Aquariums, Siding and Minecraft

School has been going for a month now and I'd like to say I've fallen into a nice routine but alas I haven't. I've been sculpting a lot and selling a lot but I forgot how long it takes to package up sculptures and ship them out. Some days I spend the whole day doing that. And then there are days like today where I don't work at all. Today I did something I've never done before. Today I boiled driftwood in a big pot on the stove.

You might be asking yourself, why would anyone boil driftwood? Well apparently if you are wanting to put a big lovely chuck of driftwood in an aquarium you should boil it first to kill anything living in it and to release the tannin in the wood. This is all great if you happen to have a ginormous pot big enough to put the whole chunk of wood in. I do not. So I had to periodically rotate the wood so all chunks were boiled. Then it went into a Rubbermaid container with water to leech out the rest of the tannin. I will change out the water daily until the water stays clear instead of tea colored (because nobody wants tea colored water in their aquarium).

See look! You learned something new today, as did I. This is all being done so eventually I can place the wood in a 35 gallon hex tank I just bought off of craigslist. It's been cycling for a week now and I'm thinking it might be time for a couple of fish to help the cycling. My parents were kind enough to bring me driftwood and rocks from Colorado, thanks guys! Since the driftwood will take weeks to be ready I put some of the rocks they brought home in the tank. I can hardly wait to fill it with schooling fish.

Sean has been busy working on the siding in all of his spare time. It's coming along. I think he's more than ready to be done with it.

The kids are enjoying school. Greta's anxiety seems to have gone away for the time being. She was having a pretty rough time when kindergarten started but we've been working on it and she's coming out of her shell. I'm super proud of her. Each day they come home from school, do their homework and then play Minecraft together. They build some pretty fascinating stuff. That's about all that is going on around here.