The Rose's Grove

We've had a fish tank now for about four years; we got it when Squidling turned three. Somehow, miraculously, one of the original endlers that we bought is still around, despite once spending about a month in the separated back of the tank, and another time jumping all the way out of the tank and being discovered later on the floor, presumed dead. He, uh, wasn't. Good thing we checked.

Anyway, as of a few weeks ago the tank had two endlers (including the seemingly immortal one), three pearl danios, and three rosy barbs. Then the smallest of the rosy barbs died, and we were kind of like "Well, it happens, that one never really grew like the other two, must've been a thing."

Then on Friday night I discovered one of the bigger two rosy barbs dead. We took it out and buried it in the yard, as usual, but we were worried. One death, sure, that's nothing to worry about in a normal tank, but two in a few weeks is concerning—it might be that there's something wrong with the water, for instance. ...Then we got more worried, because the remaining rosy barb, hereafter known as Rose, went ballistic on finding himself alone. He was zooming all over the tank, seemingly looking for a friend, and we remembered that these barbs (like all our fish) are schooling fish, so we realized we'd better go get a few more barbs, pronto. Assuming the water pH was okay.

So Saturday morning we popped a water sample into a little jar and took ourselves down to our local fish store, conveniently called The Fish Store (no, really, they've been in business here in Seattle for more than 50 years). Had the guy check our water, he declared it okay and confirmed our plans to buy two more endlers and two more rosy barbs. Great. We get home, pop the fish in their little travel baggies into the tank to acclimate, wait ten minutes, let in some water, wait ten more minutes, free the fish, everything looks great. One new endler immediately zips off to join the other two, the three rosy barbs look happy to have friends, all shall seemingly be well.

...Until Rose, once again, goes ballistic. And this time he has a target in mind: the other new endler, who is significantly smaller than the the other three. I didn't see this (and thankfully neither did Squidling), but The Boy swears that Rose zipped right up to the runt endler, chased him repeatedly, and grabbed his tail and dragged him. Repeatedly.

Big problem. Barbs are known to nip at tails, but this is more than nipping, and the little endler looks like he's on the verge of being eaten, or at least stressed to death. And what then? Does Rose then take on the next biggest endler, which is the other new one? Where does it stop? And now we're realizing that this might have been mating season behavior gone wrong and Rose might've harassed the little barb (who we now realize was female) to death and then killed the other barb because he was mad there was only a male in the tank once she was dead. And now he's harassing the little fish, and despite talking about how barbs can become aggressive during mating season, no website we can find actually says how long the mating season for barbs is. Uh, seems like that might be helpful?

(They are all quick to say that the optimal population for a group of barbs is five to six, with at least two females to each male... in a 30 gallon tank. Uh, our tank is 10 gallons, thanks—and we're not currently eager to buy more of the fish that is causing problems for everyone else, even if we had room for them?)

Anyway, on short notice the best we could come up with was to catch Rose and put him in Fishy Jail / Fish Time Out for a while. In a bucket, in The Boy's office (since it's warm in there). We'll change out the water regularly to keep it aerated and clean, feed him normally, etc, but we don't have a spare tank, so... this is the best we can do for the angry little murder fish right now.

We were clear with Squidling that Rose might not survive... which seems fair, since the new endler might not, either. He's still alive today, more than 24 hours after his ordeal, so I think he has a fair chance, but he's also hiding in a corner of the tank and has barely emerged from that spot in those 24 hours, so... whether he'll be traumatized for life is another question.

Fish drama. Sigh.

So, Squidling's camp next week is a bike camp, and it's just on the other side of the lake from us. It's only from 9 a.m. to noon, but he's very excited about doing more with his bike and all... and I realized a bit ago that of course it would make the most sense for him to ride to camp, given it's close and all.

Except my bike hasn't been ridden in 10+ years and was in desperate need of a tune-up, and... I hadn't ridden a bike in 10+ years. Oops.

Okay, no problem, The Boy says I can borrow his bike... except when I tried to ride it I totally panicked because it's a little too tall for me and the seat won't go down any further and it's a heavy, technical-looking monster of a mountain bike, and I Just Could Not Cope. Minor panic attack ensued in which I realized that there was no way I could get used to riding this bike in time to ride to camp with Squidling on Monday.

