We finally have the last edit of the Central Virginia Aquarium Society logo, as above. *Whew!* Likely as not it would have been easier to have hired a professional, but here's what we've got. I think we are all just happy to have a site with a forum and building membership, but a logo makes it more official somehow, and gives us a visual identifier.
Now we are anxiously awaiting our club meeting on 2/26/12, 2:00 p.m., at Cichlid Solutions, 6405 Dickens Place, in Richmond near Broad and I-64. We have quite a few people who plan on attending, and we're all ready to get back into things.
Things are changing around here with my tanks and I am sorry to say that I've taken down two more tanks. The 37-gallon leleupi breeding tank never amounted to anything, so I gave up on the alleged pair and sold them as possibly two males, possibly a pair who never got the right mojo going.
What's more disturbing is that I took down my beloved 40-gallon planted garden. I was really, really fond of this tank, but it needed new stock and the fact is that I'm not in my office (where the tank has been) very often anymore since going back to work full time last fall. I found that I was neglecting it somewhat, but it was SO pretty that I really hated to disturb it. However, I did just that, and moved all inhabitants downstairs to the 150-gallon, which is an appropriate setup for them, with the Geophagus "Tapajos." That tank has been doing great for the past two months as they babies have grown a bit, and not too long ago I moved the leopoldi angel down there, since the 40-gallon was much too small for that fish to be happy. I hope to get some more wild angels in the spring for the 150.
Here's a video of how the tank is today:
One disclaimer: I was foolish enough to think I could add a music track to the video, which is copyrighted material, and I've been flagged by Youtube for this crime. If the artist in question does not become alerted and nobody files a complaint I might be okay, but if not I'll repost the video with my kid playing her harmonica or something. Otherwise it's the sound of my breathing and the dog snuffling around, which is not conducive to enjoyment of the subject matter, or at least it isn't to me.... End disclaimer.
So, my office has only dear, dear Otis the figure-8 puffer, who shall remain in situ, as he is my muse. I will also, therefore, keep the 10-gallon planted snail tank, which is the smorgasbord to which Otis bellies up, so to speak. So now I have only those two tanks in my office and the 150-downstairs, my kitchen goldfish tank, my goldfish tank at work, and my 5-gal betta tank at work.
Another issue is the possibility of moving my home office to another part of the house. I have 11-year-old twin girls sharing a very small room, and things are starting to get a little difficult for them. I may move my office downstairs to the living area and return my office to its original purpose as a bedroom, or maybe put my office up in the playroom to the same end. These are preliminary considerations but the aquariums were posing a problem in terms of where I set up my office, so now I don't have that to worry about too much. I put the tanks in a newly emptied eaves space off the playroom, so I still have the tanks ready for when I need them again, which I'm sure I will.
So 6 tanks total for now is enough for me to maintain, considering how much time I spend at work these days. I'd move another tank to my office at work, since I have room there, but I find PWCs to be quite a challenge in that office as it is. There is zero water pressure, sometimes not enough to start a siphon with a Python (if you can believe it!) and that turns a simple PWC into a lengthy chore, without the ability to adequately siphon the substrate debris. Also, I hate to leave any delicate species on their own for the weekends when I'm not there.
So, I'm not exactly out of the business, lol, but I've downsized and consolidated, and hopefully I don't have all my eggs in one basket!
We have a logo! This is somewhat temporary until I get the details straight, but I'm working on turning the squiggly lines in the middle of the fish into the letters CVAS. I am getting very close to something I'm happy with, since the letters lend themselves to a somewhat zig-zag configuration.
Otherwise, everyone seems to like this logo, so we are using it for the time being on our new forum website! Go to cvas.forumotion.com and you'll see that we've set up shop and are working on getting our Richmond and Tidewater membership registered so we can communicate easier.
This is a separate entity than our club website, which is not a forum but a regular site, and we've had some delays setting up the pages. It may be that a forum is going to serve our needs better, but we'll have to decide what to do about that. Everyone has been very supportive and excited about getting the club and the site up and running, and we've made a lot of progress.
Brian (Flippercon from the Tidewater chapter) and Ben have really taken initiative and gotten things done, and this would not be happening without their hard work, so I'm very grateful to them both, along with our other board members who have contributed.
Now, as to the logo, I'm figuring out how to work with nodes and other shaping tools to configure text into the shape I need. This is proving to be a frustration, since I've never used this type of program before but by accident I'm slowly learning what it does! I am arrogant enough and pigheaded enough that I think I can figure it out myself, but we'll see - I'm pretty close to turning it over to someone who knows what their doing! It remains difficult to admit defeat, but this is a character flaw that sometimes results in unexpected joy, so stay tuned.
