I can’t kill off Cleo Fish…

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I used to be such a fish tank guy!

I can’t even remember a time when I didn’t have at least one tank either in my bedroom or somewhere in my apartment when I moved out. I’ve always loved fish, but for some reason in the last couple of years my discipline for maintaining them has significantly faded.

Case in point – I haven’t fed my fish by hand in … two years? … because after buying one of those automatic fish feeders for going on vacation, I came back and said, “Why spoil a good thing?!” and just let the robot take over what I as the responsible pet owner was supposed to be doing all of that time!

Hey, in my defense, my care had started slacking at that point anyways, so at least the robot would remember to feed them every single day!

But that said, I’ve been seriously thinking about getting rid of the tank in my office – it’s all green and nasty, and most of the fish that were in it are now dead, and when I’m too lazy to keep it filled, the filter starts to get really obnoxious once enough of the water has evaporated from it.

It’s not just me – Sara’s tank has been sitting out in the garage since we moved into this house and that was two years ago! We actually talked about turning her tank into a Lego fish tank with blue bricks on the bottom for water and various fish swimming all about. That technically never happened, either, but it would’ve been a neat idea.

The problem is, I enjoy fish in passing, but I have no desire or discipline or time to actually do the upkeep required to not have a green and nasty fish tank sitting in the room. And that’s sad because it really shouldn’t take much – I’ve got a super nice filter that should rarely need changing if everything is maintained right, and with the auto-feeder on food duty, really the only thing left is to occasionally scrape algae off the sides and dump five gallons of fresh water to replace whatever has evaporated from it every couple of weeks.

…both of the latter of which, I do not do.

So earlier today, I was finally ready to just pull the plug. Sara even asked me about it a day or two ago if it was time to just admit that we weren’t fish people anymore, so when I was sitting here trying to write and the incessant sound of water dumping out of the filtration pipe because the water level is down 6″ in the tank had pushed me to my last nerve, I got up and instead of grabbing the bucket to get more water, I just flipped the power switch to turn everything off.

Mind you, there’s still an algae eater in there somewhere … I actually think that he’s the only one left because the other two died recently … and we saw him enjoying their remains at his leisure. But I honestly didn’t really think much of it, that is until Cleo came running into my office a little while ago, stopped dead in her tracks, and made a bee-line for the darkened fish tank where it was pretty clear that she knew something was up…

For some strange reason, Cleo has always liked my fish – I guess when we adopted her, she became a fish person, too – but she would always come in and put her nose up to the glass, and I eventually put a little storage box there for her to step on so that she could see better into the tank. She didn’t really care for the other ones, but that algae eater for some reason … we ended up nicknaming him Cleo Fish just because she would get so excited when he was out and about, and so mad when he was hiding in his cave and she couldn’t see him!

I guess the TL/DR of this blog post is … I need to become a better fish tank owner because I’ll never hear the end of it from the dog if I euthanize that one stupid fish. 😕

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Giving Verizon FiOS Credit Where Credit Is Due…

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Admittedly I’ve had a lot of frustrations with Verizon lately regarding on demand services, direct marketing, and general bill creep, but this is still notable from a tech geek’s perspective.

I got an email from them a couple of days ago asking if I wanted to join their new rewards program! It sounded kinda stupid and I have no desire to interact with Verizon other than getting my TV & Internet services and paying for my TV & Internet services, but I ended up filling out the form anyways because of a little note at the bottom suggesting that random members would be selected for a free speed upgrade to make one’s upload speed match their download speed!

Alrighty then!!!

So my old speed was 50/25, which seemed fine enough for what we use on a daily basis, but here’s the new test:

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For comparison’s sake, here are a few previous tests that I’ve gotten through FiOS over the years…

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2117671705[1]

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That last one was from the last house we were renting that admittedly had shitty wiring, and I think it was a 25/25 package anyways, which then got upgraded to 50/25 when we moved due to a stupid issue with how Verizon handles moving.

There’s still part of me that’s tempted to pay the extra couple of bucks to bump it up to a whopping 75/75, although with my current agreement just expiring and them being pretty stingy on what promotional offers renewals vs. new customers can get, I might just have to sit and enjoy 50/50 here for a while.

Still, not bad…  8)

The Good Stuff

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Here’s another great Robin Williams scene from Good Will Hunting – probably one of my favorites.

What a way to talk about love, and having loved, and real intimacy, and what regret actually means in the grand scheme of things… 😉

Some thoughts on suicide and Robin Williams’ passing…

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1047c26a6b413b397f046a7624afcedeSuicide isn’t funny, but we sure do seem to lose an awful lot of funny people to it, don’t we?

