Ah, one day! Adding fish is a special day, a reward to think about way down the road after a lot of learning, but the learning itself is so fun! Patience is such a big part of getting yourself into the essence of the hobby. The hobby at its best I think is all about quiet, calm and peaceful beauty. Its the antithesis of most of your modern world, the news, the computers, the music, the entertainment juggernaut. Your tank is going to be a place for you to escape all that and you want to learn how to create the best water possible for your fish so they will show their colors and happiness!
So this thing of fishless cycling is not a thing to be impatient about but a curiosity to be interested in itself. It gives you time to get the feel of things you are not familiar with, like pH and testing and water changes, all sorts of little signs that are feedback to you. Fishless cycling is wonderful in a way because the fish are not there and you can do things to the water like very large percentage changes or other things to recover from mistakes, without any fish getting hurt or in the way.
Believe me, in the end it all seems gone in a flash and then you can settle back to the final tank and fish, which will be there to be maintained basically forever, until there is some big reason to make a change. But the knowledge of your tank, water and filter that you picked up during the cycling is invaluable in your confidence level during all that long time of maintenance to come in the future.
OK, so back to specifics, your initial job is going to be easy. You're just going to figure out how to get your water to 5ppm ammonia level, just a tad darker than matching the 4ppm color shown on the card. Just keep good notes on your number of drops and retest and see how it looks. Once you get the newly filled tank to 5ppm it will just sit there. The initial few bacterial cells that will start eating the ammonia and dividing into more cells will not be detectable by your ammonia test for quite some time. Eventually though, you will see a drop in the ammonia level and will know the "A-Bacs" are growing. Get your aquarium spiral bound notebook going and figure out how you'll make good entries. My habit was to always enter a line of info each morning and evening when I tested. It can be a bit hard to make yourself write down things that seem "obvious" at the moment, but they'll be useful later.
~~waterdrop~~