On hearing that I felt sure I would do better with my own bike, The Boy very kindly hauled it out of storage and out to the local bike shop, where they gave it a tune-up and fixed everything that had gone utterly sideways in the last decade of disuse and poor storage (it used to live on our deck, in the old apartment, because where the heck else could we fit a bike?). So yesterday I take out my newly fixed bike and determinedly attempt to ride it. And fail. For, like, fifteen minutes I'm struggling in our very steep driveway and alley trying to figure out why I can't get this thing going properly, until it occurs to me: MOVE IT TO A LONGER AND FLATTER SPACE, DUMBASS.

So I walk the bike across the street and over to a long, flat area of sidewalk, and, lo and behold, I manage to get up and moving, and go back and forth on the long block several times before deciding that's enough for one (very hot) afternoon.

But it was not going to be enough to get us to the camp on Monday. So this afternoon, after The Boy left to take Squidling to his regular Thursday appointment, I loaded up my phone and keys, a water bottle, and a small first aid kit into a little backpack and walked my bike out to the lake, where I practiced a little bit on the path and then, with mounting but still uncertain confidence, out onto the protected bike lane around the lake. AND IT WORKED. I went halfway around the lake, then turned and came back (wasn't sure about the bike lanes on the other side, and my thighs were reminding me it's been a decade since I did any bike riding!), and tomorrow we're going to go out as a family and do the whole ride around the lake so that I can get more used to the bike lanes and all, and figure out how to turn out for the location where the camp is and all that.

But, honestly, between this and the fact that this was the year I actually managed to start driving again a little bit (after TWENTY YEARS), I'm feeling pretty proud.

Oh, and we watched Wreck-It Ralph for movie night last night, and he loved it. YAY, he likes movies now!!!

For the last few years, we've struggled to get Squidling to accept fiction. I'm not sure when it started, although he always liked nonfiction (and... well, also things like the paint chip catalogue, which... when people ask me how I knew he had autism before he was diagnosed, I'm always like "Well, when he was little we moved house and there was this paint chip catalogue, you know, like what you get in the paint section at the hardware store? And he used to make me read that to him almost every day...").

Anyway. For a long time when he was little I could read him Beatrix Potter stories or Old Mother West Wind, or stories from a collection of Native American myths, or whatever. But then he Got Opinions and started refusing anything except nonfiction. And... I like nonfiction a lot, okay? I really do. I love reading to him about dinosaurs and scientists and deep sea creatures and butterflies and all that! But I'm also me, and I believe that stories are part of how humans learn to handle the world. And the older he got, the more I worried that he wasn't going to have that because he would refuse to read stories.

He wasn't even watching TV with stories, for a long time. Only documentaries. Short ones, long ones, science YouTube videos... but the only fiction he would accept for a long time was Cars, Cars 2, or Wall-E.

Then, as if by magic, he discovered the Dogman books. And he loved them. So I held my breath and got him all the Dogman books I could find. And then a friend of ours gave him a bunch of his old childhood books, and Squidling discovered Garfield.

Then I caught him reading one of the Calvin and Hobbes collections on our bookshelf!

And then, hallelujah, he was reading Captain Underpants and Bad Guys! And I was able to get him to read another graphic novel series, Max Meow, when the library didn't have any Dogman available!

As if a floodgate had been opened, he remembered that, at one point a while ago, we'd convinced him to watch some DinoTrux, and he decided he loved that again, so we watched more. And then, finally, this summer, we decided we would watch a movie every Wednesday night for summer break, and we would trade off picking movies. He got to pick first, and he kept talking about picking a documentary... but when the day came, he picked the Bad Guys movie, and he LOVED it!

Today was the second movie night of the summer, and he was begging to watch Bad Guys 2, but we insisted on being fair and sticking with trading off picks. Tonight was The Boy's pick, and he chose the 2010 Karate Kid movie. Squidling fought us and complained, and I thought he might refuse, but we made popcorn and he watched... AND HE LOVED IT. ♥

Back in March, we adopted a little black cat from PAWS. It was somewhat abrupt—I'd been vaguely looking but hadn't been too serious about the whole thing because I wasn't sure that Squidling could handle actually living with a cat even though he's quite good with my mom's cat and the neighborhood cats—but the minute I saw the listing for the long-haired black senior cat who was used to living with kids and was described as having impeccable litter box habits, I thought she might stick.