Looking back at my own life, I’ve known too many people who’ve tried to commit suicide … granted, of course, that even one is too many.

Some of them succeeded, some of them failed, and I don’t think any of them you ever would’ve guessed from the surface that things had gotten that bad in their own heads. Which is a terrifying consideration when I think about some of the closer ones to me, but I think that proves just how devilish of a beast depression can be … and just when you think someone is through the worst of it all, it very much still has the capability of rearing its ugly head in the worst possible way.

And it sucks because now that all of the dialog is present and we talk about trying to be there for those in need, this is the time when the most important questions we have to ask those people who we’ve lost remain unanswered … why’d you do it? What was it that finally pushed you over the edge?? What could *I* have done differently so that you’d still be here with us???

We’ll never know, and the only thing we can really do is try to be a little more understanding, and pay a little better attention, and be there a little more for our friends and family all of the time because we never know when today might be that day when they’re clinging to the edge, waiting for someone … anyone … to come along and reach out a hand to help them back up.

We may try to put ourselves in their shoes, but we can’t … not even the ones who tried and failed, because they failed … whatever they were going through wasn’t quite enough … and don’t get me wrong, that’s a very, very good thing that we should be grateful for. Yet to try and quantify the ones who succeeded…

I mean, I’ve thought about it before, but never very seriously. I’ve thought about a lot of different things that are admittedly pretty morbid, but most of them I’d never carry through with … in a way, I think part of that is just the crux of being a storyteller. The creative mind wanders to all sorts of dark corners in search of its next work of art … we just don’t choose to share the lot of them with anyone but ourselves…

Truth be told, I’m actually quite terrified of my own death – to the point where I hate thinking about that part of my future because just not being makes me very sad and I haven’t really come to terms with the thought of mortality in my 34 years so far – but I’ve certainly had bad days where the thought has crossed my mind whether the people around me might be better off without. I think another part of it in my head is me just being passive aggressive – “I’ll show them…” and that kind of mentality, but then I step back and put it into context in reality, and I remember that life does go on without these people. It’s hard until it gets easier, and we always remember them, but suicide is a lousy way to get back at somebody because egos have a funny way of dissipating quite quickly after one dies.

I think we all get low from time to time, and your definition of low may vary from mine and somebody else’s … but the definition of low to someone who’s depressed is in an entirely different sphere that we’ll just never know. And that’s both a good and a bad thing.

* * *

I think my favorite memory of Robin Williams was watching him host Comic Relief with Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal on HBO. He was always so off the wall and unpredictable, and he wasn’t burdened by movie ratings or a censor as to what types of dirty jokes were off limits. It was just so cool to watch three of the biggest names in comedy riffing off of each other for hours on end between each act, and it was one of the things that kind of inspired me to create Just Laugh because I wanted to be a part of something cool like that, too…

Something I probably shouldn’t admit in public – I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen Good Morning, Vietnam.

I guess I need to get on that.

But Aladdin, Dead Poet’s Society, Mrs. Doubtfire, Good Will Hunting … some of the dialog from Good Will Hunting bring tears to my eyes with how raw and emotional he could deliver, and yet on the other side with Genie he’s probably one of the most memorable characters to come out of The Disney Decade…

“You’ll have bad times, but it’ll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to.” – Good Will Hunting

“No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” – Dead Poet’s Society

“Oi! Ten thousand years will give you such a crick in the neck.” – Aladdin

And he named his daughter Zelda – just how amazingly cool is that?!

Robin Williams always seemed like a pretty great guy. He made a lot of us laugh, and he made a lot of us think, and that’s how I’m going to remember him. 🙂

movie thoughts … The Amazing Spider-Man 2

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MV5BOTA5NDYxNTg0OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODE5NzU1MTE@._V1_SX214_AL_Yawn.

So I think this was one of the first movies that we weren’t able to see at the theater on account of parenthood. We had snuck in Captain America 2 just before bringing Christopher home from the hospital in April and that was decent. I would’ve expected this one to be awesome on account of how we left the theater with the last one, but … no.

Just no…

I remember thinking when the very first trailer or pictures or whatever came out for this that Jamie Foxx as Electro was going to be pretty ridiculous, and they certainly managed to live up to precisely those expectations because good grief, did that character feel like he’d been thrown together by a five year-old who was hopped up on sugar during recess! The whole premise just didn’t make sense – he got his powers because he fell unsupervised, and he was blue, and apparently in his little isolation tank he doesn’t need air to survive, and sometimes he can fly, and sometimes he’s an entire building, but he’s not really, blah blah blah…

The back and forth between Gwen and Peter got tired pretty fast, too … she knows, yet she’s self-centered enough to think that he should spend time with her instead of saving people – real classy lady you’ve got there, Parker!

