kadyg and I have spent the weekend hauling boxes and furniture. We are now -- until the end of the month, anyway -- the proud tenants of four bedrooms, three bathrooms, two kitchens, and a hallway, all of which look like New Orleans minus the flood water¹. Half of which because we're moving out of them, and half of which because we're moving in.

Moving the feesh was probably the single trickiest part of the entire operation. All 17 of them were netted and dumped into a two-gallon holding tank while we drained the 46-gallon aquarium. (Hey, YOU try moving 368 lbs. of water up a flight of stairs with low clearance ...) So far, miraculously, all of them seem to have survived the process -- although we did have a tetra swimming around pointed downward at about a 45-degree angle, so we'll see if he recovers. We also had to uproot and replant all of our water plants. Our Amazon sword seems to have developed quite a root system and hopefully I didn't kill too much of it off. The aquarium has been set back up in the kitchen, and if I ever unpack my camera, I might be able to take some pictures (along with the ring pics I promised some time back).

However, my online access is going to be light for a while. We couldn't carry our DSL service over to the new home, I don't think either of us even owns a regular modem, and so we're netless until we can get our act together.

Contact information for the new place follows in a friends-locked post. I haven't updated my friends list in a while, so if I haven't added you yet, please speak up now.

Also, a special thanks to roaminrob, firestrike and coworker James for making Sunday something less than pure hell.

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1. In one case, with the flood water. Our cat Ocras has developed the habit of knocking over buckets to drink the tasty, tasty water within. We generally humor him by letting him lick up the dregs of the emptied buckets we've filled up the feeshtank with. However, we accidentally left within his reach the full bucket that was holding the tank filter components (which we wanted to keep wet to preserve the beneficial bacteria that keep the tank biosphere running). I arrived back at our new place at 4 a.m. Monday morning after driving firestrike home to find the kitchen, and a few feet of hardwood living room floor, transformed into a shallow pond . Fortunately, the only non-sleep-related casualty seems to have been one or two few cardboard boxes (and none of their contents).