Like an Eclipse from a Moon

I finished a book. On my own. It only took me about four days. To celebrate such a rare occasion:

Last 5 Books I've Completed:
5. The Little House on the Prairie - Laura Ingalls Wilder (Bedtime reading, with Katy)
4. Life Together - Dietrich Bonhoeffer (freetime reading)
3. Where the Red Fern Grows - Wilson Rawls (Bedtime reading, with Katy)
2. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (Bedtime reading, with Katy)
1. Encyclopedia of Aquarium Plants - Peter Hiscock (Bathroom reading, freetime reading)

Honorable Mention:
The Little House in the Big Woods - Laura Ingalls Wilder (Bedtime reading, with Katy)
Harold and the Purple Crayon - Crockett Johnson (numerous stories, Bedtime reading, with Katy)

Books in process:
Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry - Doug Fields (freetime reading)
The Heart of the Artist - Rory Noland (freetime reading)
Prince Caspian - C.S. Lewis (Bedtime reading, with Katy)
The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church (reading for work)

Wow. I've read more books in the last couple of months than I've read (besides college classes) since I was a kid and would get free pizza from BookIt!

Strategy Games

Katy and I just hung out with an old default friend. Default friends are friends that you can just call up and hangout because you hangout on such a regular basis. Since I gave up video games for Lent (just a few more days!), we sat at the table and played Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan. In memory of the good ol' days when we had default friends . . .

Top 5 Strategy Board Games:
5. Othello
4. Clue
3. Risk! (I love how Risk! has an exclamation point on some versions)
2. Carcassonne
1. Settlers of Catan

Honorable Mention: Mexican Train Dominoes

I must be forgetting some, so please critique my list.

I don't wanna grow up

Top 5 Stupid Things about Being an Adult:
5. Taxes
4. Bills
3. Rent
2. Work
1. Being expected to act like an adult

Honorable Mention: Not being in a college community.

I know, it's lame. Baby steps. I can't put my best out there; otherwise, people will expect greatness.

And another one dies, and another one dies . . .

Samuel died. Opal's about to.

The Nitrogen Cycle

The Nitrogen Cycle is the best friend of a home aquarium. However, it is not the friend of the beginning aquarist.

The pH in the tank was sky rocketing for the first two weeks. During that time the ammonia peaks as well. During this time we lost 3 fish. One fish (Upside) we lost to ammonia poisoning. Two fish we lost to the toilet (Drick and Buber were incompatible with our other fish).

When the ammonia starts going down, it is because the good bacteria in the tank are booming. At this point the nitrites skyrocket. That is the point that the tank is in now. We just lost two since this part of the cycle started. We found Javier and Speckly (our last two Male Fancy Tale Guppies) at the bottom.

Next, the nitrates will slowly climb. This is remedied by regular water changes. During this part of the cycle is when you are supposed to add fish . . . 1-2 at a time . . . over a couple of months. I added 8 fish during the nitrite cycle.

I always come across some crucial knowledge right after I do the opposite. We put in fish and then I read that our fish were incompatible. I read that we needed to make schools of fish. I put in the rest of the guppy school and the rest of the neon school. Then I read that you should only put in 1-2 at a time and found standards to guard against overcrowding.

Sidenote: Two of our new Neons are having problems staying underwater. After they eat, their stomachs bulge. When this happens, their equilibrium seems to be thrown off. They spend the next hour or so swimming at a 45 degree angle towards the bottom so that they don't float. Also, our two new guppies are swimming at the surface with their mouths on the surface. This is supposed to be a bad sign. We'll see.

When we went to bed last night, I told Katy that we would have some dead fish when we woke up. I just thought they would be some of the new fish, not our old favorites.

7 Sins of a Beginner Aquarist

We have a tendency of breaking all the rules of owning fish. Add to our list of other wrongdoings overcrowding.

I bought 8 new fish to surprise Katy with when she got home from her parents' house. I only meant to get 6, but it cost the same to get 8, so I did.

We have 6 new Neon Tetras. Right now, they are about half the size of our other two Neons (Augie and Franklin). The one thing we did right in this situation was to actually have a school of schooling fish in the tank.