Plus, I hated the weird flashbacks of her Dad all over the place – they just felt cheap and out of place. It was a lame idea in the first one anyways because he literally vowed to break his oath to her Dad in the course of maybe 10 minutes.

Granted, all of this didn’t really help the fact that  we’d paid something like $20 to buy it On Demand because it was listed as a New Release, but too early to actually rent – only to all-out buy. We had decided to splurge because it was the only thing I wanted to see and we hadn’t gotten a lot of alone time together recently, plus we’d have spent more than that on it in the theater anyways.

Though FiOS wouldn’t have given us such a hassle trying to watch it without distortion had we been at the movie theater…

There’s honestly really not much left to say … oh yeah, except that the new Green Goblin was absolutely awful, too … Willem Dafoe and James Franco both executed that role exponentially better than this new guy did. The whole character felt very forced, from introduction to confrontation.

I find it a little odd that the third installment isn’t scheduled until four years from now when traditionally 12-18 months is pretty standard in between episodes, but even if life does make it a little easier to sneak out to the movies a few years from now, I don’t exactly see The Amazing Spider-Man 3 being at the top of my list after this $20 abomination that I’m now stuck with a digital copy to watch whenever I feel like watching a really bad movie. 🙁

Dream Journal : Hello, Mr. President…

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It started off as some sort of thing with the Boy Scouts … like I was going to work at summer camp and I was waiting for word back from the camp director who eventually told me that my position had already been taken. Instead, he had this other thing that he thought I might be interested in… 😉

So we were in this big, marble building in Washington, D.C. and the President was about to give a speech – possibly the State of the Union or something that was going to be televised because it was a really big deal! I don’t really remember why the scouts were there, but they kept moving us around in the crowd as more people showed up – first it was a small-ish gathering and we were under a tent a ways away from the stage, then as they started filing in school kids and other people, we were right up next to the stage.

By the time it was ready to begin, we had been moved back to where we were right at the opening for where the President would appear before going on stage. It was kind of strange because there were picnic tables and catering, so at least I got a little snack in that somebody else immediately came and cleared away as soon as I was done, so that was neat! But most of my time was spent fiddling with my camera in hopes of getting this once in a lifetime perfect shot…

Apparently this attracted some attention because at two points someone from the Secret Service stopped by my table to chat – he wasn’t mean or anything, but just asked for my name and email address, scribbled it on a piece of paper, and then walked off.

This happened just after they opened a curtain enough where I could see a bunch of people mingling backstage, so I took a few pictures. It wasn’t long after that that my Dad appeared behind me (in his scout uniform … I wasn’t wearing one) and discretely slipped me a memory card of some photos that apparently he had taken that he was afraid was going to get confiscated.

But the real cool thing happened when it was time for the Prez to make his appearance, for when he came out of the curtain, somehow it brushed up against my table and he was able to grab my camera before I could really say or do anything! He grinned at me and asked me my name while the crowd was going wild, and then made a comment into his microphone about me trying to get a picture with him, calling me out by name on national television.

Then President Obama handed the camera back to me and posed for a quick selfie with me before going on stage.

😯

Dream Journal : Part 2, The Mystery Surgery

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The second part of this dream, which coincidentally came first, was admittedly even weirder than the pterodactyl pet thing.

I was in the hospital for some sort of surgery.

It was apparently a very lax hospital because I spent a lot of time wandering around and laying down on a hospital bed in the middle of a hallway. I guess they were very short-staffed and were borrowing people from other departments, but somehow nothing was very urgent because occasionally somebody would come by and glance down at my chart, then say, “Oh – Steve already looked at you…” and just walk away.

Eventually one doctor came by and said that I needed surgery, but that they couldn’t do it today so I’d need to come back tomorrow, as if just coming and going from a hospital at your leisure was the most natural thing in the world!

There was also some sort of weird bureaucracy going on because she noted that my nurse had wanted me to ask him for my pain medications instead of asking the doctor, which in reality sort of makes a bit of sense but during the dream it seemed kind of shady.

Anyways, I never did find out what the surgery was actually for. When I left the hospital, I went back home and did the pterodactyl thing for a while, then eventually told everyone I had to leave and went back to the hospital for my mystery surgery.

It wasn’t until I was walking through the doors that it clicked that I’d never actually had surgery before, and suddenly I felt very vulnerable and nervous and just wanted to tell my Mom and my wife that I loved them before they put me to sleep.

