Hello From Arlington Texas

Subject: Hello From Arlington Texas 6/7/2011, 11:43 pm

Hello Everyone,

I recently joined the site and for the last few days I've been navigating around and just thought.....let me jump in and make my first post. Back in Oct 2010 I set out to give my husband a surprise anniversary gift that he could keep for years and he had talked about having a tank back in the day so I thought it would make the perfect gift. I had to do a lot of researching because I knew nothing about his favorite fish "cichlids" or any other fish for that matter so my work began in Aug 2010. I found an acrylic 135g RR tank on CR w/stand and went for it. I knew in the past he had a 30 or 40g but I wanted to eliminate the upgrading that I knew would eventually or the max I thought I could tolerate in our home.....lol. Anyway the stand was a mess and the tank needed so deep buffing/polishing with all the scratches so I had my work cut out for me. I'm pretty handy so I figured I could restore and update the stand and tank.....lots of sweat filled hours in my sister's garage in the TX heat.....whew! Since it was a surprise I had to store and work on it there. Because setting it up was out of my scope I hired a local company to do that for me. Well there was a slight snag in the surprise, when the company started setting it up one of the guys dropped one of the huge pieces of driftwood and the tank got cracked. They replaced it with a brand new custom sized glass tank and they gave me six months free maintenance. It was not ready for the actual "surprise" day but it was well worth it and now I'm a fishkeeper lady by accident and loving the hobby. We have OB Labs, Cherry Red Zebras, Demasoni, Johanni, Clown Loaches, Albino Zebras, Venustus, Rustys, Peacocks, 1 Kenyi, Yellow Labs, Borleyi Redfin, VC10s and 1 Pleco. I'm trying to figure out how to upload some pics of the setup before the fish were added.......key word "trying"......lol