8/3

Sick, vacation's almost over. I've been living it up -- enjoying my crazy music class, dusting off too-old exercise videos, watching Buffy and taking B to McInerny dog park. MUS is truly wild: next week we are going to learn "La Raspa" (because I taught "Chiapanecas"!) and today Maestra played a Nirvana song on her ukulele! I love that class because for some reason I'm always almost-late and therefore feeling stressed but the first thing we always do is some kind of dance. She just slaps together a three- or four-step circle dance and we learn it in a verse or two and away we go. Today she put on "Havah Nagila" and we danced around the room and as always I lightened up immediately. It's a great chiller-outer.

Today: cleaned Shumai's tank. The battle with the tubifex worms is escalating. See, a long time ago I used to feed him tubifex worms, when he was just a baby and a picky one at that. T-worms behave like magnets -- they clump together when you leave them alone. Of course you can stir them up and apart, but they will eventually reconvene as a pulsing brownish-red ball. It's gross, but he liked them a lot and used to eat nothing but t-worms. But I guess they got into the gravel and started breeding, which explains why sometimes he can be observed snapping at the gravel under his feet. I don't think I can completely get rid of them without discarding all the gravel in the tank, which would be a huge pain. It's a 20-g long tank, awkward to carry (and impossible to carry by myself if it's not completely empty -- water is HEAVY.) I guess I could dump the gravel into a tarp or something and throw the whole lot away, but that seems such a huge waste of nice, hard-to-get gravel. I'd probably have to replace it with ugly ArtRock. The other option is to soak it in some kind of salty solution, but E's B said even that won't guarantee total eradication. Right now I'm just siphoning out as much as I can when I do his monthly cleaning, but being that they're obviously reproducing, it seems pointless. Maybe I should just leave the worms alone -- after all, this way he can help himself to a snack when he gets hungry.

I also went to the PO today to mail a bday gift and mail in a handling fee for these airline tickets we "earned" by spending an obscene amount of money on senior/family portraits. These are "anywhere in the world" tickets, which I am skeptical about but still want to check out. After the PO we found some really, really old Subway Club cards so we got sandwiches and went home to eat, and B learned an addition to his most dangerous trick: silent begging. He already knew how to sit very still and peer at the eater with his best puppy eyes. Today he kicked it up a notch by very gently placing his paw on my knee. I couldn't quite resist that. Luckily he likes to eat vegetables and things like that so even though we often cave and toss him a bite, I don't see him getting tubby off this habit. Only spoiled.

Also did laundry and some other relatively boring things. I was going to skip class and go to dragonboat paddling practice (flag-catchers DO need to practice!!) but decided that one practice was not a good reason to miss the equivalent of four regular classes.

Saw E's B for post-class chatter and to see this game he's been playing, where you're a mosquito and your mission is to suck people's blood and not get swatted. Truly weird. Fun for awhile, but who buys games like that? Uh, I mean, E's B of course. That's right. He buys them. Yes siree.