Dogs and Fish Don't Mix

Saturday was *almost* wonderful.  It didn't get quite as warm as advertised but it was sunny and rain free.  I did get a heap of work done on Frostbite.  I knew that it was supposed to rain on Sunday but it was supposed to be "scattered" showers so I thought I would be able to finish the work and take pictures on Sunday.

Sunday morning @ 7:00AM it was already starting to rain.  I managed to get the tarp back on Frostbite.  I didn't not actually get to caulk the roof fortunately since it would not have had enough time to set before the rain anyway.  I'll describe what I did do to Frostbite in another post when I get some pictures.

The rain was hard and steady ALL DAY so further work on Frostbite had to be postponed.

Nevertheless, there was another project I had been putting off for better weather.  We decided to move our deck pond from our covered back deck to the front porch.  We have a half whisky barrel that has a liner and some fish in it.  The fish are outside fish and the tank runs outside year round.  We've had this little pond for about three and a half years on our back deck and everything was fine.

Last year we got another junkyard dog, a Sheltie.  The current junkyard dog, a Mutt, did not bother the deck pond at all.  The new one, however, was obsessed with it.  She continually chewed up the air hoses, pulled out the heater, and knocked around the fountain attached to it.  All this despite us putting up a physical barricade of chairs and other objects around it which, of course, ruined the visual beauty of having the thing in the first place.  This weekend she managed to pull out the main filter and chew it up.

It was starting to get expensive.

We decided it was time to move the pond to the front porch and out of the reach of curious little knucklehead mutts.  This is actually a little better location as it will get a little more sun and we can grow some water plants in it and arrange some plants around it.  When we got the new dog, we quickly learned that we couldn't keep plants within her reach either.

We made a trip to Lowes to get new equipment.  I managed to scoop the fish up into a large bowel.  We originally populated the tank with feeder goldfish three years ago and some of them have gotten quite large.  I emptied the water, cleaned the rocks, moved all the stuff to the front porch and set the tank up again.  All this was done while it was pouring rain outside.  Our front porch is fairly large and covered but, at times, the rain blew in and drenched us since the wind was raging pretty good.

Despite this, I think it turned out pretty well.

We are going to place some of our plants around it on stands and get a few water plants growing inside it.  Come spring it should look really nice. 

I tried to get a picture of our fish but it was cloudy out and they were hard to see.  I'll post another pic once we get it landscaped a little better.  Here you can just make out one of the large goldfish.  There is another white fish that is larger but he is not visible in the photo.  The smaller goldfish were also out of site among the large rocks at the bottom.

We also took all of our plants outside that were "wintering" inside the house so they all look a little rough.  Probably did this too early as another freeze is inevitable before the Spring is over but they will do better in the long run since they get sort of neglected by us inside.  If I have to move all of them into the nook of the front door prior to a cold night, so be it.

A productive Sunday but no work on Frostbite today and I was unable to get pictures of yesterday's work.  I'll tackle that later this week when the weather gets better.