These go to 11.

The fish are all doing great, I still have managed to not kill any of them. I came damn close to it a few days ago, though. I accidentally overfed the everloving hell out of them with bloodworms. I didn’t stuff Onion too badly, but Pudge and Sammy were so bloated I quite literally thought they’d explode. You can see a photo of a very bloated Sammy on my MySpace, Pudge’s dark coloring makes him rather difficult to photograph sometimes, so I only have a good photo of Sammy after he pigged out. Every single website you can read about betta fish will warn you that they WILL NOT stop eating simply because they’re full, they’ll stuff themselves silly because they don’t know when their next meal will be. A betta can literally eat himself to death, and I really don’t want to know how close they might’ve been to that thanks to me being an idiot. I can’t even sit here saying I shouldn’t blame myself, because I did sit here thinking “This is too much, I shouldn’t give them anymore” as I kept dunking more worms into their tanks. I’m a Jewish woman, what do you expect? Jews love to eat and we love to feed others. Pets are definitely no exception, I’m half surprised Tator isn’t a furry ball of “What the fuck do you feed your dog, smaller dogs?”

The 5th was my grandmother’s 80th birthday party, definitely something worth celebrating since most of my deceased family members didn’t live that long, and my grandmother is still pretty healthy considering she just turned 80 freakin’ years old. A lot of my family was there, over 40 people and really only one was someone nobody wanted to see. She’s the daughter of one of my grandmother’s best friends, she was quite literally only invited because she was expected to take her own mother home after dinner…except the two barely speak, apparently, so it was a waste of an invitation, and I don’t even care if she ends up reading this blog. She spent the entire night making people want to kick her in the neck, and quite honestly, I just might have done that if she’d been at my table. I have no patience for people who seem to actually want to ruin a family dinner, and she’s not even family. I have enough annoying family members, we don’t need any honorary ones. That moron aside, I very much enjoyed the night, way more than I thought I would. I don’t really dig huge crowds of people who all want to say hello to me, but I suppose I’m more of a people person than I give myself credit for, because I didn’t even make an attempt to hide under a table to avoid mingling. It was great seeing my family, though it was rather annoying to find out all my younger cousins now officially tower over me. Even Daniel and Arianna who are both ten years younger than me, I was wearing four inch heels and they both were still a good two inches taller. Even my cousin Brandon managed to grow more, the asshole. Last time I saw him, we were about the same height, but that night he had to bend down to shire level to give me a hug. Writing this has reminded me I still haven’t uploaded any of the photos me or mom took, I should probably do that.

Two nights ago, I signed up for an online bartending class. I’ve spent the past year thinking about it, and finally decided to just go for it. I really dig the idea of being a bartender, the idea of huge drunken tips is definitely one reason behind it. I’ve never really wanted a career, my only real goal in life is to travel, so it seems rather silly to only have one talent. I want to learn different things so if I move somewhere or simply visit a place for a while, I’d have the potential to find a job in different fields as opposed to “Shit, this podunk town doesn’t even have internet connection, so they’re not going to need a computer tech.” And yes, I would totally visit a place with no internet, I would just never move there. But yes, bartending, I’ve been really interested and finally took a semi leap into doing something with my life beyond retail experience. I figure an online course is good enough since I just want to learn the basics, I don’t know how possible it is to get a job at a bar with zero knowledge of bartending.

I haven’t updated this in a month. Neat.

I own three betta fish now, the newest addition is named Onion. You can see photos of him on my MySpace, of course. He’s a Delta Tail, pretty much now all I need is a Halfmoon but I don’t have room for another fish. Let’s just hope I don’t get the itch again, I probably said I’d stop at two fish when I got Pudge, heh.

I recently discovered Sammy’s covered in iridescent gold dust. When I first noticed, I seriously flipped the fuck out, thinking he had Velvet. But after flipping out in an online forum, the amazing people there let me know he definitely does not have Velvet, but is simply a normal, shiney, happy fish! One member showed me a photo of a betta with Velvet, and the difference between that photo and the one I posted were obvious. Velvet is a coating of dull gold powder all over the fish which also starts to grow on the tank itself, Sammy’s simply a drag queen.

My moderation queue for comments is currently being bombarded with…well, it’s not even spam. It’s like someone’s just smashing their hand onto their keyboard for each field and submitting the comment. But the IP addresses are all different, so I’m confused. Either someone is putting a hell of a lot of work into trolling me, or somebody’s spambot is broken. Or maybe the program was written with a foreign keyboard and…I’m trying to analyze something that’s annoying me, why? What annoys me more, however, is Wordpress’s lack of Captcha. All I can do is set it so people have to register (I guess with WP?) in order to comment, and I’d really rather not do that since it might make people not want to comment. But srsly, this is weird.

Someone who’s owned bettas much longer than I have told me Pudge is constipated. The problem was I had no idea where to look for bloat, I didn’t know where the stomach of a fish was, so that’s why I didn’t notice the belly bloat. Now I know where to look, and now I know why Pudge hasn’t been eating! I fed him a pea to help, I won’t feed him tonight to help his system clear out, and if he’s still bloated tomorrow, I’ll feed him another pea. He’s already acting much better, though!

Well, according to the comic from January 24th 2000, Francis will lose his virginity today.

I’m actually really excited to see if Kurtz keeps up with that, I’m such a goof.

And by the way, Pudge is really confusing me and kinda worrying me. He’s barely eaten since I brought him home, and didn’t even touch the bloodworms I attempted to give him today. Thinking he might be constipated, I let him nibble on a pea and I’ll see if he gets any better. (That cures constipation in a betta.) I think I’m just not going to bother feeding him tomorrow, unless by some miracle he develops his own “Hey, I’d like to be fed now, please” dance like Sammy does. I’m really not sure how much of that pea he ate, but it was obviously nibbled at and I siphoned it out of the tank so he wouldn’t stuff his face and get himself sicker than he might already be. I really don’t know if something’s wrong or if he still isn’t used to a new home yet, unfortunately I didn’t blog much about Sammy’s first days so I can’t remember if HE ate when I brought him home. The fatass eats like a champ now, he gobbles up absolutely anything I toss in there. Pellets, flakes, bloodworms, even pecked a bit at the other half of the pea. Really, I just wanted to see if he’d eat that too, he took two nips and kinda lost interest so I got it back out of there. Then he swam about, apparently thinking I’d replace the pea with a delicious bloodworm. I definitely prefer feeding them the pellets since I know exactly how much I’m giving them, as opposed to a pinch of flakes or teeny scoop of bloodworms. I know for a fact I gave Pudge way too many bloodworms, but I was so hoping he’d eat something. He wasn’t interested in the least.

I’m not TOO worried since Pudge has nibbled a bit, so maybe he just won’t eat when I’m hovering, but I still can’t help but worry. Mom thinks maybe he just doesn’t want to be fed daily like Sammy since they’re different breeds, that’s definitely a possibility but that’ll just confuse me if I have to remember a special feeding schedule. Oh well, that’s what calendars and stuff are for, I can deal with it.

Oh, and my father apparently has no idea I have a second fish, how funny is that? He and I went to PetCo today because I wanted to check out something a friend recommended, and dad kept talking about “Sammy this, Sammy that, your fish yadda yadda he does this,” and I decided against saying I’m buying for two now. I want to see how long it takes him to notice the second tank.

Edit: Whoops, I guess I broke my blog by posting that YouTube video, the entire sidebar is lined up at the bottom of the page. At least, it is on Firefox, maybe it’s fine in another browser. That’s definitely one reason why I’m not into web design more than I am, I seriously fucking hate spending three hours on a site only to discover it looks completely different in Safari. Fucking Macs.

I couldn’t help myself. Since about the second week of owning Sammy (it’s been a month now), I’ve wanted to get another fish. Well, mom and I went back to PetCo today and I got one!

It was actually rather sad, at first we went to another pet store which used to be really awesome. But we walked in and the store just REEKED. Granted, the store was huge and filled with all sorts of animals, even including tadpoles and chickens, but you’d figure they clean the cages. It really didn’t smell that way, I can only hope the animals are treated better than the cages are. With the exception of the bettas, which are treated so fucking poorly I took one look at them and just had to leave. They’re being kept in cups that are barely any larger than they are, and every single fish looked unhealthy. I couldn’t even bring myself to want to save one ’cause I just figured a healthy environment would put the fish into shock. There were actually a few other kinds of fish being sold there that I wouldn’t mind having, they have these absolutely adorable puffy-faced goldfish and Pacific cleaner shrimp which I’ve never even heard of before. Seriously, if I was able to breathe in that damn store, I wouldn’t have minded making notes so I could come home and read about some of those creatures. But I’m not kidding, both mom and I were on the verge of having asthma attacks, there was a serious lack of oxygen there and we left in the nick of time. We had trouble breathing for about an hour, but at least we COULD breathe.

After that mostly-lame experience, we simply went back to the same store where I got Sammy. I headed to the sink where I’d found him and there were only a few containers, so I went back to a shelf where a bunch of them were sitting and chose from there. I would’ve liked a halfmoon, but they didn’t have any in stock, so my second choice was a crowntail. (Sammy’s a veil tail, by the way, in case anyone was interested.) Mom helped me out, at first we were looking at a pretty orange one, but we ended up choosing a mostly-black one with hints of metallic blue and red fins. I’m a sucker for rainbowy fish, I guess.

I lightened the photo just a little so you can see the coloring better, that’s how they both look under flash. The one on the left is Sammy, the one on the right is newbie. His name is Pudge, he controls the weather.

