Blogging with My Shoes Tied Together

Oh, the plans we have!

I've been keeping up on this blog really well... until now!  I'm surprised I kept up at it as well as I have over the last two years.  But as usual, life gets in the way.  That's not a bad thing!  It's just that Mom hasn't been feeling well, I haven't felt like writing a whole lot, I'm disillusioned about Obamacare and the president and all the people that still (STILL!) support him, and all the people who hate Christians because they don't want babies to die... and I guess I just needed a break.

Still do!

I will post in here again sometime soon, and probably still pretty frequently.  For one thing, Christmas is almost here and I need to write this year's Christmas poem (I've got a pretty good idea I think, we'll see) and I wanted to post some of my previous Christmas poems that I didn't post in here last year.

But I just need a bit of a break to pull all my thoughts together I think.  Sometimes I feel so plugged in - to all my little devices, and the TV, and movies, and books, and music, and what's going on in the nation and the world, and the family, and all that goes with it, that I feel like I need time to unplug, and

to be still



and



listen for God's voice





and




know.









Know what I mean?

The Ongoing Saga of a Brutal Fish Killer: My Problems with Aquarium Water Chemistry

Here's a little light, personal story for my blog, though at the time, it was infuriating.  

And I'm sure the fish hated it, of course.

September 11, 2013 - Wednesday

I killed my fish!

           

I’ve had that aquarium for how many years now?  I've never had a problem like this!  I used to clean the tank every three months by taking the fish out and completely changing the water, and they could handle it.  Hell, one of them jumped into the disposal once and I ran water to keep him alive while I felt around for him, and he survived for at least another year after I rescued him!  Not so any more!  I heard those complete water changes were way too stessful for the fish, so I haven't been doing that at all anymore.  And yet I happened to let it go too long without a water change recently, and it was starting to look rank, and so I felt that I had to do a larger water change when I cleaned it at the beginning of the month.  What could go wrong?  I mean, I used to completely change all the water every three months and the fish adapted fine!  Imagine my shock when almost all the fish started floating upside down!  “I killed my fish!” I exclaimed to Mom.

           

“You what?” was Mom’s shocked reply.

           

Out of two guppies and three neon tetras, only one neon tetra survived.  I took a sample of the water in to Petsmart to see what was going on, and the clerk tested the water and told me I replaced too much water at one time, and that the water he tested was too clean!

Huh?  So how about all those times I put the fish in a bucket and did a 100% water change with no problem?

           

Oh well, I guess I’ll know for next time!  Even if I happen to let it go too long between cleanings, only do small water changes, even if it's rank.  The fish, they tell me, need some of that utter filth!  Who'd have ever thought I'd kill my fish by being too clean?

           

In the meantime, I have to restock the tank now, and I think I’m going to go with all neon tetras and zebra danio glowfish, and no guppies for the time being.  However, it’s not quite that simple.  I got two more neon tetras immediately following this tank fiasco, but when I went to breakfast with Mom earlier today at Le Peep’s and then out to the pet store for two more neon tetras, one of them barely survived the trip home and the acclimation process, and then died shortly thereafter, so now I have to return him tomorrow.

September 21, 2013 – Saturday

I’m still killing fish!

           

The other neon tetra didn’t survive long either, leaving only one neon tetra.  I took the dead one back to the store and replaced him with two others, and they both died!  Thinking it was probably the stock at Petsmart, I tried danios.  I got three of them, and they survived for exactly one week along with the last remaining tetra (poor schooling fish has been all alone!)

For days, the yellow danio has been hiding, which is usually an indication of sickness.  I tried medicating the tank.  Two days ago, he wouldn’t eat, and then died, and now the large purple one is acting weird.  He’s sluggish and swimming in circles at the corner of the tank.  I’ve been doing my best to keep up on additives – the Tetra AquaSafe to de-chlorinate the tap water and the Tetra EasyBalance to balance the amount of ammonia and ph in the tank, along with one of those large anti-fungus tablets.  I’ve also been trying to regulate the heat, even unplugging the heater completely and finding the tank water is still at 80°, which is a little high, especially for the danios.  My brother questioned me about the heater, which he thought must be defective, until I told them I had completely unplugged it for a day and the water was still too hot.  The temperature has finally come down a bit, but I don’t think that’s what killed the fish anyway.  I mean, the last remaining tetra and the pink danio seem to be doing just fine.  I guess that’s what’s really infuriating.  I used to do complete water changes with no problems, and I’m at a point where some fish are surviving for longer than others, and not acting sick at all.  This doesn’t always last however, but at least it shows a variation between some of the fish, bought at the same time from the same batch.  What does that say about my tank?

