Monday, October 15, 2007

The weekend

I feel like there was lot of stuff crammed into the weekend, but I can't think of what it was.
Friday I taught my class. I have four boys, all roughly the same age and they are all very gung ho students. I have a lot of fun teaching them, because they are so excited about animation. I was showing them how to do keyframing and build a walking loop, and told them that sometimes, when you're doing character animation it just helps if you get up and do the action you're trying to animate and break it down into parts to identify the key frames, so of course by the end of the class I had four boys all getting up and moving around and really studying the way they were moving... honestly, it's the first time the students in my class have actually followed through on that, in my previous class, they had already been with a different instructor and been taught different methods, so it was hard to bring them around to what I was trying to show them, because we had to go backwards a bit. These new classes, I'm starting them off fresh and it's cool to watch them go along with me... it's also cool to see that what I'm doing is working.

Friday night Bertis and the Bonds were over. I haven't seen Bertis in what seems like a very long time, because he's been very busy working. We had a private screening of the Cabaret DVD, because I had to test it and make sure everything worked on it and it played in our DVD player which is a few years old. Today I am labelling the boxes... the final step in the final product to be shown tonight at the Sommerset. We are starting at 7. Act one is 1:40 minutes long, and act 2 is about 40 minutes long. The show starts at 7:30 so it should be finishing up around 10. I know there are lots of people who can't make it because of rehearsals, but if you are wrapping up around 9:30 or 10 and want to stop in at the Sommerset to get your DVD after let me know, and I'll stick around a little while. If not, I'll see you throughout the week, I'm sure, as you drop by the office. For those of you in the Rothesay area, if it's easier for you to drop by the house let me know and I'll take some home with me.

Saturday, I got some work done on my cabinet in the basement, and also did some work on an animation of a penguin, I'm working on, for an educational website. We popped out to the pet store and picked up some aquarium substrate so we'll have it when it's time to set up the new system, and I finally managed to talk the guy at vilage Pets into giving me the Neon Goby they had there for $30. It was listed at $39.99 which is insane for a fish that lists at J&L in Vancouver for $15. We are doing a fish order in the near future, because we have to get our livestock before the winter comes and J&L stops shipping. It is a really sad, that we can order fish from Vancouver, have them sent here on aircanada, and it still works out a lot cheaper than buying them from our local pet store. It's hard to not feel completely ripped off. As a comparison, at Village Pets they are selling a Yellow tang for $79.99. The same fish at J&L is $24, granted their minimum shipping rate is $54 to Saint John, but that is for five bags of livestock, so you can have five fish shipped to you for that. Even if it was just that one fish, it still works out to a dollar cheaper, spread that shipping cost over five fish. Plus if you don't have five fish you want, you can do a group order, and someone else in Saint John can phone up and add to your order, then you split the shipping. There's a reef aquarium forum for the Atlantic and they're doing group orders all the time. I try very hard to support local business, but when you're getting screwed by them, why bother? I didn't mind paying $30 for the Goby, considering they had it there for a month so I knew it was healthy, and I could chalk the extra $15 up to shipping, but I certainly wasn't going to pay $40 for it...... end rant.

The Goby now resides in our smaller tank with the Nemos, Regal Tang, and Racoon Butterfly. The Racoon has been harrassing it to clean him ever since the fish was put in.... (they're a cleaner species, but unlike cleaner wrasses, Neon Gobys don't live solely by cleaning other fish, and eat other food, plus they will reproduce in captivity.)

Sunday I got the front put on the cabinet. Now I need to get a piece of plywood for the top, some oak 1x4s for the molding, and some oak 1x6s for the actual top. I'm doing the plywood top first and screwing that down into the support walls, then gluing the solid oak top on top of that. That way there is a solid inch and a half top surface, to support the over 200 gallons of water that will be sitting on top of it. The cabinet itself is over nine feet long, and our 130 gallon tank is only 6 feet long, so we have ordered another 65 gallon tall tank, that is three feet long, with the same depth and height dimensions as the 130. This way I can run one big long canopy over both of them, and it will seem like there's one giant 9 foot tank up there..... It's gonna be awsome!!!!

No comments: