19 October 2004 Tuesday

Enter Bettas

the Betta Splendens (Siamese Fighting Fish): Twain came home with Lor and I on Saturday. yesterday (Monday) we brought home Rhine and Abra. They were all named yesterday evening.

All veiltails.. each from a different store. Twain is a fairly solid red, from Congressional Aquraium on Rockville Pike.. he’s the clearest of the three. Rhine is a messy/mottled turqoise-fined with red/magenta edges and a marbled body.. Abra is a little larger and fuller with a dark body and red fins that abruptly change to a dark cornflower blue.

i really would like to dive into raising them and breeding them and collecting them.. but i have not the space and resoures for it right now. meanwhile, i think i’ve found a way to keep Rhine and Abra warm, but Twain is downstairs in a larger bowl and i don’t know how i may keep him warm.

I once had an other betta, whom i believe i’d named Orchid (though i think that may have been only part of his name..)... he was the richest darkest deepest most vibrant blues that i have seen..very dark royal blues. i wish i had a photo. he did well for very long.. partly by himself, and at length in a community tank with guppies and other randomness where he hovered by the heater. i have never seen another live betta as obviously beautiful and rich as he was.

the sudden introduction of Twain, Rhine, and Abra is the result of Lorense suddenly thoroughly cleaning out his fish tank that has been in his room for so many months (once upon a time, it was in mine..and before that, it belonged to Yan).. and wanting to add more fish. surviving all these months were two female fancytail guppies, two sharp-looking fish that i thoroughly despise but that lorense particularly loves—i’ve been dismayed they’ve outlived everything and i’m convinced they’re responsible for some unpeace in the tank, a rather aggressive zebra danio—i think he’s male, a chinese algae eater, and… i think that’s it. so, now has been added a pleco (algae eater), a little frog, a female(?) zebra danio, and two male fancytail guppies.

lorense tends the tank and i fret about the bettas. how am i to keep Twain warm??

oh. one of the guppies had a ripped tail when i saw it yesterday, and i don’t recall that being the case when he arrived. lorense and i are blaming the male danio, and he is being isolated in a floating container in the tank in the meanwhile. he really is the hyperest/chasingest fish in there. regarding warming Twain, i may just see how he does in the community tank, or at least in a floating compartment. at least the heater in that tank is still doing well.

that’s my ramble on the fish for now. i’d get into it with more useful/learned information, but now is not the time. when will it all be?

i’m almost finished reading Children of the Mind—rather pleased that it’s been drawn out this long, as i know i will regret it being the last in the series when i am done. i’ll have to wait another five years to forget it enough to read it again!

13 October 2004 Wednesday

Not everything can be said aloud

“i need not to need, or else a love of intuition—someone who reaches out to my weakness and won’t let go…”

...

glimpses are not enough. glimpses will never be enough.

09 October 2004 Saturday

my Firefox and Thunderbird Extensions

i’m liking firefox more every day. i’m at Firefox PR1:

05 October 2004 Tuesday

There we are

I really wanted to write a bit last night, but i couldn’t get the password and i to agree with each other. ay. well, better late than never, ish. So Alberto wrote a nice bit about how free i am now and the excellence and happiness and relaxation of that. first of all, i don’t really know how to be really carefree. tried it once in college. can’t recall it before and can’t recall it afterward. and that particular stint ended badly, of course. that’s a bit beside the point tho. right now? i can’t feel carefree. i can’t feel really free, either. i’m not in a bad place or a bad time, and i’m not any place i really don’t want to be nor doing anything i really don’t want to be doing… but i’m also not really where i want to be or doing what i really want to be doing. and what is that? well… offhandedly, the answer is that’s largely what this time is for…for me to figure that out a bit.. the not quite so offhanded answer is that .. i imagine i do have an idea of when i’ll feel freeish or comfortable or all those imaginedly satisfactory feelings that i’m obviously gearing to be on track toward…

look, there’s stuff hanging over my head and there’s stuff hanging around me and until i can really come to arms and lay it all down or lay it all dead, i won’t ever really feel moved on. i’ll get to it, and it’ll be good… i’ve just been really slow about it.

weather’s been really nice these last few days. it’s been good to have mom home.. it will be nice to go for a walk with my dad… mom’s been asking me just about every day whether or not this is the day i’m going to go “put my name” in places for a new job. … no. it’s not. i fully don’t intend to even begin thinking about a new job in any really near/foreseeable sunrise. if something worthwhile finds me, that’s one thing… but as of now i am very much NOT in the market for a new job. my old job really wasn’t bad. i didn’t leave it for the sake of getting a new job. i left my job for the sake of leaving my job. pretty much.

and about me taking up the guitar … i remember trying that once i got to Antioch… it was very very happiness but it required a single dorm room in which a bed took up nearly all the space and i could do everything from it: chatting online, watching downloaded movies, eating snacks, opening up websites with java-tuners from which to tune the guitar, and of course pulling the guitar up onto my lap, amidst blankets and pillows, and doing my best with it. i really liked my guitar.and playing it was really quite nice—the experience..not the sounds coming from my guitar. but, i rap. isn’t that enough for you?

