Since Duncan’s starting to fall into a routine, I’ve been managing to catch up on some of the crap I’d been meaning to do for the last two weeks. I finally had to service Duck’s home-brew aquarium filter – which isn’t bad… ~6 weeks between servicing in a sandy tank with a nine-inch turtle constantly kick crap around. It’s a colossal pain in the arse to pour all the gravel out, rinse all the muck out of it and then stuff it all back in, but given that it’s only every month or so I think I can deal with that. It keeps his tank nice and clean, and the tank no longer smells bad, so that’s the most important thing.
I got the lawn mowed once, but it needs doing again. It’s been raining every couple of days here lately, so there’s been no time for it to dry out. It’s been growing so bad that I decided it was now or never – I took the recycler off so the lawn mower would have an easier time, especially because there’s a crack in the base I need to fix somehow. I’m not sure if I can weld the pot-metal that the base is made out of or not, I might just look for a dead 21″ lawn mower with a briggs and stratton motor so I know it’ll fit and just swap the parts out. Regardless though, the lawn is cut short but still looks awful. 
I still have to put the stereo back in the oldsmobile, which should make a pretty okay Hungry Hacker article because I’m putting a 98 cd player in a 93 oldsmobile. No progress on that yet though.
We cleaned up the fireplace/mantle again, even though it never gets used… so I’m not sure how the hell it gets so dirty. It’s an “open fireplace” at the moment, which is why we never use it – you burn so much wood and it doesn’t warm up worth a damn. We’re either going to put a stove in there, or maybe one of those fake electric fireplace insert just for “ambience”.
Finally, I broke out the Visual Basic again and wrote a little application for Sabriena to help her work, because the old “helper” app she was using isn’t updated for the new pay rates (so it makes her think she’s earned more than she has). It was amazing how much fun VB is because in a few clicks you can bang out a functioning app – but I still feel ashamed that it’s probably one of the programming languages I’m best at.