Reefer Madness (*)

We had a couple of cool days and I immediately decided that there was no way my nano-reef tank could possibly overheat (again) until next summer, so I ordered a bunch of coral. From Wisconsin, where there is apparently the Less-great Barrier Reef.

Anyhow, the package got shipped overnight via FedEx, and once again, I am amazed at the FedEx tracking system. No matter how long I procrastinate and stick around the house, they always manage to deliver the package fifteen minutes after I leave. Either they have a hidden GPS unit on my car, or there's someone hiding in the tree across the street with binoculars. It's uncanny.

So the box sat in the 90 degree heat all day until I came home. However, the company I bought it from deals with FedEx on a daily basis, so it was a packaging marvel, and it was so well insulated that the contents of the box were still cool. The plug of each piece of coral was rubber-banded to a square of styrofoam, and floated upside-down in a one-liter bag of water which was then quadruple bagged (which explains how five tiny pieces of coral had a shipping weight of 10 kilograms). Lots of thought went into this packaging, but it was still a long, rough trip.

At first glance I thought all the fragments were dead, but aside from one frag that fell off the plug and thus sloshed around in the bag unhindered, everything perked up within an hour of going in the tank. The problem child was all slimy and basically unhappy, but I'm crossing my fingers that it survives.

Here are some fuzzy pictures. (Surely this must be some defect in the camera, right? Maybe I need a different lens or something? Because this couldn't possibly be because I can't take a picture to save my life, right?)

With the lights on:


And with just the actinics:

(It looks much better in person -- the green really glows.)

And my favorite, the silver branch pumping xenia:


When the water is still enough you can see the individual branches moving.

In other news, some guy named Ponch is going to be putting up a new fence for me tomorrow. I'll miss going over to my neighbor's house at 11 pm because my dog has gotten through a gap in the fence and can't get back, but I guess somehow I'll survive...


* Thank you, Rvan, for coming up with the silly title of the day.

I suck (no, really!)

So, tonight I did my first ever water change on the new reef tank.

Up to now the tank has been cycling and I haven't had any creatures (other than hitchhikers that came with the rocks) that needed protection from nitrates. But I tested my water last week, and the ammonia and nitrite levels were zero, so I ordered a "clean up crew" consisting of a couple of types of snails and some scarlet legged hermit crabs.

Ordering the invertebrates was a bit of a pain because most places require bulk purchases, which is what you would need for a 75 gallon tank, but not for a 14 gallon tank. But I finally found a place that would let me order a few at a time. I learned some things:

1. I may have ordered a total of 8 creatures, but they sent almost twice that. I think they assume there will be some loss in shipping, probably because
2. They sent me mail saying the order had been shipped six hours after it had been delivered to my porch where it sat all day long.

Despite this, everything survived. I had a bad moment when I looked in the bag with the hermit crabs and saw detached legs in one corner of the bag, but there are three shells and three hermit crabs with all of their legs, so either one of them molted, or a few extra parts were thrown in the bag for free.

Naturally, the next day I didn't turn on the air conditioning and it got over 100 degrees, and the tank was 90 degrees (optimal temperature is about 80 F) when I came home. But they all survived even that.


With all the extra snails, I was worried that some would starve to death, but these guys seem to be like a Caltrans road crew -- most of them are standing around doing nothing, and one snail is cleaning the heck out of the glass.

The wavy lines in the foreground are the cleaned areas.




Here's one of the hermit crabs. I don't know if they do anything to clean the tank, but it's fun to watch them climb around the rocks dragging the big shell behind them.


In any case, I needed to do my first water change, so I mixed up the salt water and then got ready to siphon out the two gallons of old water. I was going to just submerge part of the tubing and kink it off to get the siphon started, but the tubing I have doesn't kink well, so that didn't work. After five or six tried I realized that I was going to have to suck on the tube to get it started.

I don't remember the last time I siphoned something, but I do remember that it took a fair amount of vacuum. Maybe I was using defective tubing or something then, because when I sucked on the tube this time, the only reason I didn't get a mouthful of nasty salt water was that the tubing was five feet long.

(Okay, I'll pause here so you all can make all the hilarious dirty comments now and just get it over with.)

Anyhow, the water change went well, and I'll be ordering coral soon. Or, at least, as soon as I figure out how to keep the tank cool on hot days...