We now have 2 Female Fancy Tail Guppies. The first one looks like a female version of Javier, so her name is Samuel. The other one has a silver body with bright blue fins and tail. We haven't named her yet.

All I can say is that I'm obsessed with this new hobby.

Absolutely Genius

I love Devin!

Devin is my Apple Genius. He fixed my problems. Not just the problems I went in for. Other problems too.

Now AplCare, on the other hand, that guy WAS a problem. Everything he said to do didn't work. He was getting frustrated with me, when really what he said didn't work no matter how many times he told me to try. Within 5 minutes, Devin fixed the problems that it took my AplCare guy 1 hour to tell me he couldn't help. Buddy, no matter how many times you tell me there's a hole on the side of my CD/DVD/CDR/IHOP/ATt&T/CNN that is supposed to be useful for ejecting my CD, it's just not there. Give it up.

Devin, however, helped me after the last appointment of the day. He even stuck around 15 minutes after the store was closed to delete other problems from the computer.

You know what's really genius? Having free tech support for Macs. Sure, OS X and the graphics started bringing me around from PC to MAC, but Devin, you made me a MacMan (not like a new cannibalistic sandwich at McDonalds, but a man who loves Mac computers, well a PowerBook G4 lover for now).

I love Devin!

The Downside to Upside

Well, we named Upside so because he looked upside-down when he was swimming rightside-up. I thought that when he died, he would float upside-down and look like he was floating rightside-up. However, he didn't float at all. He sank to the bottom where our bootom feeder began to eat away at him. Yesterday, we noticed something like a boil on one side of his head that pushed up the scales behind his dead like headphones. He was struggling to fight the little current in the tank. It took us a while to find him today, but there he was, stuck next to the log.

So, that's the first fish that died before we flushed him.

Being in the Present

The Present is stupid. Not this specific present, but the Present in general. At any moment in the Present, the "grass is always greener" in the Past and the Future.
It is so much easier to spend one's time in the Present thinking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the Past. Even the bad things of the Past become good or even humorous things when viewed from the Present. Even movies are funnier in the Past than they are in the Present. For instance, Katy and I saw Napoleon Dynamite after others who had seen it convinced us that it was the funniest movie EVER. When we saw it, it was kinda boring. However, after seeing it, we found ourselves quoting it. When we watched it the second time, we weren't laughing at the humor of the movie in the Present; we were simply laughing along with our memory of it in the Past.
It is so much easier to spend one's time in the Present thinking about Future changes, infinite possibilities. There is only one Present, there are infinite Futures. Or, at least, in one's mind there are infinite Futures. In light of the Future, it is easy to feel trapped in the Present.
The Past is "greener" because the good and bad balanced out to a general victory of the good, at least in memory. The Future is "greener" because there is no bad. Yes, there are situations like death, heaven, or other potentially long-range events in the Future, but I'm speaking of less significant life-changes. For instance, everyone looks forward to being old enough to get their driving liscense. When it happens, you don't feel any physical or metaphysical change from the day before. You look forward to being 18. No difference. Going to college. No difference. Even with being married, I felt no different the day after the wedding than the day before (Well, SURE I felt different . . . but that was just the relief of the end of wedding planning! I guess the lack of feeling different was a reassurance to realize that marriage was the natural step in our relationship).
I've always been kinda ADD. I've been able to harness that to my advantage at times in academia, but also to my disadvantage. I have a hard to focusing in the present, but when I do, I can be brilliant (Sidenote: I once had a respected professor write to me that I would be brilliant if I could only write more clearly. I only focus on the "brilliant" part!)

This whole blog comes from one thought I had earlier today. I'm a sucky cuddler. I used to be a great cuddler. Now, I can't lay still for more than a couple minutes without shifting or getting up. Much of that has to do with a bad back, but I think my ADD has shifted from my brain down through my nervous system into my back. Much of it has to do with my mind always thinking about what I should be doing in the Present. There's always something I should be doing in the Present. (This doesn't go with the Future, even though these are technically Future events. Being lazy is different than just Being)
Also, it is difficult being a fish owner. The most important task as a fish owner is to stop anything from changing in the tank. Change is the most stressful thing to a fish, the lack of change is the most stressful thing for me. Luckily, there have been enough problems with the fish that I have had to change things in the tank before they can stabilize.

