How I spent my Saturday night

Monorail Cat

...Realizes that she has made a terrible mistake

New Cat

I can has cheez?

So yeah, this cat was all hanging around outside the new place, so we took him in, named him after Dusty Rhodes, (the wrestler, not the baseball player who apparently died a few days ago)
and in a week, we're going to have his balls cut off. Good times. Right now, he's kind of splitting his time between hanging out in the bushes outside and hanging out in the bedroom inside. The outside part is because we still don't know if we can trust him to not spray everywhere, and the bedroom sequestering is because A, we can't trust him around the bird, and B, because we can't trust my original cat around the new one. See, while this cat is all snuggly sweetness and such, my cat is essentially Death Metal: The Cat, so while Dusty seems to take an, "oh hey, you're a cat. I'm a cat too, let's hang out" approach to her, Crackhouse's feelings toward him are more of the "SLAY THE USURPER" kind. Hopefully, she can get used to him, but until then, he stays locked up in here, getting fed small pieces of cheese.

Rundown of Recent Events

Haven't posted in a while, (ha, like that's new) and I'm not yet sleepy enough to attempt going to bed, so here's what's been going down lately:

Me and Sarah totally got an apartment together, and it's totally rad and I feel like an adult and stuff. I kinda feel bad though, because I've had a huge head start on crap accumulation, so my crap outnumbers hers like forty-to-one, and it's like an apartment full of my crap with only trace amounts of hers. I'd have pictures, but the place is pretty much a shambles right now, and the empty-apartment photos from a week ago are on a camera I can't find that connects to the computer with a cable I can't find. We'd invite y'all over to hang out, but once again the place is a shambles, I don't trust you creepy internet types, and there is basically nowhere to sit. We got a beanbag chair, and that's about it. We gotta work on that. Maybe just throw down some mats and act like it's some sort of Asian thing. I dunno. Overall, I must say that it is nice to live somewhere with more than one window, a double sink, air conditioning capable of actually cooling the place down on hot days, no dripping ceilings, and actual separate rooms. Also, no creepy next-door neighbor covered in really prison-looking tattoos asking me if I smell something dead in the parking lot. And no crazy, possibly retarded, probably meth-addicted upstairs neighbor screaming obscenities at her twenty cats or actual goddamn pet opossum. And no other upstairs neighbors who apparently spend their free time pushing their furniture around like it's a Nintendo puzzle game, just for recreation or whatever. And no older next-door neighbor waking me up at night with the most horrifying death-rattle of a cough in the dead of night, walking past my window to her stupid van. And no more half the parking lot being taken up by two dead cars and a freaking motorboat. Jesus, I could go on for days like this.

On a related note, while looking up info on the place, I came across my landlord's Myspace profile, (that I'm not linking to or hinting at in the slightest, because this dude in question can literally render me homeless with but a phone call) and the dude seems like a walking mid-life crisis, and it kind of horrifies me. Like take one of those bro-dog fratboy type dudes who all inevitably end up watching an episode of The Ultimate Fighter and then deciding to dedicate their lives to Ultimate Fighting, despite the fact that they only know of Ken Shamrock through his WWF stint and have never even heard of Royce Gracie, but then make him over forty and apparently decadently wealthy. Scary stuff.

On another related note, here is an open letter to what I'm pretty sure is our next-door neighbor: There are bumper stickers and window decals. And that's where it ends. When the stickers expand past the bumper, cover the trunk, and threaten to begin covering the license plate and brake lights, it's time to consider getting into some sort of treatment program. It's like Dale Earnhardt Jr. moved next door, right after signing a sponsorship deal with left-wing politics.

On a down note, the two new fishies from the last post checked out within a couple weeks of entering the tank. I'm gonna try again with a couple more otos eventually, this time armed with the knowledge of the drip-acclimation method. R.I.P. Otocinclus #1 and Otocinclus #2.

