quickie update

my airplane is at the gate and deboarding right now, so i have only a few minutes. i owe massive favors to someone or something in the universe, because i got a standby seat on a flight home from phoenix that has 24 people on the standby list, and the lovely young woman at the desk got me moved from a middle seat at the rear of the plane to an aisle seat at the middle of the plane. *envision a giant amazon happy dance here*

yesterday was ballistic and challenging and i was up for 20 hours and working for 18 of those. it was all good until i had to go to dinner with the partner's boss's 4-year-old. kid proudly announced at the beginning of dinner that he'd had COOKY! before he arrived because he at all his dinner. then dad let him "split" a coke with his 18-month-old sister. kid spent the entire rest of the night running screaming circles around our table. it was like hell, but with curry.

then again, if eggplant curry doesn't make it better, i'm not sure what does. tradeoffs.

i'm going on vacation starting this weekend, so look for trip reports soon. photos by rose, words by me, as usual. oh, and we FINALLY got our wedding photos back. those will be up when we return from vacation. it turns out that all that damn drafting training for me was worthwhile, as i've never had anyone come to me and report that my e-mail address was illegible. apparently, this was the photographer's third attempt at reaching us with the pictures, but rose has such "artisitic" handwriting that we didn't receive the first few. haha. engineers: not as sexy as doctors, but we get our e-mail. nowhere near as sexy as artists, but... well, we get our e-mail. and we'll console ourselves with e-mail while the doctors and artists are off with the pretty girls and the bottles of wine.

hairdos

i got my hair cut today. i love my stylist; he's an atrociously cute gay boy who can give me a men's business cut or a modern girly cut with equal aplomb. today his hair was EXACTLY the same color as his skin, only about three shades darker. it gave him a weirdly monochromatic look, so he said he was going to get some lowlights to break it up and make it more interesting. he sorta looked like a ken doll, really, but after "don't ask. don't tell." was repealed and ken could just come on out of the closet and tell barbie how badly she needed that lip wax all along.

now, last week, i had an amusing conversation with a fairly buttoned-down and well-groomed sort of lesbian i am acquainted with. she and i were with a group of friends at a play in phoenix. the play is a whole other post in itself, but i'll summarize it with the blurb they used in the publicity "lesbian erotic fiction dramatized and set to music." now, i ask you, aware readers - do you think any lesbian story EVER needs to be dramatized? i mean, further than it already is by virtue of the fact that it's a lesbian story, whether fiction or non-fiction? anyway, we were sitting in our seats waiting for the show to start, and the two rows in front of us were reserved. just a few minutes before the show, a gaggle of fashionably mussed and well-dressed lesbians came in and filled up those reserved seats. and the lady next to me leaned over and whispered, "doesn't anybody comb their hair anymore?" she had a point. these ladies were pushing the bed-head look to its fashionable limits. being the straight-shooter i am, i leaned over and whispered back that they had stopped issuing combs to lesbians born after 1980, because of the budget cuts. of course, by the time that had wended its way telephone-game-style down the row of friends, it came out something like "they stopped making combs in the 80s because of the petroleum crisis." whatever.

then i walked out of my hair appointment looking like one of those uncombed gals from the play last week... my stylist gave me a modern girly cut today, and bless his heart if he didn't try to iron it flat so it would lay down against my noggin. curls just don't do that, but if he pastes 'em down with gel and i put my motorcycle helmet on right afterward while the gel sets, i can kinda make 'em behave for a few hours. i can't wait to see what the wedding planner and the photographer have to say about that...

so tired...

hey, i bet you thought i had turned into a clogger, didnt' you?

well, i haven't. i've just been at home sweet home enjoying my fabulously purple living room and my dining room table and my recently-painted office. that, and working my tail off.

some other boring stuff has been going on, too, like researching used fish tanks on craigslist. it turns out that joey is going to get very large. in fact, he's going to grow to about a foot in length, if i manage to keep him fed. he's also going to want some company of his own kind soon, so he can quit schooling with my Flying Fox. so i'm trying to do a better research job on this new tank and build a semi-functional ecosystem that will require little maintenance. if any of you have ever seen me get single-minded about research you know just how much tunnel-vision a quest like this entails.

this week, i'm in phoenix. and let me just say that my travel people are FIRED. first off, i wrote a very nice note with my travel request specifying that although i'd indicated i was flying in on sunday and out on sunday, i was checking out of my hotel on friday because i'd be spending the weekend of 2/3-2/4 in the phoenix area with friends. my first itinerary came back and had me booked into a hotel for ONLY the weekend. and i didn't have a rental car until friday, either. i ask you, gentle readers, did they think i was going to sleep under a bridge and hitch all week while i was teaching a class for the company? and then use a rent car and hotel that they'd booked for me for two days of lounging over the weekend? furthermore, they booked me into a completely shitty hotel. i requested one of two nice chains at which i have frequent-flyer status. instead, i'm in the red roof inn. and let me tell you what the red roof inn, phoenix, az does NOT have:
1) Irons
2) Ironing boards
3) Coffee pots
4) Room service that could bring me coffee
5) Internet connections
6) Bath towels in sufficient sizes/quantities to dry a giant amazon after her daily shower
7) Coffee pots

I may have mentioned the coffee more than once. I'm a little miffed about it. I don't function well without caffeine. Why, in the name of all that is holy, would you want to work in a hotel with decaffeinated guests?!?! I don't even like my own self before my morning coffee, I know nobody else wants to talk to me. Crack-smokin' hotel managers.

