the day starts with death
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Kenny and I stopped to feed the fish on the way to the day care this morning. When I got back, a Rummy-Nosed Tetra was dead.
And its eyes had been picked out.
It's the first fatality in the tank in six or seven month, and came quite unexpectedly. I'd recently made some changes, adding a piece of driftwood for the pleco (to ignore) and adding some plant fertilizer to the water (belatedly realizing that Nitrates aren't enough). Nothing in what I'd done should have impacted the water quality negatively, so I'm a bit perplexed.
Things continued to go fair-to-middling for the rest of the day. I got a tonne of important work done, including launching ads for our firm on both Facebook and Google. But a death in the aquarium always gets me a bit bleah.
It didn't help that at some point in the day I discovered a hold-over from the weekend's BBQ. The event had been a good one, hosted by a friend who lives in "World City Tower", a development of three or fours buildings near our home. The highlight, perhaps, was when Ozeki-san dropped a bottle of champagne and it vomited its contents onto the ceiling—that stuff has to be the most explosive thing that humans drink. But the unwitting take-home had been the remains of some bell peppers I'd used in preparing some salsa. From Saturday to Monday, they'd been festering in the ~30ºC heat. In my backpack. Needless to say, I was dismayed to track the source to my beloved old bag. Happily, some detergent actually got the acrid, putrescent smell out.
Three good things that happened today:
1. The thing with the ads
2. Hammered out some problems with the investor proposal I'm working on
3. Promoted some new content to the store site in time with the advent of the adverts—and in doing so learned a thing or two about Ruby*
*Ruby is the programming language we've used in developing the site. And in its infancy, still something of a solution looking for a problem.