Finally, on another down note, apparently, during the period when I wasn't paying attention to the internet, Mitsuharu Misawa died. If you don't know who that is, don't worry, because that probably just means that you're a normal human being with a future. Anyway, he was pretty much King Shit of Fuck Mountain when it came to the Japanese pro wrestling scene back in the days when it still made money or mattered to anyone at all, and a lot of the pro wrestling basement nerds (and I can't knock those guys too hard, because I was one of them for a while) will tell you that he was the best there's ever been. Apparently, he got dropped on his head one too many times, and after the last one, he never got up and just died right there in the middle of the ring. And you just know all the dorks are putting the "that's how he would have wanted it" spin on the thing, but fuck that, the dude basically got killed (and depending on who you ask, spent the last few years of his life in a concussion-induced, half-retarded fog) because of taking a fake sport way, way, wayyyyy too seriously. And I hate to be that dickhead, but back when Shinya Hashimoto died a few years ago, I told you so. Not to mention the whole "Chris Benoit had the brain of an 85 year-old Alzheimer's patient when he killed his family" thing. Looking back, I'm getting more and more ashamed of being such a huge fan of that "drop people on their head and hit each other for real when possible" brand of wrestling back in the day. I should be ashamed of liking normal wrestling back in the day too, but eh, I'll deal with one personality disorder at a time. Anyway, R.I.P. dude. He's elbow-smashing angels now.

About time

I have a bunch of photo-related stuff to post, mainly from clearing out my closet full of crap and heading down to Ada for a couple days for Sarah and her mom's college-type graduation of fancy book-learnin', but for now, here's the one that I can get done in a few minutes with a handful of pictures. I'm lazy; that's how these things work. But anyway, I finally got some fish for the 14 gallon tank.

Freaking out in the bag

I'm still undecided as for what'll be the main featured fish in there, (leaning toward guppies, but that's subject to change) so for now, I went and got myself a cleanup crew. These two are otocinclus catfish, basically the freshwater fish keeping world's perfect engines of algae removal. Unlike the plecostomuses, (plecostomi?) which are mysterious poop-factories who never seem to actually eat algae, (or even algae wafers) yet are constantly taking a dump at all times, and more often than not turn into tank-busting behemoths, these dudes eat algae like crazy and stay small. And unlike Chinese/Siamese/etc. algae eaters, (usually just labeled as "algae eaters" in the store) otos don't grow into vicious little shits who'll suck a hole in the side of any fish big enough to get a grip on, and pretty much work and play well with others.

Chillin'

I've needed something along these lines for a while, because with all the excess plant-growing goodness that my fancy $25 gravel put in the tank, the algae has been running wild like Hulkamania, and while I can scrape that stuff off the glass, it's not so easy to get off the plants. And the shorter plants in there have been looking nasty lately, all with the brown algae from starting the tank and these gross little worms that apparently dig on said algae, but not enough to actually remove any of it. And an oto is gentle enough of a suckerfish to not shred your leaves when they take algae off a plant. Real service-oriented fishes. For the worms, pretty much any normal free-swimming fish out there will polish those off, so they'll get theirs in due time.

NOM NOM NOM NOM

Overall, though, I'm having to be cautiously optimistic at the most for these two since I added them to the tank, because there's one huge problem with these fish: Otos die like crazy. The way they catch them in the wild screws them all up, they acclimate to a new tank really badly, and half the time, they're starving in the pet shop's algae-free tanks. I'm hoping for the best, because the place I got them from is a way more seriously fish-oriented place than the normal chain stores, where they seem to actually give a shit about the fish and know how to take care of them, and these two fishes I got seem to have too much of an algae-gut to have been starving. Still, I'm holding off on naming them for now, to make it less of a bummer if I have to flush one of them, although I can guarantee that if I can ever tell them apart, one should end up being named Otto.

Anyway, check back in a week or two for an update on the alive-ness of these two, plus possibly pictures from a quarantine tank full of their future neighbors.

I just spent like an hour scraping algae out of the fish tank.