           

Anyway, I took the dead yellow one in to Petsmart this morning, along with a water sample.  The girl said everything looks good, except the nitrate.  It’s been a month since I did that thorough cleaning on that tank that apparently removed too much of the good bacteria, and they’re still telling me the nitrate (or “good bacteria” from an established tank) is a little on the low side.  I've been adding the proper chemicals and I even bought some that you can add to a new tank, just in case, and have continued the recommended water changes.  Why are my fish still dying?  They're still telling me my tank is too clean!  What do I have to do to get some nitrate in there?  I'm beginning to think I need to take a dump in there to get some waste going to convert into some nitrate for them!  

So I still exchanged the yellow danio for another yellow danio, and bought another neon tetra.  I figured if the tank needs nitrate/good bacteria, which is converted from fish waste, then the more fish I have in the tank, than the more nitrate will be created.  And I usually don’t add the water from the pet store, but I did this time.  I figured if the tank is low on nitrate, and the tanks at the pet store are well regulated for ammonia, ph, and nitrate, adding it this time could only be beneficial, right?

          

So the two neon tetras are now swimming around like the best of friends, and it’s the same for the pink and yellow danios.  Only time will tell how long this might last.  I hope they live.  The purple danio is still sluggish and isolated, hanging around at the top swimming in circles, but has showed a few signs of normalcy.  The clerks at the pet store said his symptoms seemed to be more indicative of trauma than illness.  If the tank gets the nitrate levels it needs, than this, along with the third danio (since danios are a schooling fish), might be enough to revive him.  I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath.

           

The guys and gals at work know I’ve been struggling with this.  I told them that my surviving fish have started wearing tiny little T-Shirts that read “I Survived the Van Buren Death Tank of 2013!”

October 1, 2013 – Tuesday

I don’t want to dwell on my fish tank, but I did want to say I finally have 5 lively fish in the tank and I plan to add, slowly, a few more… and that those Petsmart clerks don’t always know everything, and are starting to give me conflicting information.  About a week ago, one clerk told me my nitrate is low, which is bad.  I need more waste, which converts to nitrate and good bacteria.  No, that's not true another one tells me this week; nitrate is bad, she says.  I know too much nitrate is bad, but some of it is needed for good bacteria.  But she's telling me I don’t want ANY nitrate in the tank!  Maybe she was thinking "Nitrite" instead.  However, she also says my PH is way too high, especially for tetras.  But I just put in a product that you sell at this store, I tell her, and it states that it maintains chemical and PH levels in fish tanks.  Well, the clerk explains, they have "good", "better" and "best" products, on three different shelves.  I was using one of the “good” products, and the "best" product comes in this huge size and costs at least twice as much as the “good” product.  The product I used, I’m told, probably just increased the PH rather than maintain it, which is bad.  I didn't know what to think, or what to say, but I wasn't going to buy the huge, expensive bottle! The cheaper one I already bought states that it regulates PH!   Later, after I left the store, what she said really bothered me.  Why are they selling me a product that says on the front and the back of the bottle that it will regulate, not increase, PH levels, yet this clerk was telling me the product was not doing what it says it will do?  If that’s the case, perhaps I could sue them for false advertising and killing my fish!  I don’t think the company Tetra that sells this product, called EasyBalance Plus, would be able to mark on the label that the product regulates PH levels unless it actually regulated PH levels.... even if the quality is only just "good".  That stuff still has to go through all kinds of testing and rigid marketing, even if it's just the "cheap" stuff.  It is much more likely that the clerk is just misinformed, or is being pressured to sell the more expensive product.  Did she even know the difference between nitrate and nitrite?

October 11, 2013 – Friday

The fish are doing better.  That's good.  It was getting embarrassing.  The clerks were starting to treat me like the "Ted Bundy" of fish enthusiasts!  Even though the PH is still a little on the high side, I now have 4 danios and 4 neon tetras, though there was one danio death over the last few weeks.  I have the tank decorated for Halloween now, and even bought blue light bulbs.  For a little 10 gallon tank, they're not very bright.