I only have the internet connectivity due to the remarkable goodwill and overly-trusting nature of someone named connie. she set up an unsecured wireless network that i can receive if i sit in the superbly uncomfortable chair at the desk in my room. i can't get it from the comfy chair or the bed, however, so this post is about to be cut short by the tingling numbness in my left cheek.

the weather's been pretty nice, at least compared to the sleet and snow they've had in dallas this week. and the food's been outstanding. i recommend Tomaso's Italian on Camelback if you ever find yourself in Phoenix. and get your caesar salad WITH the anchovies. it's da bomb.

Fish Tank Goodness

So, i managed to get out to PetSmart finally and buy shoes for Molly. yea! She has cut her little paws too many times down at the river, and she needed some protection. So, last week on Tuesday, my friend and I went down to PetSmart and bought Molly some shoes. She looked a little funny walking around in the one I put on her to check the size. However, she always walks a little funny when something like that is on her foot, and I'd rather she be walking funny because of shoes than because of bandages. Since I know you're all DYING to see how they turn out, I promise I'll post some kind of update on the progress of the shoe situation when I get a chance to try them out. Molly spent the weekend with her cousin-dog Orenda at my sister's house, since I was out of town. And here, of course, is the segue into the subject line...

I was in Phoenix over the weekend for a friend's birthday party. Supercoolfunstuff... yea! When I got back, my fish were not having a good day. I had shut off my computer when I left on Friday, because we were having storms and I wasn't entirely sure that my flight would actually leave. I didn't want to tempt the Wild Little Green Men in the sky into zapping my computer with lightning while I was gone, so I shut off the computer and everything else when I left. Of course, the filter and air pump stayed plugged in for the fish, but I did leave the tank light off. My apartment gets indirect daylight a-plenty through the mini blinds, so I figured that would take care of my fish while I was gone. They're tropical, and I've read in the books that they need to have a well-lit tank. It never says what happens to fish in a poorly-lit tank, though, and it doesn't really explain how lit a tank has to be before it's considered well-lit. This is probably heavy-handed foreshadowing, but that information would have been REALLY USEFUL LAST WEEK.

Anyway, when I got back from Phoenix, I noted that the coloration of all my tetras was "off". They usually look like this: My fish, however, did NOT look like that. Their blue top stripe looked very dark blue just above their side fins, and pale blue everywhere else. Ordinarily, the whole thing glows a uniform blue that varies from deep indigo through teal, depending on the lighting. Also, their red bottom stripe, (which is usually the color of freshly oxygenated blood) from mouth to tail was completely missing. They were translucent with a barely discernible pink tint. Finally, as if their coloring wasn't bad enough, they were effectively lying on the bottom of the tank behind the rock they usually hover above, and "gasping". That's what it looks like, anyway, they work their gills hard and rapidly and it looks like they're struggling for air. Errr... ummm... water. Which has air in it. So, air. Yeah, my fish were gasping for air. There were two that kinda stirred about, but the other four were only occasionally and spastically moving their fins, just enough to keep them from colliding with each other in the faint current at the bottom of the tank.

EEEEEP! Knowing how fragile fish are and how challenging it is to bring them back from illness, I set my friend to researching tetra illnesses online while I began trying to figure out what I'd done different lately that could explain this. I was gone all weekend, and I left them with a weekend fish feeder tablet. I haven't changed their water in about two weeks, and I just got some plastic plants. It's the first time I've used a weekend feeder since I got the tetras, so I decided giving them their regular flake food might fix this. Maybe the tetras weren't eating the fancy krill and spirulina so lovingly time-released by the tablet. So I turned on the tank light to let them know food was forthcoming (because fish appreciate the warning) and I opened the tank and sprinkled flakes in it. Well, the zebra danios (who were perfectly fine, by the way) gleefully ate almost all the food. The two tetras that were kinda swimming around made weak lunges at some of the food bits, but didn't appear to get much. In the meantime, I'm hearing terrifying things about sporatozoa and necrotic tissue being read to me from the internet.

I settled in to watch the fish and listen to the disease descriptions coming from the computer, and noticed that the most active of the two active fish suddenly had a red flush over parts of his belly which looked like it was slowly spreading. His blue color was never as bad as the others, but it seemed to be almost back to its normal distribution, not concentrated above his side fins at all. I thought that maybe since he'd gotten some food, he was perking up, so I tried the food again. Alas, the four at the bottom still didn't stir, but the two who were out got more of the food and seemed to be improving by the moment. Knowing you can't force-feed a fish that's less than an inch long without traumatizing it to death anyway, I resigned myself to writing off the four at the back and decided I would have to find an alternate weekend fish feeding arrangement. Bummer.

About five minutes later, I checked in again, and the two active fish were totally back to normal. Better yet, the four at the back of the tank were moving around and their color was returning! But they didn't get any food... at least not that I could tell when I was watching the others feed.

Newsflash: tropical fish need light. Lots and lots of light. Especially the kinds that "glow" when the light is shining. I thought that enough ambient light was getting in during the daytime through my blinds, but apparently, I was wrong. Food or no food, after about 20 minutes under the lights, all the tetras were back to their zippy old selves, and their color had completely normalized. *WHEW* And that, my friends, is Fish Tank Goodness.