Sidenote: to a person with any kind of ADD, eternity even in heaven is kinda scary. It's not that I want to take my Xbox with me, its just that I want one waiting there for me when I get there!

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Katy and I are horribly indecisive people. I'm actually a little more decisive than Katy. Anyways, when we need to make a minor decision, we play the "Not This" game.

How to play Not This:
1. Come up with a list of possible solutions to a minor decision.
2. One person decides which of the possible solutions they do not want.
3. That person says "Not _____" (_____ being the solution not wanted)
4. The next person involved repeats steps 2 and 3.
5. When the solutions have been narrowed to 2 or 3 possible solutions, either repeat steps 2-4 until the solution is narrowed to 1 final solution (this gives one person the final decision, which usually doesn't work for an indecisive couple like us) or everyone involved somehow makes the final decision (which is also tough when all people involved are indecisive, but at least the possibilities are narrowed).

There are two main situations that Katy and I play not this: picking a restaurant and picking a movie from our home collection. Since picking a restaurant is so much based on location. I will only discuss picking a movie.

When we play Not This Home Movies, there are some movies that make it onto the list more often than not. What I mean is, there is an initial list of choices. We have at least a hundred movies, so we don't play Not This with all of them (unless we play Not This with genres to get it started. This also works with restaurants: not fast food, not Chinese, not stuff that causes diarrhea, etc.). One person sits at our movie library and lists of up to 20 movies to start the game off. The movies that make our list regularly are our Safe movies, the movies we can always fall back on, the movies we can enjoy in any mood. Here is my list.

Top 5 Movies That Make My "Not This" List Regularly:
5. What About Bob?
4. Mystery Men
3. (A Tom Clancy movie; we only own Hunt For Red October, Patriot Games, and Clear And Present Danger)
2. Saving Silverman
1. 10 Things I Hate About You
Honorable Mention: Super Troopers, Office Space, Princess Bride, Rocketman (which is my favorite movie, but I've seen it so much), A Bug's Life (token cartoon), Any of the Mummy movies (I put one of these on the list regularly, but it is always Katy's first movie voted off the island), The Man Who Knew Too Little (loses out to What About Bob? as the Bill Murray regular), and any Star Wars movie (these have been our Sunday afternoon series since we finished the LOTR trilogy).

Comments should A) critique my list, 2) be your new list, or IV) critique someone else's new list.

1 of 2

Sorry about all the fish updates, but so much has changed for them since we've gotten them.

Spike, the once docile Angelfish, now attacks T on a regular basis. If a fish can go insane, T has. He swims as fast aqs he can, darting back and forth off of walls, and he hasn't eaten in 2 days. I think we're pretty much waiting for him to die.

No one really goes into the new shelter. Listerine, who didn't know the tank without it, goes into it occasionally. I saw T dart into it this morning right when I turned the light on.

When the fish get stressed, we get stressed.

Enough about the fish for now.

The Replacements

No, not Keanu Reeves playing football. It's my current obsession - fish.

We got two new fish to replace the Tiger Barbs we flushed. We also got a fake log/stump/shelter for the fish, since that is supposed to help them be less stressed.

Anyways, Listerine is the new Coryadoras Catfish. He's a little leopardy looking and eats the unclean leftovers of the tank, so Katy wanted to call him Leper, but we thought Listerine was a little better. He's named Listerine because everywhere he goes his mouth is swishing back and forth.

Jack Hammer is kind of funny. He has a long black stripe from head to tail. He is an Otocinclus Catfish, but you wouldn't know it when he is swimming. However, he rarely swims. He is usually stuck to the side of the tank, a leaf of a plant, or the top of the fake log. Jack Hammer is named after the movement of his body when he is chomping away on the side of the tank. He was almost called Hungry Hungry Hippo, but that just doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.

So far, Listerine is the only one who has gone into the shelter that we have seen, but we'll give it a little time.