November 7, 2013 – Thursday

Things have finally calmed down!  I still have the same fish I had a month ago!  I think the water chemistry in that tank is finally fixed.  Hurray!  I'm still going to keep using that Easy Balance Plus though, along with the water changes. 

So now it's time to think about possibly adding a few small Corydoras catfish...

These "Laser Green" ones look colorful!

And the saga continues.

Rating the Movies I Saw in October 2013: King's Dolores, a Pre-Christmas Nightmare, a Conjuring, a Spooky Mama, a Vacancy, and Three Idiots at an ATM

[The titles all link to the trailers]
Since the year 2000, every month in my journal, out of all the movies I saw that month, I always pick my two favorites, and the one or two stinkers I happened to see.  I'm not a movie critic or a true cinefile, which means I often don't get to see most movies when they are released.  Therefore, the only rule is that I can choose any movies I happened to see that month, no matter when they were released, provided I haven't already named it as a favorite (or perhaps a stinker) before.

This is my list for the movies I saw in October of 2013:

Movie of the Month:

Dolores Claiborne

Misery isn’t the only great Stephen King film starring Kathy Bates!  Released five years after Misery, this quieter thriller tells a moving, intricate story of a woman accused of murder for the second time, but more than that, it is a good piece of feminist literature, as not only Dolores, but also her workaholic, drug-dependent daughter Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her overbearing, pompous employer Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt) seem to have difficulty with all the men in their lives.  

Dolores and Selena

The men seem to hold all the power, and yet these women are able to stand up to them throughout the story, but not without severe consequences.  For instance, Selena’s now a reporter, and her boss, the editor, who she’s been sleeping with, just gave her story to someone else.  Dolores’ husband was a no-good, lazy, abusive lay-about named Joe (David Strathairn), and he constantly doled out verbal and physical abuse upon Dolores, but she swore she wouldn’t put up with it, and bravely stood up to him.  Then Joe did two more dirty deeds that left Dolores reeling, one of them concerning a young Selena, who seems to have blocked out all memory of it, and the other leaving Dolores’ bank account dry when Joe empties it.  When she goes to the head of the bank, who is a man, she is left no recourse, and he won’t deal with her.  “It’s because I’m a woman, isn’t it,” she tells him, and she’s right, and her righteous indignation doesn’t come off as patronizing.

"Dolores Claiborne" Supporting Cast:  David Strathairn, Judy Parfitt, Christopher Plummer, John C. Reilly

Vera gives her some advice:  “An accident can be an unhappy woman’s best friend, Dolores,” she tells her, revealing at the same time how her husband’s brakes “happened to fail” just when he was leaving his mistress’ house, and so Dolores has just such an accident in mind, which will play out during all the eclipse hoopla around the small, coastal Maine town, and it’s a doozy!  By all accounts, it is a legitimate “accident”, and Joe deserves it, but she doesn’t get off Scott-free anyway, of course, and is doggedly pursued by yet another man in the “old boys club”, Det. John Mackey, well played by Christopher Plummer.  He always suspected foul play in Joe’s death, and in fact, it’s the only case in his entire career that he ever lost.  And so now that Dolores is implicated in the death of Vera Donovan, where she was found standing over her dead body ready to assault her with a heavy rolling pin after Vera fell down the stairs, not to mention the fact that practically the whole town had heard Dolores bad-mouth Vera, he now sees an opportunity to finally condemn the only person who ever managed to allude him.  The only man on her side throughout the whole movie is the constable played by John C. Reilly, who sticks up for Dolores twice when Mackey is trying to demonize her.  Things look even worse for Dolores when it is revealed Vera left her entire estate and all her money to Dolores.  But despite their strained relationships, and appearances, all these women actually come through for each other in the end.

Movie of the Month: 2nd Place

The Nightmare Before Christmas

A little over a decade ago, I named this as runner up for worst movie of the month.  It just so happens that, for that particular month, it really was the second worst movie I saw that month.  Over the last decade, it seems I watch this every year around Halloween, hoping to get it off that list by naming it as the best or second best of the month… but it never seems to come to fruition.  I like this film – the animation, the bizarre story, some of the music, especially “What’s This” (Danny Elfman as Jack Skellington), “The Oogie Boogie Song” (Ken Page and Edward Ivory as Oogie Boogie and Santa), and “Kidnap the Sandy Claws” (Paul Reubens, Catherine O'Hara, and Danny Elfman as Lock, Shock, and Barrel)- but it just never seems to make it into the top two.  That’s because I realize it does have its limitations, but it’s also far from being the worst.  After all these years, there’s still something there.  Will it make it into the top two this month?  Well, maybe… but don’t hold your breath!