When we went to meet her at PAWS and, the minute one of us put our hand in her cage, she rammed her head into it and started purring, I knew it had to happen.

Her original name was Bellatrix, which we shortened to Bella, and Squidling gave her the new full name of Bluebell to finish the transition. She's been a completely different experience both from the dog (she fits soooo much better in our lives than the dog did, thank heavens) and from my past cats.

Theoden, for those who didn't know him, was a doofy marshmallow himbo of a buff/tan cat—big, generally confident, and completely helpless at anything and everything except yelling at people to do things for him. Random, meanwhile, was a beautiful little blue-eyed murderbeast who would snuggle so hard it was like he wanted to be inside you, then turn around and bite and bunny-kick you for literally no reason (and I say this as a person with lots of cat experience—I never could figure out what triggered Random most of the time, he'd just suddenly decide he was Done With You).

Bella... is a lady. She is seven years old (not the ten that was originally quoted to us, at least not by the vet's estimate and her very nice teeth), and about eight pounds soaking wet, and has very particular opinions about many things. Her litter box habits truly are exactly as impeccable as advertised, and while she will make her wishes known if her food bowl is empty, she never gobbles. She eats delicately, and walks away a few times before coming back to a meal later.

She's also the first cat I've ever had who cares about when people go to bed. And, as it turns out, she cares very much about that. A few weeks after joining our household, Bella determined what the "correct" bedtime was for my husband and I, and she now holds us to it with an iron paw, herding us upstairs to bed and supervising all bedtime-adjacent activities to make sure we get properly settled before retiring to her favorite comfy chair or to explore back downstairs, herself. She also supervises story time during Squidling's bedtime routine, just to make sure we're doing things right.

It's delightful to have a cat in the house again, and it fills a hole that I'd probably left empty too long.

I'm still alive and have once again remembered that I have a journal here! And... oh dear, it looks like it's been about a year since I last posted. Um. Very basic updates are called for, I guess.

I did indeed eventually recover my sense of smell after my bout with Covid last summer, which was very nice. Shortly after that, the Squidling started kindergarten, and we had a bit of a chaotic start to the year as his teacher had... not so much actually read his IEP. Oops. Got that resolved, things calmed down mostly, to the point where we (very optimistically) adopted a dog, who we named Astro, from a local rescue... and then everything went all to hell. The Squidling loves dogs, it turns out, but is too impulsive and, frankly, unwilling to adhere to rules, to actually behave well with a dog in the house, and the chaos of having a dog (who was both younger and more high-energy than we'd been lead to believe...) meant that he never got the calm down-time at home that was required to help him function moderately well at school. Due to that and a few other issues, we eventually made the sad decision to return Astro to the rescue.

(Astro is fine: he went into the care of a very experienced foster family who had a foster-fail dog of their own, with whom Astro immediately became best friends, and at last check they were so happy running around the yard together and then sleeping all over the people's furniture together that we're crossing all available appendages that they foster-fail with Astro, too. One sticking point of his time with us was that while he liked people fine, he really wanted a dog friend full-time, and that was never going to happen with us.)

Anyway. Kindergarten didn't go great. Squidling did not like school much, because he is super impulsive and unwilling to follow instructions, and he and his teacher butted heads basically all the time, and... things did not go well, anyway. The good news is, he loved his resource teacher, Ms. A, and likes many of his classmates, and still loves learning and reading and all that, so we're hard at work with his therapist and his resource teacher on plans to develop the good sides of things, and hopefully get him some medication to help him with his impulse control (in addition, of course, to non-medication methods like helping him think ahead and give rewards for good behavior, etc.).

Summer has been pretty good, with a friend and her kiddo visiting from out of town a good part of last month, and then a big week last week where we went to Point Defiance Zoo, then met up with several of Squidling's classmates and their families to watch the Blue Angels from a local park, and then a day of hanging out and going fun places with his grandparents the next day. Tomorrow he starts his second week-long day-camp of the summer, and they are prepared with strategies learned from his first day camp of the summer (as are we), so hopefully things will go well... and at the end of the month we'll get back to school!

