Fish Sticks and Green Jello

Last week I was going through all my old emails and I came across one from a really old friend named Ben Davis. I hadn't heard from him in awhile and his email address was no longer valid. I had tried to email him once before and it had been returned. Ben was a really good friend of mine back in 1995-97 roughly. We used to collect action figures together and hang out together all the time. I loved Ben and I miss his friendship a lot. He even came to my college graduation. Around the summer of '97 I started going out with this guy in Santa Cruz and stopped hanging out with Ben so much.

At one point, I remember this day clearly, we all went to Betty's Ocean View Diner for breakfast. I recall he said something to me that really irritated me and I dumped my juice on his breakfast plate. He got really upset by that, as well he should, and I was very unapologetic. Suffice to say that was the beginning of the end of our friendship. I've always regretted that day and it took me two years after that to really figure out some things about myself. Those things were what alienated an ex of mine and alienated Ben as well. I don't really want to go into what the root cause was or what changed but let's just say things got A LOT better.

Anyway, last Tuesday I was watching last Friday's 20/20 on my UltimateTV box. Now I never watch 20/20 but for some lame reason I wanted to see the Posh Spice/David Beckham interview. So I sat through the whole show because I was too lazy to turn it off after the interview. At the end of the show there was a preview for next week (this friday's) show. It was about a woman who had been searching for the son she'd given up at birth when she was very young. Now this woman lives in Florida and somehow the daughter out in California just happened to meet her long lost brother via a mutual friend 34 years later. What are the chances?? So the camera pans to the son and goshdarnit if it isn't Ben! I was totally freaked out. I had to write an email to my friend Xochi immediately who filled me in on what he knew. What an amazing story! It was great to see Ben too. I was really happy for him and it made me think again about contacting him. Maybe I'll drop him an email and see how life is. And maybe one day he might read this and drop me an email. You never know...

My friend Kammie gave me her potted Jasmine to plant in my yard since she's moving to Vermont and was getting rid of her plants. It wasn't very happy here so I wound up laying it to rest and buying a new Jasmine which I planted last Saturday. It's a Pink Jasmine, it's taller than I am and it smells wonderful! I have a piece of it in my room right now and it the smell of jasmine is everywhere. This guy was a lot of work though. I spent hours carefully untangling the vines and tying it to the trellis. I sure hope this one makes it. I have great intentions for my plants, but since I'm so new at doing this it's taking awhile to make my brown thumb less brown. If I could I'd have a yard full of scented flowers like jasmine, wisteria, honeysuckle and trumpet trees. Here's a before and after picture.

Oh and the 4 plants I have in my office are actually still alive and thriving! I'm so proud. Even after one of them got gnats and I had to wash all the soil off its roots and transplant it. Yay me! Crap, did I just jinx myself?

Okay so I was scoping out someone else's blog and saw the coolest thing. Someone actually built a monorail they can ride around in their yard! A local no less, located in Fremont, CA. You gotta see this for yourself: http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/Niles.html.

A nice guy by the name of Allen wrote me a note to let me know that for some reason all he can see on this page is the picture of the squid flashing and nothing else. He has IE 5.0. I told him to upgrade. This blogger thinggie uses a template that I personally don't want to sit around trying to debug. I'm hoping he takes my advice on this.

On a sad note the three goldfish I gave up for adoption last November have died.
Read for yourself:

-----Original Message-----
From: R. Joseph Heagany IV
Sent: Saturday, April 19, 2003 1:15 PM
To: Marian Burgess
Subject: Re: Fishies

hi marian!

well, i'm sorry to say this.. but they didn't survive.
they didn't all go at once.. but 2 weeks ago i had to
burry the big one (who lasted the longest) friday
morning i woke-up and he was swimming upside down (as
the others did) i didn't think much about it - but i
had to go out of town for the weekend.. anyway, i came
back and my entire apartment smelled like rotten
fish.. and i heard it got quite hot that weekend too.
ugh, gross.

well, they were fun while they lasted. sorta freaked
my friends out though with those big crazy eyes.

glad you're enjoying yer new city.
cheers,
joe

Joe was a guy I met last fall in Oakland when I bought his elliptical. He emailed me afterwards wondering about my apartment since I'd mentioned I was moving and he needed to move out of his place pretty quickly. He wound up finding another place and I wound up getting him to adopt my fish.

I'd had those fish for almost four years. My friend Dave foisted them on me after he'd found them abandoned in a rental his parents had after the speed freaks that lived there had moved out and been gone for three weeks. They were suprised to find the fish in the first place since the tank was full of murky brown water. A little stirring and voila, three fish! I took those guys in and added two more to the fold. Over those years one of the ones I bought died and one that I'd adopted died. So I was left with two adopted fish and one that I'd gotten from the pet store that was once black and had mutated and turned gold. My favorite of the adoptees I named Dave. He was a BIG goldfish. They all had those goofy bubble eyes but he was the coolest. I was pretty proud of how big he got.

It got tiresome to own fish though and I was tired of ruining carpets and furniture due to all the water involved. I don't know how other folks do it but it was a pretty messy process to upkeep those guys. Joe already had some fish so I figured he was a good candidate to take them in. Now I'm not sure what really happened and I thought Goldfish live a long long time so who knows. I'm just sorry they didn't make it. Oh well, Dave would have probably flushed them down the toilet so they got a few extra years of life out of it. No more fish for me anyways. Too much work!

I fixed the ugly whacky color comments box due to a couple of complaints I got on how hard it was to read. That's the color the darn thing came with! I did put some time into making it a lovely shade of pink. At least it's not red or lime green per Jenn's request and it's quite readable now. I think. Also be sure to put in the http:// before your URL in the Hompage field or the link won't work when you leave your comment. Yes, yes, that's dumb, I know. I'll look into fixing that later. For now please just add the http://. Thank you!