Cooking For Real People

Let’s face it – there are a whole lot of cooking shows out there already. Do we really need another one? I would argue yes we do, for the same reason that although there’s a lot of porn out on the internet (at least that’s what someone told me), what we really need is for the second season of Castle to bring back Nathan Fillion. (Monday, Sep 21 for those who haven’t yet marked your calendars.)

My point is, the current cooking shows on television are for people to sit on the couch and watch while the frozen pizza is in the oven. Nobody has kitchens like these chefs, and we sure as heck don’t have all the fancy cookware. Nobody I know would (intentionally) light something on fire in the kitchen. It’s all just food porn.

No, what we really need is a cooking show for people who not only don’t cook, but also don’t have anything that didn’t come from Target or Costco in their kitchen. A cooking show for real people.

Here’s what I would cover in the first episode of "Cooking for Real People":

• Knives – yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard about how important it is to have the right knives, and a dull knife is more dangerous than a pit bull on meth, and blah, blah, blah. You know what I have? A set of serrated knives that I bought at Costco twenty years ago. Most of them are technically steak knives, but there’s also a cleaver (never used) and a bread knife (which I once used to shorten the pressboard when I goofed while putting the entertainment center together). I chop things every day, and I’ve never sharpened these knives. And I haven’t cut myself with them either since I finally stopped holding the bagel in one hand while slicing with the other. Fancy chefs are horrified by my knives, but I say screw ‘em. They work great.
  

• Pam – Want to avoid greasy food? Don’t roll things around in a bowl of oil, just spray Pam on them. It’s faster and you don’t have to wash an extra dish. (That last bit is important when you only have two bowls of any decent size.) It’s just olive oil anyhow.

• Old Spice – Not the cologne (although, that’s really something to avoid – I knew someone whose dorm room walls were basically rotting and he covered the odor by sprinkling Old Spice in the carpet – I will take the resulting stench with me to the grave). No, I’m talking about all the spices that came with the spice rack you bought two decades ago. Yeah, everything is over ten years old now, and those cooking show people keep trying to convince everyone to throw out spices older than six months. Those people are on crack. I don’t even go through that much salt in six months. It you can’t see bugs in it, I say it’s still good. Just add a little more than the recipe calls for. (But maybe not so much with nutmeg – I found that out this week.)

• Measuring – This may be the only thing I agree with the chefs about – measuring is for wimps. The size of your palm doesn’t change. Figure out how much of your cupped hand is covered by a teaspoon and use that for measuring. Your prep time will decrease. Granted, every once in a while you may completely miss the mark, but you can always claim that the problem was that your spices were too old.

That’s it. The Food Network should be calling any moment now…

The Family That Keeps the One Year Old Out of the Toilet Together Stays Together

So, I went down to Orange County to visit family this weekend. It turns out that I am related to these people. Here are some highlights of the trip:

• My dog came with me. Dogs aren't allowed in my parents' house. I slept in the garage with my dog. My parents' garage is cleaner than my house, but has many more mosquitoes.

• It took my three year old nephew Aiden two days to get over the fact that I don't like garlic.

• My 14 month old nephew went running back the hall with a remote control. After some discussion of who was supposed to be watching him, my sister-in-law followed him into the bathroom and gasped. Jojo the Enforcer (the little devil's mother) started laughing and said "I guarantee that means the remote is in the toilet."
  

• When I left, K-poo was sitting on the bed with Aiden, flying a rocket ship to the Sticky Planet while following the pirate treasure map. Part of flying the rocket ship involved the three year old wearing K-poo's oversized white sunglasses and iPod earbuds. It was a good look for him.
  

Wasting Away Again In La La La La Land...

When are they going to invent a transporter already? This is the sort of thing I wonder as I'm stuck in traffic in LA. In order to visit family in Orange County, my choices are

• Get locked up in a little metal box with horrible air and no personal space. And pay for the privilege.
• Drive.

Driving really is the more attractive choice. Unfortunately, there really isn't a way to get from Sacramento to Orange County without going through LA.

Here is the Los Angeles that I know:



I see the same thing every time. In fact, traffic is all I see. I used to try to time things so that I would miss "rush hour", but then I realized that rush hour extends from 6am to 10 pm, and sometimes later.

