gwax's rumblings

We’ve been teach­ing Baldr that destroy­ing water­mel­ons is a good thing. “Why?” you might ask and the answer is clear: because Baldr attack­ing water­mel­ons is awe­some. On account of awe­some­ness and the fact that we actu­ally had two water­mel­ons lying around, there are two sets of water­melon destruc­tion involved. Proof follows.

(Matt helped a lit­tle with the sec­ond watermelon)

Internet, meet Baldr. Sorry it took me so long to intro­duce you.

Post title pla­gia­rized from Riad

Yesterday, I went and picked up my new puppy. My puppy is a pure­bred Saint Bernard with strong cham­pion ances­try from Conifer Creek Farm in Rough and Ready, CA.

After a great deal of con­sid­er­a­tion, I have decided to name my puppy Baldr, after the Norse God com­monly asso­ci­ated with light and good­ness. I had pre­vi­ously been con­sid­er­ing Heimdallr and Odin but Heimdallr sounded too cum­ber­some and the breeder, a very friendly man by the name of David McKague, related to me the story of a Saint Bernard named Odin who had been noth­ing but trou­ble. As much as I like to be con­trar­ian and see Baldr as a bit like the Jesus of the Norse, it really is a good name. Baldr was often called Baldr the Good for a rea­son and I think that it’s a very respectable and good sound­ing name for a dog.

I will post pic­tures as soon as soon as I get an xD card for the cam­era a friend gave me or am able to get some­one else to take some pic­tures for me.

I am very sad­dened to report that my fam­ily dog, Browder, had to be put down. Browder was a yel­low Labrador and had reached the ripe age of 13. Browder devel­oped can­cer in his abdomen about a year ago, which he recov­ered from after surgery. A month or so ago, the can­cer came back and it was, once again, removed, though it was more inva­sive this time around. Sadly, it was not fully removed and, about a week ago, it started to make a really strong push for­ward. The can­cer rather thor­oughly over­whelmed poor Browder and he had to be put down yesterday.

When I last saw Browder, in early May, he had just had his most recent surgery and he seemed quite a bit more lively than I’d seen him be in years. It is my belief that, after the last surgery, he knew that he was on the way out and fig­ured that he might as well live things up a bit with the time he had left. I’m so glad that I man­aged to get back east and see him one last time.

I am really going to miss that lazy old layabout. I remem­ber so many times with him; it’s hard to accept that he isn’t any­more. I remem­ber when he was young and would bring us things he found; he was an excel­lent retriever in spite of us never teach­ing him how. He once came home with a live baby owl gin­gerly held in his mouth; he caused the owl no phys­i­cal harm, though I’m cer­tain the shock ruined the poor lit­tle bird; he brought it in, placed it on the floor and looked at us for approval at the tro­phy he’d brought us. I remem­ber when my brother, Joseph, was a tod­dler and he’d climb all over poor Browder, tor­ment­ing him as only a tod­dler can tor­ment a dog; Browder would just lie there, gen­tle as could be putting up with it all. I remem­ber vis­it­ing Tim Jessup place land in Norfolk, CT, tak­ing a Sunfish out on the lake and sail­ing while Browder chased me around try­ing des­per­ately to keep up; he wasn’t a big fan of salt­wa­ter but he was a fan­tas­tic swim­mer. Sure he’d steal food some­times, sure his hair was every­where, but man was he a good dog.

I can’t write any more, it’s too sad. I’m going to go cry myself to sleep.

I have been inspired by Weebles’ recent friend mak­ing to stop talk­ing about get­ting a dog and actu­ally be proac­tive in get­ting a dog. To that end, I have been in con­tact with a some­what local breeder of Saint Bernards. I have cho­sen the Saint Bernard as a breed for a num­ber of rea­sons, basi­cally boil­ing down to size and tem­pera­ment. I want a large dog that can serve as a pack dog for all sea­son hiking/camping trips and can pull me around the city on my skate­board. Additionally, I want a dog that will be chill and main­tain his cool in sit­u­a­tions rang­ing from alone in the after­noon to a party with hun­dreds of peo­ple. There are plenty of other rea­sons but that’s an overview.

Having, as I men­tioned, been in con­tact with a breeder, I have arranged to obtain one of the pups from the next breed­ing cycles, which will put a Saint Bernard puppy mov­ing in with me some­time dur­ing the first week of August. At some point in the not too dis­tant future, I’ll have to start prepar­ing for the puppy but for now I need to come up with a name.

My cur­rent front-running name is Heimdallr (after the Norse God) but it’s early enough in the process that I’m will­ing to accept alter­na­tive sug­ges­tions. Leave sug­ges­tions in the comments.

Something just reminded me of Mr. Tickles and I cer­tainly still miss him.