I'm a little lax on the entries lately. I spent the entire weekend playing Age of Mythology until the wee hours of the morning with Chris, Fred and Scott. Really fun game except the computer almost always kicks our butts for some reason. Maybe we all just suck. Oh except for Fred, he's pretty good. Anyway I highly recommend picking it up if you're into PC Strategy Games. Basically you choose a God and as quickly as you can you build up your economy, earn favor, create mythical creatures and armies and try to take out the enemy before they take you out. Personally I really like all the buildling aspects of the game. Kind of like Sim City except you have people level control as opposed to just city level. The part I'm lousy at is building the armies and fighting. If for some reason you decide to pick up this game be sure to check out Planet Age of Mythology. This is one of the best sites out there on how to play the game and what kind of strategies to use. Okay, okay, enough boring game talk.



On another note, Friendster is enforcing their photo policy which states you can't have celebrity, copyrighted or pet photos displayed as your primary photo. As a result Olivia's pic as well as many of her new pet "friends" no longer have photos in their profile. This really sucks because there were some funny profiles, such as the one I listed in the last entry, that will eventually lose their photos. Also Jenn was telling me that when we joined the number of Friendster members was in the 59/60K range. It's now over 100K members and we've only been on there a month! Crazy!

And last but not least "Detective Story" is available for download from the Animatrix site. This is the 3rd of 4 shorts the Matrix folks will make available on the web before the DVD comes out June 3rd. There will be a total 9 episodes on the DVD. In case you don't know what this is these are animated and CG short stories based off of the Matrix. "The Second Renaissance Parts 1 and 2" deal with how the Matrix came to be, "Program" is about a training program and "Detective Story" deals with a 40's style detective trying to track down Trinity. So far I really dig the "The Second Renaissance Part 1" the best and I can't wait for the 2nd part to come out next month. Check them out if you can. They are large downloads but worth the wait!

My friend Raul recently got me to sign up for a service called Friendster. It's not unlike many dating sites, except its less like a meat market and more like just a way to have fun and meet new friends or keep in touch with old friends. It turns out that I know quite a few people on there from back in the old sfnet bbs days. I've seen their profiles on there but it's hard to contact folks you haven't talked to in 7 years. I got my friend Jenn to sign up recently and next thing I know she's met some cute, gainfully employed man named Spot. Go figure. If you're interested in sites like this you should sign up, it's pretty cool. You can even look me up on there if you like!

There are also some darn funny profiles on there too. I have to include a pic here of one of the funnier ones. This pic is from the profile of "Dr. Dre & His Peeps":

Oh, I have to add another entry... My co-worker Paul pointed me to this site today. He was telling me about a post someone made having to do with why people create blogs or profiles for their pets and how these particular people are whacky. Now there's nothing wrong with having a little fun in my opinion, which is precisely why my cat has her own Friendster profile. She's met quite a few new friends this way too! More than I have that's for sure. Anyways, I have to point everyone to this site: The Misused, Generally Ignored LJ Pets Talk Back's journal

Here's an excerpt:
________________________________

I got spayed today.

Mommy and daddy took me to this big scarey place (I was so scared) - they put something on my face and I feel asleep. When I woke up I had a tummy ache and they put a funny collar around my neck. I'm sleepy and I just want to lie around.
I feel funny.

-Prey
current mood: groggy

So what's up with the whacky ketchup colors? Does this make kids want to eat more ketchup? Does this stuff really sell? Don't get me wrong... I love whacky colors, otherwise I wouldn't have purple hair, but there's something just not right about weird colored food items. Take Crystal Pepsi for example, that tanked. Why? Because drinking clear "7-up" looking liquid just didn't taste the same in people's heads. It's all psychological. Kids must dig it though because the H.J. Heinz Co. has sold ketchup in red, green, purple, pink, orange and teal, and now their new color, BLUE.

Actually until today I thought Heniz had only put out green and purple ketchup, I've never even heard of all those other colors. Yikes! So... has anyone tried any of these colored condiments?

I've been collecting quite a bit of Miller Chalkware from Ebay lately. Keeping in line with my usual love of vintage kitsch I guess. I've decorated my bathroom with quite a few pieces of chalkware fish. These were popular to have in your bathroom in the 60's. If you're really interested in chalkware you can check out what Ebay has to offer. I usually do a search for Miller Chalkware. I'd better not see the prices skyrocket on these things now that I've shared it here for the world to see! Here's a pic of some pot holder wall hangings I purchased recently.

I'm fascinated by the idea of there being species of "Giant" and now "Colossal" squids living in the world that we've never seen and will probably never see. I think it would be very cool if there were squids the size of the one in 20,000 leagues under the sea. You never know...

Photo: Auckland University of Technolgy researchers Dr. Steve O'Shea and Cat Bolstad, are seen with a Colossal Squid at the Te Papa research laboratory in Wellington, Wednesday April 2, 2003.The squid, which was found by fishermen in the Ross Sea, Antarctic, last week, is thought to be the largest intact specimen to have been found. The 150-Kilogram (330 pound) 5-meter (16 foot) immature female 'Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni' squid has eyes as big as dinner plates and razor-sharp hooks on the tentacles.

Read more about Giant Squids:
An in depth Colossal Squid article
Cool photo of Giant Squid found in Spain
New Species of Giant Squid found in Australia
Giant Squid Washes Ashore in Tasmania
Project Kraken Giant Squid Photos
A little lesson on giant squids
The UnMuseum - Giant Squid Lore

Labels: curiosities

I just planted lavender on Sunday. It was nice and perky. Now it's very wilty. It's probably because after I planted and watered it, it rained for two days. Can it be saved??

Labels: hobbies