Today we do the messy part of fishkeeping. Pumps and hoses.

I’ve got to go to Lowes and the feed store, in inverse order, and get two pumps, one that will accept a garden hose for the pond, and a little Maxijet for the topoff tank. Then I get to go find tubing/hose/adapters that will do the job.

I nearly flooded the basement: turned on the water filter we use for marine, to fill the freshwater reserve tank, and forgot to set the timer. I remembered at 5:30 this morning and dived downstairs to find the water within 2″ of the top of the 32 gallon reservoir (read, Rubbermaid Brute trashcan) I use for that.

So now—the great hose and pump expedition. It’s a chill, grey, rainy day here, so I’m not going to mess with the pond yet.

I’m in that strange stage of the new book when I outline, and this feels like a book I really want to outline very tightly. This consists in writing sequentially what happens, who’s there, and sometimes the issues that have to be dealt with and when. This is where I arrange to be brilliant: if anybody thinks all this just flows off the top of my head with no backtracking, I’m flattered, but it don’t work thetaway—I’m doing the outline of the middle of the book when something occurs to me that needs to be built into the front end, so I scroll up and put that in, then tuck in a note: controlling where detail appears is important, plus you have to have it pop up often enough the reader may not really notice it, but it’s there…and then you have to make it pay off. That sort of thing is best handled in outline. So this may mean I write less than 300 words in a day, but the brain is burning fuel bigtime and I get this horrid yen for greasy cheeseburgers or fish and chips…