I hope that my dog doesn’t die for a long time.

Today is a sad day for the world, Mr. Tickles has died. Mr. Tickles was a friendly fish, loved by all who made his acquain­tance. To some he was just a fish, to oth­ers he was always big­ger than the time before, but to me he was my dear friend Tickles.

Tickles, I will remem­ber you fondly for all the amus­ing times we have had. I will remem­ber how I would sit and watch you swim around. I will remem­ber the time you bit Kurt. I will remem­ber how you would eat gup­pies with such glee when you were given the oppor­tu­nity. I will remem­ber how you would watch me at my com­puter. I will remem­ber how you would swim around so excit­edly at feed­ing time. I will remem­ber how you would change col­ors so sub­tlely, con­found­ing me until I real­ized that you could change col­ors. I will remem­ber your abil­ity to be con­stantly larger than you had been before. I will miss you Tickles.

Mr. Tickles was a Tiger Oscar Cichlid and died of a fun­gal infec­tion this after­noon, Saturday, September 25^th 2004, at about 1PM. Mr. Tickles died at the ripe age of 1 year old; he was 9 inches long at the time of his death, far more than the 3–4 inches of when we first met.

I don’t know that I’ve actu­ally gone through the proper intro­duc­tory things between the two of you, so here goes. Internet, meet Mr. Tickles; Tickles, meet the inter­net. There, that’s not so bad now is it. I’m sure that you’ll make great friends, after­all you see me at the inter­net enough Tickles, and you don’t really give a damn about any­thing internet.

What, no inter­net, I was not call­ing you a slut.

No, I won’t take it back because I didn’t actu­ally say it. You really need to calm down inter­net; it’s not actu­ally all that important.

Ok, fine inter­net, I’m sorry if I hurt your feel­ings, it was not my inten­tion to insin­u­ate that you had loose sex­ual morals, but you have to admit that you do have a lot of porn.

For the love of mon­keys, shut the Hell up inter­net; this is Tickles’ moment, so just let every­one look at the pic­ture and be happy.

Yesterday I went to PetCo and bought a whole bunch of lit­tle fish (~20) and gave them to Mister Tickles. Needless to say, amuse­ment fol­lowed as Tickles made a task of hunt­ing and con­sum­ing all of the feeder fish.

I am strongly con­sid­er­ing get­ting another fish tank and breed­ing gup­pies or some other small fish so that I can keep Tickles in live food.

So, I’m sit­ting here watch­ing Mr. Tickles do his thing and it occurs to me that fish make for extremely good pets in col­lege. The best thing about fish is the ease of tak­ing care of them. I feed my fish two or three times a day and then every few weeks I have to change some of the water or change the fil­ter. Compare what I have to do to what some­one with a dog, cat or rodent has to do. A cat owner has to change the kitty lit­ter fre­quently, feed the cat, train the cat to use the kitty lit­ter and make sure that the cat never man­ages to get away. The owner of a dog has to house train it, take it for walks, pay atten­tion to it and so on. Rodents are much closer to fish as far as atten­tion needed to keep them alive, except that their cages need to be cleaned more thor­oughly and more frequently.

There is, how­ever, one slight prob­lem with fish, notably, it’s harder to get a fish that’s inter­est­ing and has some per­son­al­ity than most other types of ani­mal. The solu­tion to this prob­lem is found in one of two ways: select­ing your fish very care­fully or get­ting lucky; I man­aged to lat­ter. So, as might have been inferred from the begin­ning of the pre­vi­ous para­graph, Mr. Tickles is my fish. Tickles (as I refer to him when I don’t want to bother with many syl­la­ble) is a Tiger Oscar (Astronotus Ocellatus), of the fam­ily Cichlidae (the cich­lids). The note­wor­thy thing about Oscars is that they’re large aggres­sive fish. Right now, Tickles is about 6″-8″ and will grow to about 10″-15″ even­tu­ally. His per­son­al­ity would be hard to clas­sify as he’s got quite a bit of it for a fish (I got lucky), but suf­fice it to say that he’s a rather fun char­ac­ter and I’ve really taken to him.

That Tickles is aggres­sive and big means some amus­ing things in the future. Supposedly, his breed of fish will not only eat most things (liv­ing or oth­er­wise) but will also eat crea­tures up to slightly larger than him­self. This of course will be great when I get off my lazy ass and hunt down some other fish for him to eat. I would have done so before, but dif­fi­culty arises in that many fish carry dan­ger­ous par­a­sites and the feeder fish at the local PetCo™ carry fatal ones to oscars. He does eat sushi, left­over Chinese, hot­dogs and all sorts of other such things.

All in all, I’m quite fond of Tickles and very glad that I got him.

Oh yeah, this one time he bit Kurt; that was funny.