hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

Cold-weather kitties!

1. Made plans to hang out with gaudior and also hopefully remediate the current state of litterbox doom.

2. Sent a personal comment to the FCC about the cable company merger. (Surprising no one: having worked in telecom, I am agin it.)

3. Preordered Ancillary Sword! Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow!

I was foolish and mopey last night, but many things are nice.

- Almost done quilting the Wim quilt. (I should've thought of working on it last night, probably would've felt better.)

- Unpacked many clothes, though I need a good dresser to organize things before doing much more.

- The weather is a thing that is nice now! Walking is pleasant and it takes 5-10 minutes less time to get anywhere than my summertime estimates. Beautiful skies too.

- The fish Lord Nelson built a bubble nest just because. I guess he is feeling sassier!

- I've been sleeping pretty well even with importunate cats.

1. Slept and slept! Despite not having a real good bed. Being in my own space is excellent.

2. Cleaned the sublet nicely and dropped off keys for the person I was subletting from.

3. Figured out where to recycle fluorescent bulbs (the hardware store) and did so. Also got some necessary things for the new place.

4. Witnessed the use of a cat back pack! I'm told that the cat does not like the pack but does enjoy bike rides.

5. Fixed the busted shelving so it no longer comes apart and actually looks pretty good. I started by just nailing on the backing, but the front was still loose, so I borrowed a drill and some spare screws and fixed it properly like an awesome person.

1. Promising meeting! Things are moving slowly for this project, but we'll get somewhere cool eventually.

2. Knowledge is power. I'm not happy about it per se, but I finally found out something very important.

3. Mom texted that Squeak cat was playing laser with Dad. :)

1. Playing "what is on this CD?" as I clean and start to actually pack boxes a little bit. Today I found a Christmas music mix marked only "2004" -- okay!

2. Stressball girl collapsed on the bed with cats for a bit, with pants undone because I don't know, I was partway through taking them off, and Diz cat decided to not just snuggle but start licking my tummy. Laughed and laughed.

3. I put things into a box for moving today. And other things into bags for going away forever.

4. Watched Labyrinth with an online friend! I like this watching things in chat with people, I haven't done it until the last month or so and it's quite good as a way to hang out with someone who's not nearby.

This is a post about the wee axolotl Hachiko! She remains wee because of not having eaten at all for months. Her triumphant return to the up-above room-temperature world was accomplished a couple of days ago, after literally months of spending time in the axolotl equivalent of the hospital: the refrigerator.

Axies sometimes get fungal growths. Usually it's because of injuries or poor water quality: like most amphibians, they have a nice slime layer that keeps bad stuff off them for the most part, and it's when that's broken or degraded that they can get in trouble. The fungus is something that's in the environment all the time, and they usually aren't bothered. So, shortly after last fall's warm weather, which isn't really good for them, Hachi had gotten a little fungus in her gills that would go away and come back, and she wasn't growing well or seeming very energetic. The first method for fixing that problem is to give salt baths. It proved very tough to catch her from her tank for doing that, and the treatment wasn't very successful, so I went to the worrisome fridging option within a couple of weeks.

I kept giving salt baths for a couple of months while she was in there, but the fungus would go away and come back just like it had before, even when I eventually raised the concentration enough that I was worried about harming Hachi with it. (Amphibians don't like salt either, but it's like chemotherapy: the idea is that the disease likes it a lot less.) So I decided to quit with the salt and just keep her in the fridge... and she got better. It was very weird to keep changing her water every day and have her fairly active but refusing to eat. Truly, other forms of life are fascinating. Anyway, she hasn't had a recurrence in weeks, so I am cautiously moving her back to room temp.

Now Hachiko is back in her 10-gallon tank and eating food pellets whenever they're offered. Hopefully we can get her fed up big enough to go into the larger tank with Hex someday -- I look forward to the cuteness multiplier, but she's still so little that an accidental bite could do her real damage, so she needs to bulk up first!

In other axolotl news: there's new evidence for the hypothesis that they're extinct in the wild, alas. At least it reminded me to make this:



(I can't remember the other Hipster Axolotl joke we were making like nine months ago when I took the photo, though. Wim?)

Sunday:
There was a faux chestnut in the pizza place harvest display, all silly green-plastic spines. Wim and I were both delighted.

Tuesday:
1. Felt better about going to family Thanksgiving. (Failing actually interacting better, I have the new 3DS Zelda game.)

2. Painted fabric looking good for baby square of doom.

3. Thai noodles and Leverage with Wim making us both feel better.

4. Email with rushthatspeaks and very important Lucien cat.

Wednesday:
1. Moderately intelligent cloning scheme generated by me!

2. Finished painting some very pretty coral, set the dye, and (this is critical) decided not to screw up my fingers and brain trying to finish the whole thing tonight.

3. Played Rock Band with my new drum pedal, which I had to buy on eBay since somehow the Goodwill only has the main drum-kit parts. Fun! Hilarious to observe myself failing to control my own foot!

1. Animal guessing game: super lucky cat. Among the first few questions: DOES IT RAISE A PAW. I don't know how I kept a straight face. This was the best thing that happened all week.

2. Awesome skeptical feedback on my proposal! I almost wish I hadn't made it all pretty first, but this way I got to have a "feeling really good about it" stage AND a "yay someone ripped into it where it needed ripping" stage, so it was actually good. (The NSF is back at work but is kinda telling us to fuck off while they regroup, which is fair.)

3. Watched BIG ASS SPIDER! with Wim. Exactly a ridiculous monster B-movie. Very pleased. Also, that was definitely 100% ironic racism, and it was still not okay, so, nice to have that experience for sure I guess.

4. Fun outing with some parents-out-law, to lunch and the lab and the university's phenomenal greenhouse. These things by themselves would've been enough, but our luck was in and the greenhouse manager was there. He opened the terrarium and fed the poison-dart frogs so they'd come up and be photographed, and we got to hang out with the praying mantis too.

5. As I told the cats earlier tonight, I do like doing things that are right, and taking the laundry down from the ceiling fan is pretty indisputably right.

6. I have passed a strange sort of milestone in axolotl ownership: Hachiko is currently in the fridge to recover from her chronic fungus problem. I'm VERY NERVOUS about this because it doesn't seem like the kind of thing one should do to a pet ever, but it's the standard of axolotl care if they're not getting better readily.

1. Three-headed cat beast on the couch when I got up this morning! They are so contentious all the time, but sometimes when I'm not around they forget to (pretend to) hate each other.

2. I like making 140-character tweets, especially when they're this one:

I am MIGHTY: sender of proposal draft, requester of recommendation letter, user of Google cache to dig up NSF web pages. Now it's lunchtime.

3. And then I took myself out for a delicious burger and milkshake, and I ate them while sitting on the grass in the sun and reading a novel.

4. Okay, Savage Lovecast, you win. Talking about clothes AND sex, with the clothes only available in the premium version, will in fact get me to spend a dollar on your podcast. Keep it up!

5. My submission to Mansplained is up! (One person already found it, I see.) This was by far the worst of our bad interviews. Very glad we have two good lab managers now.