Fishy Update: It's ALIVE

Our new thirty gallon tank is still "conditioning," a process that requires it to stand empty for nearly six weeks while friendly microbes percolate.  Shawn is still trying to find a good sunken/post-apocalyptic cityscape for some of the features (if anyone out there knows of a good source for aquarium safe plastic/coated plaster/porcelean model cities, please send it along).  Meanwhile, I added a couple of plants just because I was sick of looking at plain old water and gravel substrate.  

Yesterday, I saw signs of life.  Three snails stowed away on the moneywort.  Somehow, in my mind, this makes the tank feel christened... blessed, even.

Happy, our remaining ghost/glass shrimp, continues to be, in fact, quite happy.  I cleaned his tank last night while avoiding working on my revisions of "her" ROMANCING THE DEAD, and afterwards "Happy" did his little feed-me dance, where he rises to the surface of the water and, if I drop flakes in, he does some acrobatics to float upside down, grabs a huge piece with his pincers, and stuffs it into his mouth.  I really wish that I had a the forethought to dig out our digital camera, because this whole process is really fairly fascinating.  Last night it was especially cool because my substrate vacuuming had dislodged a few plant bits, and Happy found a way to cling to a floating piece of sea grass while reaching for his flakes.  

Also, for those of you following the Mason Fear Factor Saga, today's class went much better.  Just a few tears at the beginning when we had to say good-bye, and then I was actually able to slip off to the coffeeshop for a few minutes.  When I came back, I peeped in the window.  To my great pleasure, I saw him playing along with everyone and actually hopping up and down with a great big grin on his face.  Success!  I think he's actually looking forward to tomorrow.  

In a side note, we always get to the school about an hour early because it has an awesome playground.  Today he actually made friends with a little girl named Zoe (they hunted for dinosaur bones together).  But, the coolest part, was that, when we went into the school to cool off (it's in the 90s today), we poked our heads into a fencing class.  Mason was captivated.  He totally wants to take up fencing, something I used to do in college.  I'm _so_ going to look for a parent/child intro course for fencing.

Also, last night Mason went stargazing withjiawen last night, but that experience was so cool, I want to write about that seperately.