So, the weather suddenly turned clear and gorgeous yesterday, but it was still cold, and I joked that maybe we were getting our one nice week in April early this year.

...And then today the temperature hit 78 F.

I didn't really notice at first because omfg GORGEOUS DAY throw open all the windows and clean all the things! And then the Squidling fell asleep while The Boy was working, so I went out for a walk. And... got sweaty? Even though I was only wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a long-sleeved t-shirt? I mean, I was wearing tall socks, but...? Checked the temperature, and holy what the hell, this is Seattle in March, why is it 78 F?!

I have a feeling we're going to be veeeeery glad for our split system this summer. Hopefully we do not have another heat dome like in 2021. Eek.

Anyway, for now, it sure is pretty outside...

I didn't LOVE Good Omens s2, but I did very much like parts of it, and the cast was quite good. That said, I have some complaints.

( Spoilers under the cut, obviously )

I've made a bunch of random new icons (what else is my overstuffed images folder for?) and, gasp, updated my profile. That was... a bit of an experience, given that I clearly had not updated it since L was born. Life is super different now!

Anyway. Getting comfy. Didn't look at Twitter at all today. Go me.

Maybe someday I'll even figure out why most of my custom mood theme doesn't work. That was always one of my favorite parts of my old LJ.

Edited to add: Well, I know why the mood theme now completely doesn't work (it used to just mostly not work) — I forgot that I'd changed my domain and my website service provider in the intervening few years since setting it up, and so all the images links are broken. Easy to fix, right? Not so much, because my new provider, Squarespace, doesn't allow me to just upload images to the root directory like any normal, functioning provider would have back in the old days, and it also obfuscates its image links so much that you have to inspect source to find them. So... I guess I could go through that whole process 125 times (because of course Squarespace borked when I tried to upload all the mood theme gifs at the same time), or I could just give up and admit that my adorable custom mood theme is a thing of the past. And I definitely do not have the time to put up with all that nonsense just to get a custom mood theme. Alas.

...Wait, wtf, some of them ARE actually still working. Where do I have these things uploaded? How can I view the existing code? WTF is going on here? ARGH. Okay, this is NOT a problem to figure out tonight, nor indeed tomorrow (because I have Actual Paid Work that needs to be done tomorrow while L is at soccer camp). But... I will come back to this. Someday.

Edited to add yet again: Found the images, they're uploaded in my DW account, and I swear to god I will go no further than this tonight. Or tomorrow. Or probably for the next week. But... yeah. Weird.

I can't say I'm 100% jazzed about everything in the B5 trailer, but as with everything about B5, even if I'm complaining about aspects of it, I'm doing that because I love aspects of that universe so much that I become functionally irrational around them. So.

I'm obviously mad that the whole thing isn't about Delenn and the rest of the Minbari, Londo, and G'Kar, but if I have to put up with John Sheridan in order to get more of that universe, then so be it. And even though I feel like the animated Sheridan is a bit off and weirdly serious-looking, the sound of Bruce Boxleitner's voice lights up the room just like his smile does. I have no idea how he does that, it's quite impressive.

Hearing the old familiar voices that remain to us was a delight every time they appeared, and I was impressed by how much the voices that remain have not changed. I discovered I was half afraid that Peter Jurasik might've forgotten how to do Londo's accent, but of course he has not.

The new voices were largely successful to my mind, which was kind of a surprise! Unfortunately, at least to my ear, the new voice actress playing Delenn... um...

Look. I know my standards here are very high. There's a high likelihood I would have disliked anything short of Mira Furlan's spirit possessing some other actress and speaking through her and... somehow recreating her own exact vocal cords in the process. I am a teensy bit obsessed with voices in general (it's up there with "attracted to good acting" in my qualifications for serious, and seriously weird, crushes), but... let's just say that while I think this person is a perfectly fine voice actress, I don't think she made much of an effort to sound like Mira Furlan and/or Delenn. Which I think was a mistake.