30 September 2004 Thursday

Is it too late to come out of retirement?

i am so very very out of the game. and by ‘game’ i mean this whole website-building/designing/blogging thing. i let it go for a while.. and that was all good and fine, but now here i am, lost to whatever my previous state was. i kind of remember where i was and what i was trying to do, but now i don’t really remember all my personal shortcuts and arrangements and the basic skills and techniques i had built in short-term memory and repertoire.. they flew away, figuring i can learn it all over again. i can, it’s just going to be a whole up-hill adventure again. maybe the slope will be a bit easier..although i figure i’m even more out of shape now than i was before! and here i go with the rambling! and hadn’t i decided i was going to try to use proper quasi-complete sentences and something semblancing (yes, i am acquainted with the word “resembling”...what’s yer point) english grammar and common useage of Capital letters. well clearly that flew out the window too.

anyway, here i am. i haven’t reacquainted myself adequately enough to declare cheers of ..anything… but i haven’t given up the day i take that “pardon my ferrydust” sign off the site and replace it with some comfortable alicson-ramblingish and proseness stuff.

just to clarify, i’m not fulltime or even halftime back on this yet. but my eye’s on it and i’m looking forward to it. *boogieboogieboogie*

...holy &r@p. i’m completely forgotten html (and probably css too). okay.. so if i want to make some font smaller, then i… umm…

02 August 2004 Monday

Going

Oy. I haven’t been writing, Ferrydust isn’t finished, and so many various other things are not where they should be. Too many journals: less written. Too many thoughts: less decisions. Too many grape-type-originated foods: too sweet—but that’s rather entirely irrelevant to the rest.

So this is a note to say hi… “hi”... and note: I’m not finished.

08 July 2004 Thursday

Lackadaisical

I was writing and wanted to use the word “lackadaisical” in my sentence.. It’s such a rarely-used word that I thought I should look it up briefly, just to verify exact spelling and definition. So I pull up m-w.com and what should happen to be the Word of the Day??

lackadaisical
lak-uh-DAY-zih-kul adjective
: lacking life, spirit, or zest : languid ...

What are the chances??

06 July 2004 Tuesday

What Do Dreamed Stethescopes Symbolize?

In my dream was Harold-sensei.. I was looking all over his classroom for one of his stethescopes.. (I don’t think he has stethescopes. Or one single classroom.) I don’t know if I found one in the end, but I ended up also looking for a similarly-shaped screwdriver.
It proves I did sleep last night.

I feel really sick

...but it’s just a feeling. I’m sure it will go away, and be the only thing that does.

I’d really like to write something.. but what would I say? I don’t want to talk about how I feel.. I don’t want to talk about this week, and especially not yesterday and today.

It’s really hot in my room. Even with three fans blowing. I’m not thinking very highly of these fans.

I’ve eaten a lot of blueberries in the last few days. While on a plane ride over to Asia a few years ago (I forget where in Asia) I sat next to a gentleman (British/American..I think American..keeps an apartment in Bangkok) who was reading a magazine article about surprisingly most-healthy foods.. He and I talked about it for a while—tried to guess them and then remember them and.. I’ve forgotten most of the conversation. It was pleasant. One of the foods was blueberries.

Showers don’t make me feel better. I don’t suppose they make me feel worse, though. And my room isn’t getting any cooler and I’m still sweating as I sit here—I despise sweating indoors.

Most unhappiness and disatisfaction and hurt and disgust and … anyway, it’s mostly in one’s head, right? That is, what happens to you is what it is, and how you choose to feel about it is what you make of it.. right? Well, I guess I’m choosing to feel like this paragraph is crap.

I guess I’m feeling beaten. So this is what it feels like. To be treated with open disdain and insult, and to be told to accept it, at the pain of being told I am selfishly complaining and responsible for making everyone unhappy. Live with it, as it lives carefreely around me as if nothing was nothing and neither am I. I don’t choose to feel like this. There are few other things I feel so badly about, and nothing that feels this bad. I think this feeling is worse than heartbreak—if that isn’t combined in it to begin with. My face hurts. If I stay, this is what I stay with. If I leave, I’m accused of running away. And I didn’t want to make anyone cry.

I feel disgusting and disgusted.

I’d look more forward to tomorrow, if I didn’t remember that that’s what I was doing yesterday when today happened.

30 June 2004 Wednesday

Site Issues; My dying mouse

‘Having some site issues (some internal server errors and ‘ferrydust.com’ and ‘ferrydust.goodgrape.net’ are not resolving to where they should go, though ‘ferrydust.goodgrape.net/ferrydust’ is working fine. but.. oh. ‘just realized.. no one’s going to see this till the whole thing is fixed because who the heck would come upon that last url? it should be the straight up ’__.com’. but anyway, like i said, the site’s having some issues…)—which is not entirely heartbreaking, as the site isn’t even finished yet. But still, it’s always a little bit disheartening.

I haven’t had chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream in a while (maybe two weeks or so.. but it feels like longer).

I need a new mouse. USB, optical. Not cordless (blasphemy!) because with my current set up, there’s just barely room for the comp with the mouse next to it, and I also tend to use the mouse on my thigh… so I’ve had a recent tendency to drop my mouse a lot. Hence, (after quite many months of this, actually) my current mouse has started hiccuping at me, and I find it necessary to buy a new one.