i was asked to wait downstairs while she went up to get the aquarium. for $15 i got a 10 gallon glass (heavy!) tank along with an empty whisper power filter and a proquatics 50w heater. if i was to buy everything new, it'd probably be around $50. the aquarium didn't come with a hood so i still have to get that, as well as a fluorescent light tube. then there's the gravel and the plants and eventually the fish. 
part of the excitement of getting a new tank is imagining the kind of stuff i can keep in there. even though i said this was a breeding tank, i'm tempted to just convert it into another regular fish tank. 
10 gallon is a pretty standard aquarium size, so it'll be a lot easier to find accessories for it (for instance, growing lights, so my aquatic plants will have a decent chance of surviving). my dream is still to have an underwater garden. the only problem now is where to keep the 10 gallon tank. i don't have any space at my place, and i currently don't own a table that can support the weight of a filled aquarium - about 100 lbs. that means i'll be trolling craig's list again, looking for a durable stand.
instead of just going back home, my father and i embarked on an odyssey of early morning shopping at the assembly square mall on this windy frigid day. first stop: circuit city, where i was trying to find a philips dvd player with divx playback and usb input. unfortunately, the model that i wanted was out of stock (instead i went home and ordered it online with free shipping). next, we went to home depot, where my father got an 100 ft coil of coaxial cable while i bought a replacement filter for my furnace and a piece of plastic plumbing tube for my aquarium (i'll explain more later). since they were out of melting salt, we then went to k-mart where they still had some in stock (but the fancy expensive kind - we had no choice but to get them anyway).
back at home i put that piece of tubing to good use, taking out the two sake cups and replacing it with the plastic tube to form yet-another a makeshift cave. once more, i didn't see any baby guppies taking advantage of the shelter. back to the drawing board!
late last night i was already starting to get bug reports from my faceless code testing friend in india. i think it sort of stressed me out because for some reason i had a hard time falling asleep. by the time i woke up early this morning (after about 2-3 hours of sleep), there was big list of bugs to fix. then i left the house to get my aquarium and run errands and when i came back i started fixing stuff. i wrote e-mail to the client several times but there were no replies (radio silence) but i got everything done after a few hours and posted the latest builds online. figuring that maybe no news meant good news, i began decompressing from worker mode back to slacker mode, starting with last night's new episode of rome. the actor that played octavian got replaced with an older actor! this week's episode contained several scenes of torture (including branding and defilement), poisoning, severed limbs, and implied child prostitution. no full frontal male nudity though. a pretty tame episode in my opinion, but still good!
for lunch and dinner i continued eating my leftover raviolis from this past weekend until i finished everything. an tao came home relatively early for a change (6pm) and we watched prison break (where there's quite a cult following in china apparently) and 24. "that will do pig, that will do!"
