Author: Susan

Guess what? Yesterday I got a job! To celebrate, Kevin and I went to the fish store. 🙂 We’re in the market for a yellow tang, but as the fish come in on Fridays and are largely gone by the end of the weekend, there weren’t any there to bring home.

Instead, we are now the proud owners of a silver tipped Xenia. It’s a tree shaped soft coral, and each of the branches look like eight-fingered hands. (Picture an ancient tree with a huge trunk and branches that start quite low to the ground.) The major characteristic is that it pulses, so each of the hands endlessly opens and closes, combing the water for particles. Watching it pulse is the visual equivalent of listening to siren songs — it’s nearly impossible to tear away. Utterly mesmerizing. When we first put it in the tank, all of the hands bunched up tight, though they kept moving the individual fingers slightly. Every now and then a hand would stick a finger out and then whip it back in. It looked like a cross between a sleepy kid rubbing its eyes and someone not wanting to get out of bed. Eventually it opened up and started pulsing — so wonderful to watch.

Given that freeze frame photos won’t capture the coolness at all, I’m including these with the caveat that I understand if your reaction is “huh.” The cool part is the motion, these are really merely proof that the Xenia’s in the tank.

The clowns checking out our new pulsing xenia and hermit crabs while they temperature-acclimate in their fish store bags.

Xenia from the front, in the tank. You can see the pearl-colored trunk in between some of the hands. Also, the pink oval below and the white triangle to the far right are two of our 10 new snails.

Xenia from the side. We lodged the rock fragment that it came attached to into a hole in our live rock as close to the lights as possible. There’s a rubberband on the fragment, but I don’t want to remove it for fear of injuring the coral.

Ours was captive bred, which makes me happy. I realize that most of the content of marine aquariums comes from reefs, but whenever it’s possible to have more self-sustaining, never wild, less traumatized species, that seems ideal (our clowns were also captive bred, our gramma and live rocks were not. I have to wonder how much the Gramma’s personality problems are innate and how much they’re a result of trauma from capture and transport.). I don’t know if that view is a result of too much “Finding Nemo,” but I’d still rather go for tank bred. I also hope that our aquarium will be able to support it. Xenia are supposed to be quite light-needy (we’re barely inside the bottom bracket of their tolerance) and rather current-adverse. If they’re happy, though, some hands will fall off, blow around the tank, and start a new xenia where they land. Some online sources have called them weeds. (Must be weeds in the same sense as the little sunflowers on the sides of the highway from Kansas to Idaho — too cool to count.)

Now that we have a coral, we officially have a reef tank! 🙂 Not as spectacular as, say, this, but we’ll build up eventually (though I can’t imagine the work to get the basement set up like he did, be sure to scroll down through the photos! and, note, the picture of the purple feather-like corals in the “Feeding” section shows a dense patch of xenia!)

My hands (particularly the right) have been freezing lately. It’s been in the 50’s here (no New England-style snow storms for us, sadly) so the weather obviously isn’t the reason. My hunch is that the culprit is a combo of knitting and mousing, and since neither of those activities seem optional, I came up with a design for fingerless mitts so that I can carry on with warm fingers. It’s based on the ragged old church mitten pattern I’ve been using since middle school (which feels like it was printed on cloth, the paper is so worn) and a trio of lace patterns from my new favourite knitting reference. I used a double eyelet rib for the underside of the arm, scattered double eyelets for the palm, and a fern lace panel for the back of the hand and arm. Below, pictures of the right mitt blocking and being worn (I’m really not a left-handed photographer, sorry that it’s blurry!):

The yarn is the remnants of the Barn Red Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece that I used for my hat and scarf set. This yarn has a storied past: I bought it in Boston after the first snowstorm, finished the hat, then started the scarf. On #5s, it took the better part of a year to finish and was the project that saw the Patriots through their Superbowl Championship, the Sox through their delightful season and series, and the Eagles & Pats through their stellar early seasons this fall. I brought these gloves (worked in the same yarn) to a friend’s place for the games on Sunday, and (not to claim credit) saw AFC and NFC wins for the Eagles and Patriots. Now I have to quickly finish the gloves before the Superbowl so that the yarn stays lucky — no matter what, it’ll chalk a loss for one of the teams if I’m still working with it. 😛

(Note: I grew up in New England but didn’t start watching football until Eagles-obsessed Kevin made me… the upcoming game is something of a conflict of interests.)



(The needle is pointing to the unintentional backwards cable from the final out when the Red Sox won the series. That mistake stayed in as a testament.)

And with that, enough sports superstition for one day.

It’s looking like I won’t have quite enough yarn to finish the second glove — I’m starting the thumb increases now, but the mess of yarn is dwindling. I’m debating between unmatched gloves or pirating yarn from the overly-long right hand — we’ll have to see how far the bit that’s left stretches.

Alison of the blue blog fame is hosting a fix-a-thon knit-along for February.