Hey, what do ya know, it finally made it!

Stinker of the Month

ATM

ATM:  Three idiots and a ridiculously lucky killer

Three complete idiots get locked into an ATM on a freezing cold December night by a psycho with a big hood on his jacket hiding his face.  The first mistake they made was park so far away from the ATM they needed to use.  The second mistake was not running while the psycho was murdering a guy walking his dog.  From there, it was just a series a one mistake after another, including a security guard that is dumber than a soap dish.  That killer was lucky all these people are so stupid!  They tried to do an interesting twist at the end, similar to Arlington Road, but it was laughable, and not gratifying in the least.  This cheap film is at such a lower level!  

I’ve seen these actors in other roles:  Brian Geraghty as the new recruit in The Hurt Locker, Alice Eve as Carol Marcus in Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Josh Peck in the Disney Channel show Drake andJosh.  He was affable in Drake and Josh, but here he winds up playing a completely selfish and arrogant, bone-headed jerk.  This film had a few good scares, but they would all be non-existent if the characters were smarter than a bag of rocks, or if the plot maneuverings dealing with the killer had made sense.

Other movies from October:

The Conjuring 

One of the better ghost stories we’ve seen lately, it had scenes that were spooky, shocking, and creepy in all the right places.  There’s even an exorcism in the end.  The film juxtaposes two families – one with a whole passel of daughters that moves into a new house, and a ghost-hunting couple with a daughter of their own.  This couple, the Warrens, were apparently based on the real ghost hunters who later dealt with the family who owned the Amityville house.  I was never much of a fan of The Amityville Horror franchise, but this film manages to deliver the goods in the end.  That’s good.  I don’t think I could have taken another Sinister.   

Mama

This was one of the better horror movies we’ve seen lately, but we still didn’t like the ending.  The way the movie ended was still much better than, say, the way Stephen King’s The Mist ended, which we HATED!  But still…

They spared no expense on the story or the ghostly effects, particularly the title creature, and the acting was quite good, and you could see everything quite clearly, unlike many other dark horror films (like Sinister).  In fact, this could have been an all ‘round great movie, if only it hadn’t ended on such a downer.  I’m sure there are some people who liked the way it ended, and that I perhaps missed the meaning, but I didn’t.  Without giving anything away, I will simply say that I understand what they were trying to do, but it just didn’t really work.  We would have preferred an ending in which everyone survived.  Still, I was very impressed and absorbed with this film up until the very end.

Vacancy 2: The First Cut

It’s been so long since I saw the first Vacancy with Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale.  I remember I liked it, and that it was about killers at some backwoods motel, but I didn’t remember the basics of the plot, namely that people were being filmed while killed, and the snuff videos were being sold on the internet.  Now with Vacancy 2, we get the story of how it all started.  This is strictly direct-to-video fare, but as such, we found it rather scary, and truthfully, the gore was turned down (just a bit) in favor of suspense and shocks.  In other words, the filmmakers, to their credit, did not relish every opportunity to linger over torture and blood and dismemberment, like you would normally expect from a direct-to-video cheapie.

            

I recognized David Moscow, who here played the slime-ball owner of the motel, striking a deal with the killer to film his assaults for profit, and then finding himself having to sometimes assist in the rampage, eventually paying the ultimate price for it as well.  A long time ago, he played the 13 year old version of Tom Hanks in Big.  I suppose it’s a good thing he’s still working in film, but to compare his career with that of Tom Hanks… sad to say that his is actually the career the vast majority of actors have, or will have, eking out a smaller audience with less prestige.  After looking for the pictures included below, I discovered Moscow is a leftist political activist (no surprise there for a Hollywood actor, of course, especially since he states in an article, "What I want to do in my life is to make commercial, left-wing propaganda.  I want to change whom the world views as heroes." - see the link here - As the Church Lady used to say, "Well, isn't that special!") and has been making quieter, independent films lately, such as this one, or David & Layla about a Jewish man who falls in love with a Muslim woman, and is developing a TV show, probably for a cable channel, about his real parent’s lives as liberal political radicals.  So there you go.  A quieter, more specialized career.  They can't all be as lucky or well known as Tom Hanks and Kathy Bates, you know.