Dream Journal : Not a Good Pet

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We were all staying at my grandparents’ house, though it was much bigger than in reality with several extra bedrooms and bathrooms off of each. Company was a mixture of family and friends and co-workers…

…and this thing that looked sort of like a baby pterodactyl…

Most of its similarities were that it was freaking nasty. I don’t remember how we had found it, but in the short time after we did it had trashed two rooms and killed a couple of people. Its beak was deadly – very long and very sharp, but also with crazy teeth on the inside of its mouth much different than what you would expect from a normal bird.

Of course, somehow *I* ended up holding it – under my arm with both hands clamped around its beak trying to keep it shut, and I spent twenty minutes frantically running around the house, trying to get someone to help me subdue the thing before I lost my grip and its killing spree resumed. It was flailing a lot, but we just didn’t have any place to put it – the closest was a dog cage, but we figured with teeth like that, it’d probably make short work of the thin metal bars.

Finally settling on duct taping its beak closed like you would an alligator, we found a roll of neon pink duct tape and managed to wrap him up, though we still didn’t know what to do with him from there. My friend said surprisingly seriously that I should put a leash on him and take him for a walk like a dog because he probably just needed to be outside, but I just looked at the droplets of blood all over my shirt from its past victims and said that wasn’t going to happen.

During this whole ordeal, somebody else had our employers on the phone, who saw the situation as more of a marketing opportunity than the extremely dangerous kill zone that the house had become. The boss wanted us to just hold tight so that they could think about it some more, and that on Monday they were going to setup a press conference to announce him to the world.

I pushed back very hard, saying that they had no idea what this thing was capable of, and that it had already killed two of our friends and needed to be contained in a proper research facility NOW.

Surprisingly, they said ok.

HealthyBlog ’14, Day 2 : Eat Actual Food, Part 1

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So I think I did ok for my first day yesterday.

I’ve decided that for my first week, my two simple goals are going to be:

  • Eat a healthy breakfast everyday
  • Drink more tea

I should probably note that “healthy” in the first bullet point isn’t defined by mountains of virtue or anything … my goal is just to eat real food to start my day – whatever time of day that actually happens to be! 😉

Yesterday it was a simple scrambled eggs (with cheese) and a glass of OJ.

Today was a little bigger because it was a bit later – I added an extra egg and also a couple of pieces of toast.

And that’s that.

I’m not even trying to get into calorie counting or scrutinizing every little turn – the only major change is that I might need to switch to egg whites (on account of old man heart health), but it’s not like I’m making pancakes with a huge pool of maple syrup, so even with a couple slices of toast on occasion I don’t think it’s a very bad start. Next week I’ll probably pick up some ham to dice into it as well as some veggies … my main goal with this meal is just quick and simple, healthy, and filling enough that I won’t be lunging for a snack 2 hours later.

And hopefully bullet point #2 can help me a little with that as well because my main driver for tea is simply that in the past it’s tended to help cut down my cravings for other snacking when I have something to sip on that isn’t water.

I even bought a little mug warmer thingy to keep at my desk so that I can stop pouring out half-empty cups of cold tea!

That’s it for changes at this point, though – again, the real goal is small, simple changes that months from now will all add up to a healthier routine for me across the board. And it’s admittedly weird because even yesterday I felt the drive to add just a couple more things to my list because I was in the mood and wanted to dive in headfirst, and I had to actively tell myself, “No – this is enough for now … we’ll add more next week.”

I mean, there’s definitely plenty to tackle – carbs, junk food, other meals, sleep schedule, late night snacking … I fought with that a little last night, which to me oddly enough is actually sort of a good thing because it tells me that my body is sensing a change. It’s fightin’ it, too, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if after a month or so of tweaking other things with my diet, the midnight snacking cravings just sort of manage to dissipate on their own.

Last night I had a big bowl of Reese’s ice cream with whipped cream and that chocolate shell stuff that I’d bought at the low of my being sick, and even though an hour later I wanted a plate of pizza rolls, too, I was able to distract myself long enough until it wasn’t on my mind anymore. The eating while I’m sleeping thing is a little different, but I think it’ll go too with time.

One day at a time… 🙂

Good news and bad news, Link…

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So the good news is, apparently Christopher is fairly easily entertained simply by watching his Dad play The Legend of Zelda…

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The bad news is…

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…I’ve never actually beaten the second quest before – or even gotten very far in it, for that matter… 😕

Also, I feel like I had some non-Hyrulean things that I was also supposed to get done tonight. Dishes? Clean bottles?! Here’s a lesson in choosing your battles, kid – saving the princess always comes first! 😉