I love relaxing weekends in Vancouver. Sometimes the best weekends are spent at home.

My favourite moment was Allan and I spontaneously dancing in the middle of our living room together for absolutely no reason. Other good moments include playing 9 holes of golf at Westwood Plateau (Academy course) with Trev and Tom, doing yoga every night together before bed, and of course… visiting the fish store.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Allan and I are slowly putting the work into building our fish tank into an aquascape. The first step is of course to get the right lightning (check), CO2 going (check), and the right water conditions for the plants and the fish (in progress). After that, it’s a matter of designing what you want your ‘scape to look like, picking out the right fish and plants, and making sure you can keep everything alive! Definitely not easy at all.

It’s worth it though. It’s like a moving piece of art.

So we stopped by our favourite fish store, Big Al’s, to pick up a couple new plants and some new fish.

Here’s a shot of our work-in-progress tank. As you can see, pretty bare on plants and way too much algae.

We bought a Red Dragon Discus… I’ve always wanted Discus fish in our tank, but they are tricky to keep happy and need specific conditions. I think we’ve finally got the right set up, and the Discus so far seems to be fitting into the community. It’s a gorgeous fish, somewhat expensive, but very much worth it. The red pattern really stands out in the tank. Over time, as the Discus matures, it will start to develop iridescent blue in its fins to complement the red colouring. Very excited! Nickname: Disco Stu.

We also got 2 new bunches of Rangeri Sword plants. We’d like to eventually fill the back wall with them. Some more plants will hopefully keep the algae levels down a bit more.

We also picked up 2 Golden Rams… really beautiful fish, but difficult to keep alive. We’re hoping they will grow big in the tank because that gorgeous yellow colour would be a nice addition.

We’ve been having a serious algae problem ever since we added the new light (as you can see in some of the photos), so we purchased 4 Siamese algae eaters. We were pretty skeptical that they would make any difference at all… and had been warned that they would do well with our red-tipped shark… but so far they seem to be faring well. And miraculously… they are actually eating the algae!

Here they are in action chowing down on our algae.. we couldn’t believe it!

A side profile of some of the new fish in the tank… very excited!

Although we are still quite a ways from the aquascape we want, we are making good progress and are really loving the new fish already!

So I finally got a chance to put together the time lapse photography movies I’ve been talking about for a while now.

12 hours and about 2,000 photos crammed into just 2 minutes. Pretty nifty! I think it turned out alright for my first go at true timelapse. I have some ideas on what I want to do next… I think the execution will be better next time.

This time lapse photography was done for our move in February 2009 from our old apartment into the new one. Also features the rather epic set up of the fish tank in our living room. Takes quite a lot of work to put the fishies back in their watery home! Check it out below:

Setup: Nikon D90 on a tripod, hooked up to laptop using Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2 software, time lapse photos/frames compiled using Quicktime Pro and Adobe Premiere CS4. Note to self next time… turn off auto exposure.

Bonus points to anyone who knows which soundtrack this song is from

Enjoy!