And there's still some in there, but I think I need to seriously start thinking about putting a fish or two in there. Meanwhile, in the 2-gallon, it's business as usual.

I just spent about twenty seconds

Moving a laser pointer around on my computer's monitor.


...And chasing it with the mouse pointer.

Current status

New 14 gallon tank, within a day or so of water being added:

A couple weeks later, fluorite dust starting to clear:

A week or so ago, fluorite dust giving way to tank-cycling bacteria cloud:

Today: Almost there~

Ammonia reads 1 ppm, (parts per million, duh) Nitrates are 5 ppm, and Nitrites read 1 ppm. I figure it'll be fish-worthy in a week or so. The fancy expensive gravel seems to be doing the job, because every plant except the lily that got screwed up by Methylene blue in the last 10 gallon disease outbreak has damn near doubled in size, and the original lily bulb that broke off of that plant is re-sprouting a new one. I'm pretty good at fish tanks, as long as there aren't any fish inside them. Hopefully, this tank doesn't turn into a death-trap like the last one.

=O

So yeah.

Messing with some stuff here. Sorry~

Also, here is a thing

I had this weird little piggy bank shaped like a football and such. Now, I have converted it into a Matt Forte bank, because I'm weird:

2009 Omnibus Blog Stimulus Post

Okay, haven't posted since the last week of February, so I figure I better update on the happenings and goings-on. Busy month.

- Remember that post about how I cured fish disease by just letting the tank go and letting the fish get all unstressed and such? Yeah, so it ended up being kind of bullshit in the end. Without getting into the sad details, adding two new barbs to the tank stressed everybody out, everybody got sick, and this time, even with a hospital tank coming into play, everybody died.

So now, the ten gallon pit of disease has been abandoned, a new 14 gallon tank has started up, and hopefully, it doesn't turn into a pit of despair like the first tank did. R.I.P. Larry, Darrell #1, Edgar, and Bubba.

- Gonna mess with some website-based stuff, so this might look all weird for a while. Right now, it's running where I type stuff in at Blogger.com, and then it posts to my website. Thing is, you lose a whole lotta capabilities and bells and whistles that way, ("Older/Newer Posts" links) so I'm probably going to just go back to hosting this page at Blogspot. You'll have to deal with their stupid navigation bar at the top of the screen, but eh, you're not paying for this shit. And I'm not paying enough to be able to install my own blog software on this site, (and I wouldn't know how to anyway) so there you go.

- I put a bow on my cat. I don't know why. But whenever that thing is on there, she acts all chilled out, like some sort of reverse Mr. Hyde serum, so on it stays.

- Mastodon put out a new album, and it's the first time a CD has pretty much blown me away since the last time Mastodon released an album. Unfortunately, this is also the second straight time that a new Mastodon CD has made me all but forget about the existence of a pretty good new Sepultura CD.

- I'm still doing occasional Chicago Bears-related posts over at the Armchair Linebacker blog, and maybe when it's easier to do stuff like that, I'll put a link to it somewhere on here that's not just part of a blog post. The life of a Chicago Bears fan is a life of pain, but for real pain, check out Neil's posts there. He's a Lions fan. Yeah.

- On the 19th, me and my special lady-friend Sarah celebrated our one-year anniversary. Hopefully, she doesn't wise up any time soon, but if she hasn't gotten sick of my football card addiction, failure to consistently keep dishes washed, and general weirdness by now, I should be in the clear. Here's to many more years of lazy snuggling, trips to Souper Salad, and being able to tell people I'm not gay and having them actually believe me for a change.

In other news related to people in my family not being gay, my brother Jack and his wife Amanda just had a whole bunch of babies. Well, in the name of accuracy, she did most of the work of having them, and it was actually only two babies. But that's still twice as many as most people have, so it counts. Crazy shit. In my new-found role of Crazy Uncle, it falls to me the responsibility of teaching them how to do amazing things with boogers and fire. Hopefully, I am up to the challenge.