I don’t have any knitting of my own to go back and rework. (This isn’t a sign of knitting perfection as much as my slooow progress — if you don’t make a lot, there isn’t much to go back and fix.) Instead, I have two store-bought sweaters that have been irking me. One’s the lovely J. Crew one with the unfortunate pleated shoulders that I ripped out way back in October. I would love to get this finished.

The second, which I just attacked and finished as a show of good faith is a dark blue turtleneck that I would love a lot more if it was less suffocating. I cut off about 2/3 of the neck, picked up the stitches, and bound off to make a mock turtleneck. I forgot to take a picture before I started, but I actually have two versions of this sweater since Express cut the price so much late last winter. So, here’s the post-op dark blue with it’s unaltered counterpart:

And here’s a rather serious shot of it on:

(You would think that pressing the button on the camera was an extremely difficult maneuver, based on my facial expression. Geez. 🙂 Also, note the *bright* sunshine streaming in through the window. Not as fun as the northeastern snow storm, but at least further proof that it isn’t always raining in Seattle.)

Also, thanks to everyone for the fish-hoping. He’s eating again, exploring, and playing with his mate. I tried to take a picture of him as proof that he really is looking better, but he wouldn’t stay still long enough to get a non-blurry shot:

He’s the blurry top guy.

Darted behind the top bar.

Wriggly swimming.

I suppose that ought to be proof enough. 🙂

After relatively few mishaps so far (the worst have involved accidental water spillage from the buckets), we made a massive mistake last week. The addition of the quarantine tank was supposed to keep our clowns happy and healthy so that we could put them into the main system in about three weeks, confident that they were disease-free. We were doing twice-weekly 30% water changes from the main tank and seemed to be cruising along until one of our clowns all of a sudden started acting like a terribly sick fish. He was just sitting inside the pvc tubes breathing, stopped eating, and his face all of a sudden looked all sunken.

We tested the water, and realized that our ammonia, nitrite and nitrate had gotten way too high. The symptoms (thank you, Google) matched perfectly for ammonia- and nitrite-poisoning (and had been there for several days before we realized: breathing at the surface, listlessness, etc). We did two water changes in 10 hours, and it didn’t bring the quality up at all, so we put the clowns in the main tank to try to save them (the second one was having symptoms too by that point).

When we let them go in the main tank, our sick guy looked like this for the entire first day:



head down, tail up, and breathing hard. The fish store gave him a 50% chance of pulling through, and I was utterly wracked with guilt, since we’d essentially poisoned our fish and it should have been preventable. Our second fish bounced back pretty fast and he would go off to swim around the tank for a few seconds, then beeline back and nudge his friend, then go off again. They’re such a pair.

This was a typical scene by yesterday: the sick clown down in the corner, spending minimum energy, the well one off exploring and playing with the currents, and the gramma lurking unhappily by his cave, ready to give chase and nip any dumb clownfish that got too close. We had to rearrange the rocks to give the clowns a corner with some protection because the gramma wasn’t graciously adapting to his new tankmates.

Today, our guy was looking a bit better, and even had enough energy to go play with his reflection.



He still hasn’t eaten though, so it remains very much a fingers-crossed situation.

🙁

“War President” by Joe at American Leftist

early April, 2004.

(From his website:“It’s a mosaic composed of the photos of the American service men and women who have died in Iraq. No photograph is used more than three times.”)

Today is a difficult day politically (both for those who are unhappy with four more years and for their interaction with people who aren’t). I don’t have much to say other than that I do respect the office of the president, if not the person holding it, and I recognize the value of the system that re-elected him, even if I’m not happy with the result. I did not plan to post a political message today.

However, I came across this image while surfing tonight, and it hit me very strongly. I think it makes an important and emotional statement, especially when paired with the artist’s (short) commentary on the public reaction to it. Such young faces, and such a mangled purpose.

So, in spite of my original intent, here’s a somber note of protest for January 20th.

My last Boston project was a modified booga bag. The booga bag measurements according to the pattern were supposed to be about 4.5″D x 7.5″W x 8.5″H, which seemed awfully small to me. I was envisioning something vaguely gym-bag-like, which could hold sneakers and workout clothes on the T (even though there is no T in Seattle. Ahh, denial). The bag I was using at that point was a small paper Crate and Barrel bag (I never said I was stylish), so I was thinking something along those lines, just sturdier and not a walking ad. The booga bag seemed perfectly shaped, long and thin, just a tad small. So I did some math (famous last words), knit like the dickens for my last week at home, and the bag was the inaugural load of laundry in my new Seattle apartment.

Unfortunately, what was perfectly dimensioned before felting:



no longer could aspire to the same purpose afterwards. The finished bag measurements are 6″D x 10″W x 8″H — about a third of the height I was envisioning. The base is perfect, though, so I must have just spaced out on one little multiplication.

(Though it’s also possible that I just leave things in to felt longer and it sucks the height out of them. For example, look at my Sophie vs. the model.)

