Arizona Crystal--Do you need to wait for a rainstorm out in the desert before you can fill that tank?
LET'S ROCK!!!! 
Actually, I meant to get to adding rock about two weeks ago. But once football season starts I lose track of time.
Crystal, I would let the sand storm abate before starting up your pumps. Circulation slows the settling and, as you mentioned, can damage the pumps.
It just so happens that Darren Walker, aka Palmetto, wrote a wonderful guide to LR about the same time I should have been writing mine. Since he put just about everything I was going to put in my post in his, I'll save myself some carpal tunnel and just give you the link.
Beginner's guide to Live Rock
One of the points Darren makes that I wish to stress is having enough water to dilute the noxious products of curing. I have found you can get fairly flat, plastic; containers that hold around 15-20 gallons for about $5 each at discounts stores. You can use them for stomping grapes after your done with the cycling.
If you get a few of these you can set up a nice curing line at a low price. Since your tank doesn't need heaters until you introduce LR you can use your tank heaters in the containers. The big ones will even allow you to place a skimmer in them. You can skim one tank each day during the cycle so don't go out and buy a skimmer for each vat.
Darren used actinic lighting but a better solution, if you wish to light the curing tanks, is a shop light fixture with daylight type florescent bulbs like the 6500K Optilume type bulbs. They are much cheaper and provide enough light for curing. You can use one light and move it from container to container. You only need about a 6 hour photoperiod at this point. Make sure you use a GFCI when hooking stuff up for safety sake.
Curing LR in your tank is OK but you are better off using separate curing containers as you get some pretty funky water during the cure.
Darren said you can use your nose to judge how the cure is going. Recently I gave Amanda from Michigan this advise on the proper fragrence one should have during curing--
- A man wearing a black suit drives up in a hearse and asks if he can remove the deceased
- You neighbors put up a sign in your yard saying "Bates Motel"
- Your spouse, who wasn't into this saltwater thing in the first place, has their lawyer draw up divorce papers on the constitutional grounds of cruel and unusual punishment
You are going to want a test kit when you add the LR to your tank so you might as well spring for it now.
For those that cure the rock in their tanks, you will want to do some massive water changes. I know this is contrary to a lot of expert advise. My reasoning is that during the curing massive amounts of nutrients are added to the water column. There is plenty to go around to complete the cycle, so why keep this nasty water around? It will only come back to haunt you later as a huge algae bloom. Now dumping most of the water is
not going to stop you from having an algae bloom but it will reduce the intensity and duration if you remove a large portion of the nutrients via a large water change(s).
A few days into the curing it is a very good time to show off your skills as a geeky chemist.
You want to check for ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. Hopefully the ammonia will be dropping or low and nitrates will be present. If not, just give it more time. Another thing you want to check, especially toward the end of the cycle, is pH and alkalinity. Don't be surprised if both are very low. Often the alkalinity will be only around 1 meq/l and the pH in the range of 7.5-7.8. Why? Well the curing process is acidic in nature. The bacteria produce lots of carbon dioxide and consume alkalinity. It is normal for both of these parameters to decline, often, dramatically.
Once again, water changes during the cycle will be a big help as they add fresh buffer with the introduction of fresh salt mix. You can also buy the various buffers sold on the market to adjust pH and alkalinity. A cheap substitute is washing soda, sodium carbonate, sold at the supermarket. Add 1 tablespoonful of washing soda for every 20 gallons of tank water to a quart of RO/DI water and dissolve. Pour this mixture into the sump or other high circulation area of the tank. Give it about 3 or 4 hours to react then check the pH again. If you still need to increase the pH you can add another dose. If you use a second dose wait a full day before making any more adjustments as the tank needs time to stabilize.
As Darren said, When you ammonia and nitrite are very close to zero you can add your LR to your tank. Don't worry if your nitrate levels are high. Nitrification is the hard part of going through a cycle. De-nitrification will be forthcoming as the LS in the tank starts to develop anoxic zones. The more time you can give the cycle the better off you'll be.
Well, I just heard the 2 minute warning ending this half. Next half will talk about the algae blitz that is the next fun part of the reefer game.