I've discovered the secret to curing fish disease

First, the bacterial/fungal/whatever shit broke out big-time in the ten gallon tank again, taking out Darrell #2 (The smallest of the three tiger barbs. Poor little guy.) in the process, and I finally got fed up. I just said fuck it, fuck bacteria, and if it's what's gotta happen to save the fish I still have, fuck the dang live plants. So I medicated the shit out of the tank, this time with stuff that's better for the fish but toxic to plants, as seen here:



After the dust cleared and the Methylene Blue faded, everything cleared up and things were great, aside from the near-death of my dwarf lily and a couple of my aponogetons. (The Amazon sword plant in there came through it awesomely, though.) For like a week. Then, Darrell #1 (Even if he's the only Darrell left, I'm keeping him numbered. I'm planning on the next tiger barb I get to be named Darrell #4, for the record.) started getting all white-spotty and eye-bloaty again, and in my frustration, I tried a bold new approach. I did absolutely goddamn nothing. I just let things go. And in the end, my gambit worked: After the initial disease breakout, I'm pretty sure the subsequent infections were sped along by stress from the tank's biological filter being killed graveyard-dead by all the antibiotics. So I just kept my water changes going, added some occasional Prime to neutralize the ammonia, and let the tank cycle again. Once the water stopped being cloudy, so did the fish. Larry and Darrell are as good as they've ever been, and it's all due to a strict regimen of medicinal neglect.
And it's kind of funny, because Barbs are usually the most gangster of small freshwater fish. I mean, they don't have the firepower to just chomp their neighbors in half, like an Oscar or something, but they will fin-nip each other and their tankmates into oblivion in the wrong conditions. Like they even tell you to keep tiger barbs in odd numbers, so that the odd fish out can hide and rest while the other even-numbered ones are bitch-slapping each other. But Larry and Darrell seems to be the best of pals now, even after Larry was a fucking bully to all the Darrells in the pre-columnaris era. I'm guessing it's because they've been to hell and back together, and have that same sort of bond that crippled Vietnam dudes have. Like I'll get a couple new barbs someday, and those two will swim up to them and be all "You wouldn't understand, because you weren't there! WE'VE SEEN SOME SHIT, MAAAAAAAAAAN." At least that's how I imagine it. In reality, they have brains the size of the head of a pin and just have thoughts like, "bubbles... bubbles... bubbles... food. Foooood, foodfoodfoodfood... bubbles..." But whatever. I got my fish back, and that's what matters.

SWEET JESUSING FUCKBURGERS

According to my online tax return and every online "tax return estimate" thing I've checked and rechecked like a hundred times, I'm supposed to get back 966 dollars this year.



THAT'LL BE NINE HUNDRED SIXTY-SIX DOLLARS ON RED, MY GOOD MAN

Just god damn

Now begins Week Two of me not having an operational car. So far, we've ruled out, the battery, the starter, the alternator, and the ignition system. Which leaves only one possibility left:


SATAN.

WAKKAWAKKAWAKKA

Sweet jesus

This is happening inside my body as we speak.

They said it could never happen

But I actually just called in sick to work. Wow. This thing has been weird so far, in the I was the most miserably sick on the first day, but while I felt fairly decent yesterday, the whole "exploding ass" thing was about fifty times worse. Today shall be a mystery, but one that I'd rather not have unfold at work.

Of course, since I called in, this pretty much guarantees that I'll be magically healthy by 9:00.

Sick as a dog

My streak of not puking going back to 1995 is still intact, but the simple act of trying to chew a piece of gum this morning brought that dangerously close to an end. Meanwhile, I'm running a temperature in the low hundreds, my ass has clearly decided that it wants rid of everything in it, and I left work after about 30 minutes today, which if you know me, is pretty much unthinkable. Life is hard. Meanwhile, I haven't eaten anything today, but now that things have calmed down enough that the hasty exit of food will most likely not be through my mouth, I think I might go get a dang Big Mac. And some dang fries. Hells yeah.

Polar bear says:

"Fuck Tim Tebow."