Rather than finishing the bag then, I let it languish on top of my bag of knitting things. I bought lining fabric way back in October, but didn’t follow through. Right before Sharon got here, I got out the sewing machine and made a lining, with a large interior pocket trimmed on the top with black piping. I finally finished sewing it in last night, added a lined cardboard square to the bottom for dimension, two snaps to the interior pocket, and fitting in the handles. Instead of tying the two I-cords together, as per the instructions, I sewed them together with yarn and a metal needle so that they would be less bulky.

So, yay for finished projects!!

Pattern: Booga Bag with size modifications

Yarn: Cascade 220

Colors: #8555 (black), #2409 (med. green), #9406 (speckled blue-green)

Combining my rugged individualism with my unwillingness to pay $17 to dispose of my Christmas tree, I took matters into my own hands yesterday and sawed the thing apart, limb by limb, so that it would fit in our “yard waste” collection bin (circled in the picture below).

This is the second year running that I have dismantled the tree in order to remove it from my apartment, and in a mildly pagan way, it is becoming one of my favorite parts of Christmas. First the exercise of wrestling the thing apart (this year’s addition of a saw was extremely helpful), then the amazing smell, and finally the result of not having to feel guilty looking at an abandoned Christmas tree all alone in the cold trash heap — abandoned branches are so much less sentimental somehow.

I started bottom-up, removing the limbs, then took it out of the stand to saw the trunk in thirds before sawing the branches off the top. Somehow, it all fit in the bin.

And now we’re back to our regular living room, which looks so much bigger without the greenery:

So, the rat update: Kevin bought traps on Tuesday and set them up, baited with peanut butter and pecans, after we saw a huge rat run into the middle of our living room and discovered that it had been leaping up onto counters to munch on our bagels. (eww!! eww eww)

I’ve been wearing my tall boots around the house and only fleeing downstairs and straight back up when absolutely necessary. Last night I called my landlord, Jeff, just to let him know too. (The couple next door has a four month baby, etc… He needed to know.) Jeff earned massive amounts of appreciation by sounding genuinely horrified and aghast and then taking over the apartment for five hours today to rout out the problem. He removed the dishwasher to find that the plumbers had drilled their own holes instead of using the ones Jeff left for them, thus leaving large holes behind our cabinets down to the crawl space. They patched those, then went under the house into the crawl space (shudder) to look for more rat holes (shudder again), clean up droppings, spray foam everywhere to seal things, and make sure it all looked ship shape.

So, here’s to responsive landlords with high standards.

I feel so much better and have taken off the boots. 🙂 We’re leaving the traps up for a few more days, but now I don’t have to worry about huge jumping rats taking over my home.

I’m not on the ball for blogging this week, it seems. Here’s the catch-up:

My sister Sharon came out to visit for a few days of her winter break, and was here Thursday night through Monday morning. It was awesome to have her — the whole Providence-to-Seattle distance is hard to me. We took the ferry to Bainbridge, watched the Seahawks in a bar downtown, went to the fish store (she asked, we really didn’t drag her), and she re-learned to knit so we went to Acorn Street to get scarf yarn (again, she asked). In between we ate a lot of yummy food, tea and made it over to Essential Bakery. I wish she’d stay — or maybe include Seattle in her job search locations… (not that I’m hinting)

While we were at the fish store, we picked up two baby clownfish. They’re awesome. We’d been thinking of a school-of-3 of green chromis just to have more fish all at once, but I was both worried about them vs. the size of our tank and really wanted a clownfish (we’ve read a lot that unless you have a matched (aka breeding) pair of clownfish that there will be dominance issues, so we thought that it was 3 chromis or 1 clownfish). The ever-helpful employees of Blue Sierra explained that if you buy them young and approximately the same size, they will be fine living together. Further research at home showed that clownfish are hermaphroditic — when it comes time to breed the larger becomes female, the smaller male and it all works out. (Do your own google search if you want a lot of “gender-bending & disney” commentary…) So, now we have two happy, hungry, wiggly clownfish bopping around our kitchen tank. They really are the golden retrievers of the fish world.

My favourite part of watching them is the way their mouths move. The littler one looks like she’s constantly saying “bopbopbop” and the one with more black tipping on his fins has a bigger chin and says “blablabla.” They both have a constant stream of running commentary, and keep talking over each other. It amuses me highly. Based on their sibling relationship (they were captive bred) and fondness of talking, they have been named Click and Clack (aka, the boston bros who’ve been doing Car Talk on NPR since the early 80’s).

(Note: This appellation is doubly appropriate since we got them while Shar was out visiting and she and Dave gave me two Car Talk cds for my birthday for the cross-country drive to Seattle.)

my sister came to visit (wonderful), we got a pair of clownfish (a post of their own), I’m knitting fingerless mittens (ooh), my wonderful aunt carol came to dinner, and kevin eiher wants me to get a job (reasonable) or start a yarn store (woah).

🙂

I have pictures, but there’s a rat in our kitchen (VERY STRONG UGH!) and I’m not going down tonight to fetch my camera, so patience.

All I have for you is the recomendation: Our Lady Peace — Innocent. Sweet dreams!