on the project page.

November has just flown by without a whole lot of crazy stuff going on. You all know how it is: DST changes and hours become other hours, three entire Thursdays go by until Thanksgiving, then before you know it December.

My job continues to be great. When I started here I asked if I could have a fishtank, and the answer was “well how big of a tank?” then “sure.” Earlier this month I up and put a 2.5 gallon tank (designed by Courtney, more on that later) on my desk, and in that tank I put a betta. Between the tank and my vine, I’ve got a nice zen thing going on.

The tank on my desk. Not pictured: any work whatsoever.

The betta, whose name is Pixel because he’s red-green-blue.

My home-animals are also good. I don’t have any recent pictures of my saltwater fishtank, though I did take a couple of the cats in their new beds. They got beds because they’re now banished from sleeping in my bed due to them being hairy and shedding like crazy, which means I have to shut them out of my bedroom at night. I didn’t want them to be uncomfortable

Gromit

Shaun

Also, I made some Christmas earlier this week. My large fake tree from last year ended up looking odd and being a general pain in the ass, so I got a small fake tree instead.

Aww, Gromit wants to be Christmas!

I was having some serious problems getting a non-fuzzy picture of the tree.

Or non-speckled.

I’ve been idly reading forums geared towards automotive enthusiasts who own Mazdas. It seems that a semi-popular thing to do with Mazda3s is to re-badge them as a Mazda Axela. I’m not that big of a fanboy, but Courtney had an interesting proposition: why not re-badge it as a 323?

I looked on eBay, but no one was selling extra badges from the Mazda3 and the Mazda2 (I wanted to make the fonts look decent). All seemed lost, until Courtney noticed the car’s side panels: a shiny “2.3″ badge on each side. Well dang, between the immediate availability of numbers and the fact that yesterday peaked around 75 degrees, how could I not?

It’s been three months since I bought my new car; I’m honestly surprised I haven’t done something like this already

Fishing line behind the badge cut through the adhesive holding it on in relatively short order.

The car was sitting in the sun, so the adhesive was already soft. Hot water, soap, and my thumb cleaned the residue right off.

Both 2.3 badges and the 3 badge from the back are off. Also featured, the lovely gouge some asshat left in my bumper a couple months ago.

The 2.3 badges got de-gooped, sawed apart, sanded down, and reset on 3M indoor/outdoor mounting tape. I think this is pretty much exactly what Mazda used in the first place.

Laying out how the re-purposed badges will look.

Hooray, a Mazda3…wait

Victory!

It’s so beautiful!

A wash and a wax later, and everything looks spectacular. Thanks to Courtney for the great photos, and the idea, and locating the 2.3 badges, and cleaning off the badges, and making handy loops of fishing line for cutting them off in the first place…we went through a lot of fishing line.

Recently, my girlfriend has been thinking about getting a cartilage piercing in her ear. She did some research on the topic - as any good librarian does - and found a place in Waldo, MO called Irezumi. It’s evidently rated very highly among tattoo and piercing enthusiasts.

Last night around 9:30, we were sitting around debating what we should do. Bowling? Nah. Pool? We’ve done that recently. We wanted something new. Courtney started looking around online to see what Irezumi’s hours were, in case she wanted to get the piercing sometime soon. Turns out they were open until 11PM Saturday night. I suggested that she could go get it done now, and before either of us knew it we were heading to get a hole poked in her ear.

I don’t know anything about tattoo parlors or piercing establishments in general, but I have to say I was very impressed with Irezumi. The place is very clean, the staff is friendly, and the entire process was inexpensive and very fast. A++++++ would watch someone get needled again.

Last night I took quite a lot of pictures of my fishtank and its inhabitants. The entire set is on Flickr, but I have a couple pictures saved locally for those who do not have access to Flickr at work.

A small colony of zoanthids

The full-tank shot

I managed to post threads about my fish tank on two different forums but forgot about my blog.

A while ago I decided I wanted to start with saltwater reefkeeping again, so when I ordered a small fishtank for my office, I decided to salt it up. Putting it in my office, however, just wouldn’t be very practical. The tank I’m using is only three gallons, and in the dry atmosphere of a heavily air-conditioned office, it’d evaporate like crazy. That’s bad enough with a freshwater tank but it’s really bad with saltwater because salt doesn’t evaporate, so the salinity of the water would fluctuate badly. It wasn’t too bad with my 10g tank back at CSSM because I had a topoff going and there was more water mass to balance things out. Long story short(ish), the tank ended up in my living room instead.

So, with minor alterations, here’s the contents of the thread I posted on Something Awful:

I bought a 3 gal Picotope a couple weeks ago, and decided to make it a nano reef in the general style of Sandeep’s 5.5 gal with in-tank refugium. I didn’t go the full refugium route, but I really liked the idea of partitioning off the hardware with the addition of an overflow.

The bare Picotope, it’s about 11″ x 8″ x 8″.

The piece of plexi I cut for the partition. It’s 3/32″ thick, with slats for overflow and a hole for the return powerhead. It’s about to be painted with Krylon Fusion flat black and set in the tank with GE Silicone I.

The tank is masked off and ready for the equipment area to be painted with Krylon Fusion satin black. I ended up masking off the bowed part of the equipment area so I had a place to look in and make sure things were working okay.

Looking into the equipment area after the painting. The powerhead (MJ400 or 600, I forget) and the HOB Taam Rio Nano skimmer are visible here. Note the plastic screw on the skimmer - that’s not stock. I didn’t like the way it was hanging on the back, so I got some little rubber stick-on feet and fixed them to the skimmer against the glass, then used a securing screw from an old HOB skimmer to get a tight fit. No rattling = good

The tank on its stand in my living room. The lamp that comes with the Picotope is a 9 watt PC 50/50, which I may be upgrading at some point.

Water + sand + rocks from an older tank added. There are a lot of microbubbles, which will hopefully go down as the skimmer activates.

Already churning away!

For stocking, when the time comes, I’ll probably stick with ricordea and zoas.

Since that thread was posted on August 4th, several things have changed. The microbubbles did subside after I added a piece of live rock from a nearby saltwater fish store, which activated the skimmer as the tank’s cycle got started. Ammonia/nitrite/nitrate testing a couple days ago indicated that the tank is almost done cycling. It’s already pretty freakin’ alive. There’s a small brittle starfish that came in with the piece of rock, an unexpectedly large number of amphipods (which is great, it indicates a healthy tank and makes good food for things), and last night I got a margarita snail and a scarlet reef crab. I’ll be taking more pictures tonight, after I pick up the fourth season of House and ingredients for gazpacho. Busy busy.

As promised, I got it washed and took many a’picture!

Click for the Flickr set