Now, I have bitched about voice actors based on a false premise before and been proven wrong. I hope I will be again here. But this is a reaction to a trailer, so this is what I've got.

Anyway. The animation looks cheap (too much use of copypasta), I'm mad at JMS for seemingly once again forgetting that not all good Minbari (or, indeed, all Minbari at all) are Religious caste, the multiverse thing is overdone, blah blah blah. I'm sure I'll have a boatload of complaints, and I don't care. It's more B5. I'll be there.

I've joked for a while that far too many times when I've taken Lucas to the zoo, I've found something that someone else lost on the way there. Once it was someone's cellphone, which I spent a fair amount of time asking nearby people and houses about before taking it home and eventually getting hold of the owner because her boyfriend kept trying to Facetime and call her. Another time a woman asked me if the little stray dog she'd just caught, who'd been running around trailing his leash, was my dog, and she and I spent some time checking the dog for tags and whatnot before she took it off to bring to her vet to see if it was microchipped. She had a dog of her own and didn't have a toddler, so she took the lead on that one.

Today, The Boy and Lucas and I were going to the zoo and before we got more than a block away from our house... we saw a white and black dog trotting down the sidewalk toward us, with nary a person in sight.

"I hope he's not alone..." said The Boy.

"Uhhh... I don't see anyone," I said.

He was alone.

I stepped ahead while The Boy turned L's stroller aside, and then we both called him, and he trotted right up to us and stopped, crouching and wagging his tail, so I got hold of his collar and checked his tags. His collar read "Adopt me" and his tags had the name of a local rescue org and two phone numbers. The Boy called the first and left a voicemail and then, as directed in the message, also texted it, while I petted the dog. The manager of the rescue called us back almost immediately and said she'd get in touch with his foster family and have them call us. Then, because what else could we do, we went back home and got him into our (happily highly fenced) yard and gave him a bowl of water. L, who had by now been freed from his stroller, was happily announcing "Dog-dog! Dog-dog! Woof! Woof!" to all and sundry, and despite my efforts to keep myself between him and the dog (who seemed completely friendly, but you never know if a strange dog might react poorly to a toddler with not-very-great-yet dog manners), the dog licked his face and hands repeatedly.

Now let me say first that both The Boy and I grew up with dogs, and both of us grew up in houses where our pets often showed up in ways that were... not dissimilar to this. My cats growing up included a kitten who was born in my grandparents' woodpile, and another who was found in my grandpa's car engine. One of my dogs was abandoned by our dirtbag neighbors when they moved. However, The Boy and I have spent the last year or so saying firmly to each other and anyone else who will listen, "After Theoden is gone, no more pets until L is five or six years old and willing and able to take on at least some of the responsibility."

And then this damned dog we've just met licks L's face, leans his side against my leg, and sits on my foot, and I start thinking "...Well, I mean, he needs a home, doesn't he? And he's clearly a sweetheart and good with L. He's bigger than we meant to get, living in a townhouse, but he handled the stairs just fine while we were trying to get him through the hall into the yard, and he's awfully cute, and we could always just keep the baby gate on the upstairs and not let Theoden downstairs..."

After not too long at all the foster family of the dog (whose name turned out to be Mason) called The Boy and he took the dog out to meet them, and I used the water from the bowl to water our tomatoes (the dog had only taken a few half-hearted gulps when I put it down, so I assume he hadn't been loose very long), and got L back inside, and then The Boy got back and we went to the zoo as planned. The foster family, of course, made sure to let him know during the tradeoff that he's available for adoption. And on the way, we talked about it. It doesn't really make sense for us right now, but we talked about it as if it did for a while, because, really, both of us basically always had dogs, growing up, and... well, what else do you do when a perfectly nice seeming dog drops into your lap? But it would be a hell of a thing to put Theoden through in what are undoubtedly his last years, and it would complicate a lot of things, and our yard is quite small, and... it doesn't really make sense. But I admit I'm still a bit sad about it. He was a good boy, and for a moment it felt like the most natural thing in the world in that way that is slightly unhinged and totally against what you'd ever intended. I don't know.

Anyway, the other bit of this post is a spoiler for Loki: The Series. ( Spoilers for the most recent episode, specifically. )

So anyway. I just had to share that.