Fucking Comcast

I've been waiting for Comcast since 1pm. It's looking increasingly like they will not arrive by 5, as promised. Fuckers.

Because I couldn't pass the time either watching tv or eating, I was forced into the open arms of the internet, thanking my lucky stars the whole afternoon that we don't have a cable modem. I spent a lot of time here, looking at before and after pictures of buttock implants ("I want a shelf!") and other cosmetic surgery. I highly recommend the site for all of your time-wasting needs.

And now I go to buy cat litter, because I don't have to wait here any longer, like a sucker.

The Kitchen Sink Science Fair: Bringing Medieval Plagues to the 21st Century

We have a cyclical relationship with filth. Sometimes, we're on top and everything is clean and you could imagine yourself eating here quite happily, and other times we're lying around in lazy defeat and then you wouldn't want to come in the door. I wish that it weren't like this, but... alas, it is. Our personalities, so pleasantly compatible in other ways, combine to produce some glaringly dysfunctional cleaning.

Just a little preface there for before you judge. It's not always like this.

I did the vast majority of the dishes this morning. There were a few things that wouldn't fit in the dishwasher or else needed soaking time, so they're waiting in the sink. But everything is well on its way to cleanliness.

There was an alarming amount of mold growing among the lower strata of dirty kitchen ware. If I'm saying it was alarming, you know that it had to be bad. The "perfect storm" of food waste. Forms of dirty-plate-mold that I've encountered often enough to no longer feel alarmed by include: the little black gritty things that look like tiny sand and slough right off, the slick film, the spiderwebby kind that hangs on a bit more tightly, and the hard nucleus of crust that you have to scrub the bejesus out of before it will budge. Today's specimen blended black grit with slick film and a virulent stink that combined food and rot odors so perfectly that I don't know when I'll be able to smell eggs again without visualizing slick film.

I'm not so good with the odors. I can get used to visuals, but there's no preparing for a disgusting smell.

The important thing is that it's clean now.

The Internet Is My Jesus

I fed the stupid frog too many foods again today because they all fell to the bottom. It was only 3 this time. I set my flee-the-apartment threshhold a bit higher today.

The reason that I hadn't consulted the internet about the frog's habits right away was that I couldn't remember what kind of frog Kara told me he (she?) is, but once I got home today, I had a brain wave. He's an African Dwarf Frog! After that, it was only a matter of minutes on Google before I learned that they don't eat food until it sinks to the bottom (he probably can't believe the sudden glut of little foods drifting his way) and the shedding skin and darting around are both normal.

This explains why he never ate the Saturday food; it floated. The upshot is that I may yet kill him, but it won't be with starvation. It will be with cardiovascular disease and morbid obesity.

A New Pet-Sitting Challenge

I don't have much amphibian experience, unless you want to count a brief period during my childhood when we had a goldfish. His name was Gigolo. He died a precipitous death, and now that I think about it, it's possible that my mother killed him. She played a fairly large role in the loss of my two other childhood pets too, and it's only now that I'm connecting up all of the dots. She says that his bowl was too small, but I've never been sure.

The other two pets were parakeets. One of them flew out an open window after my mother let her into the room. According to my mother, who was the sole witness to the incident, the other parakeet flew into the sink while my mother washed dishes. The bird got covered in grease, "caught cold," and died in the night. Or maybe my mother just got tired of picking up tiny, circular poops from the tops of all of the doors in our house.

Anyway, the reason that I've got pet death on my mind is that I've just returned from Kara's. I didn't go yesterday because I was in the throes of sickness. When I looked in on old Froggy, I noticed that the food I'd put into his little cube on Saturday was still floating on top of the water. He hadn't eaten it.

I ended up giving him 4 foods today, because he kept thrashing around in the water and knocking them to the bottom. I wasn't sure from Kara's instructions whether he eats things once they stop floating, so I kept popping in fresh ones. She was very clear, however, that the most she ever feeds him in a single day is 2 foods. Finally, I admitted to myself that I wasn't going to feel good about leaving until he ate something, but that he was very unlikely to eat. As a solution, I dropped in one final food and got the hell out of there. And now I'm worried that he may die. It wouldn't bother me if he died of natural causes, because we've all got to face that at one point or another, but I would feel terrible if he died because I starved him through incompetent feeding.

I think that my sentiments were intensified by the fact that I'm on the Gatorade-n-broth diet myself today, and I want to eat actual food so badly that fantasies of chewing bread have been distracting me all afternoon.

I've learned today that I don't know much about frogs. Maybe he doesn't eat every day. Maybe the thrashing is normal. Maybe the laying on his back at the bottom is normal. Do they eat food off the bottom?