It took roughly three hours to drive what should be a two hour drive through Los Angeles. I had lots of time to take pictures because this was my speed for a significant part of the trip:



Fortunately, my navigator doesn't mind stop and go traffic, so it was alright in the end...

Lest You Think I Only Make Fun of Other People…

I hate getting my hair cut. I always have. I don’t like people touching my head, and sitting still for half an hour while either trying to make small talk with someone or having to listen to other people talk is just torture. I really don’t care what my hair looks like, I just want it to be short enough that it doesn’t tangle too easily, and in a style that doesn’t require me to do anything other than brush it in the morning.

Back when I was in college my friend Stephanie convinced me to go to a more “edgy” salon. (Honestly, I think this may be the only time I ever went to go get my hair cut with someone else.) While I was waiting for my turn we talked about what I wanted. I believe my exact quote was “I don’t really care as long as they don’t shave my head.”

However, when I was sitting in the chair, what came out was something along the lines of “Do whatever you want to do.” Naturally the stylist immediately whipped out the clippers and set to work. I thought Stephanie was going to stop breathing because she was laughing so hard.

The thing is, it looked pretty good. And it was really easy to take care of. It wasn’t long enough to tangle, and there really wasn’t all that much to brush. The only problem is that 1) I didn’t (and still don’t) wear makeup, and 2) I didn’t (and still don’t) wear dresses. Apparently “short hair” plus “no makeup” plus “jeans” equals “male” to a small but significant percentage of the population.

Let me just say, if I were a guy and had a butt this big, I would cry.

In the Santa Ana train station, the bathrooms are down a short hallway – the men’s bathroom is halfway down on the left, and the women’s bathroom is at the end.

I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, plus my leather jacket, Doc Martins, and I was carrying my guitar case. But again, let me stress, if I were a guy and had hips like this, I would never leave my room. Ever.

Anyhow, I walked down the hallway, followed by two guys probably in their fifties, with slight Southern accents. As I passed the men’s bathroom, one of them called out.

“Son… Son! You’re going the wrong way!”

At this point I realized they were talking to me and I paused and considered turning around, but then decided that it just wasn’t worth the effort and the all-around embarrassment. I kept going into the women’s bathroom.

As the door closed behind me, I heard him drawl to his friend, “Well… I guess he didn’t care.”

Please Recycle After Reading

So, I've been working at the same company off and on for about fifteen years. In that time we've changed names at least four times, moved the location of group at least twice, centralized and decentralized a couple of times, and redone the organizational chart at least every six months. But the most interesting change has been the progression of the recycling effort.

When I first started, there was a bin in the break room for aluminum cans. I think that was about it. If you needed to recycle anything else, you gave it to Rvan, and he took it down to the county recycling.

Then we were each assigned a big white box, about eighteen inches high, with the footprint of A-size paper. On the box was printed all of the things that you could (paper) and couldn't (Post-its, plastic envelopes) put in the box. Those boxes were great, not for recycling, but as an easy supply of scrap paper and a time-based filing system. The one time someone came through and emptied the boxes, there was general outrage because we no longer had those scraps of paper that had design notes that you thought you were done with but really weren't. At that point we still had aluminum recycling in the break room.

In the cycle after that, the company went whole-hog. Our standard black plastic trash cans were labeled with a big fluorescent "recycling" sticker, and a tiny little piggyback bin was attached to the side with a round "Basura" sticker. The aluminum recycling bin was taken out of the break room because it was theoretically redundant.

(Sidenote: Okay, granted, 99% of our cleaning people have spoken Spanish as their native language (and you could get some interesting but scary stories from the Guatemalan about being beaten by the female police officers in his native land), but isn't it just the tiniest bit racist to assume that they can't figure out what the word "trash" is? After all, if I can figure out "basura" and I don't know Spanish, surely someone living in this country who is making a living cleaning office buildings can puzzle out one word of English, right?)

Anyhow, the reversal of the big and little cans confused a lot of people. Some followed the labels, others followed the prior purpose. After I worked late a few times I realized that it really didn't matter since the person emptying both the recycling and basura bins went around with one big trash can for both of them.

As it stands now, we each have our own (unlabeled) standard-sized trash can. And there is can and bottle recycling in the break room, along with non-confidential paper recycling in the copier room.

But if you need to recycle anything else (batteries, cardboard, etc), you give it to Rvan.