Oh, by the way, if anyone reading this has a Livejournal account and would like to be notified there when I update here, go add my syndication account.

rss_heatherface

Last night, I was in the middle of a text message conversation with a friend, when suddenly my phone froze. The screen then went black, then sort of resetted and went to the main screen. It started doing that every few seconds for about 20 minutes or so, then it died. Poof, just like that, it wouldn’t even turn on. I started freaking because I’d had some stuff on there I couldn’t replace, such as numbers I didn’t have anywhere else and photos I hadn’t saved.

No, not nudes, shut up. Do you know how awkward it is trying to take a photo of your ass with a cellphone? …So I’ve heard.

Another reason I was freaking was because I use my cellphone as an alarm to wake up in the mornings. I used to have an actual alarm clock on my “nightstand” (also known as a chair next to my bed), but when my mother’s alarm clock died, I gave her mine and started using my phone. Well, luckily, my mother is currently unemployed, so I left a note asking her to wake me at 11am since otherwise I wouldn’t wake up in time for work. Not only did she wake me in time, but she also told me she’d be taking my phone to the Verizon store to either get it fixed or replaced. My mom rocks. I went to work feeling like I wasn’t wearing pants, since I haven’t been without a phone since I first got one about ten years ago. A few hours later, she calls me at my job to tell me the bad news, my phone was completely dead and they couldn’t retrieve any data. The good news was she replaced the phone (free of charge, yay!) and was on her way to bringing it to me. When I got it, I immediately redownloaded the ringtones I’d been using, because I can’t own a phone that doesn’t play The Final Countdown when it rings. I then ran around and got the phone numbers of my co-workers, who all teased me about my phone dying. “Did you drop it in your fishtank or something?” I seriously wish I had, then at least I’d know why the phone died. But then mom would’ve had trouble replacing it, I’m sure.

I’m so grateful mom was willing to do that for me, it was hell enough being without a phone for 12 hours even though I was asleep most of that time. I literally stood at my counter at work telling my co-worker “This is just damn weird not having a phone. I could be TEXTING right now. I don’t need to be and there’s nothing to say, but it’s the fact that I can’t do it. Texting is like CRACK.”

Now I just have to get used to the fact that my phone died and this is a new one. It’s the same exact style (Krzr K1m if you were curious), just a different phone, so I’ll open it expecting to find my photos only to be denied.

My name is Heatherface, and I’m the head cashier at an art supplies store. I honestly love my job, but sometimes I get questions or situations that make my brain pop a little. Today I dealt with a woman who simply could not grasp the idea of what we sell. In short, she threw a tantrum because we didn’t have absolutely everything her kid needed for his project, and simply would not shut up about how she didn’t want to drive to multiple stores.

We sell drawing supplies, painting supplies, drafting supplies, and arts & crafts stuff. “Arts & crafts stuff” includes things like construction paper, beads, candle and soap making supplies, feathers, pipe cleaners, knitting supplies, wood carving/burning supplies…you get the idea, I’m sure.

Some of the items she asked me for: Jelly beans, paper plates, a t-shirt, nail polish, a shoebox, four-inch heavy duty nails, a styrofoam head, beads shaped like the Pope’s hat, and a power drill. I shit you not, and at this point I was too annoyed with repeating “We don’t carry that either” to bother asking “And by the way, what in the hell is your son building??” My only guess is he has to build a replica of himself, but some of the items she mentioned were just weird, unless the nail polish and Pope beads weren’t for him.

And of course, she left the store bitching about how “This place is horrible, they never have what I need, I don’t know why we shop here.” Sorry, ma’am, I’ll be sure to tell my manager that we need to start carrying completely random stuff just in case a kid will need jelly beans and a power drill.

Someone left a comment in the last post I made, and I threw a mini party ’cause it was actually the first comment I’ve received on this blog. That not only tells me the commenting feature works, but it also tells me at least one person has glanced at this blog, if not actually reads it. So THAT tells me I should try harder to update the damn thing.

The comment asked if I have any plans for YouTube for my birthday. Honestly, I have absolutely no ideas at the moment. Why? Because I’m not sure what I’m doing for my birthday. Right now that’s because I don’t know how much time off I’ll have, my manager tends to be scatterbrained and hasn’t actually told me yet if I’m able to take two weeks off like I’d wanted. I know I’ll at least go to Disneyland again with mom, and I’ll be going out to eat with my grandmother. If I get my vacation time, then who knows, maybe I’ll go to the moon and do a video there. The options are almost limitless if I get that much time off, I haven’t taken a vacation since I started working at that place almost two years ago. I took an entire week off in December, but that’s because I was practically dying, I had a horrible cold. The worst case of laryngitis I’ve ever had, completely lost my voice for three whole days.

But I headed toward a tangent and that really has nothing to do with my birthday. I will not talk about illness because I simply refuse to jinx myself and get sick before my birthday. What will Heatherface do for her birthday? Heatherface will fucking rock your world, that’s what. How? By existing. I’m just that damn cool.

(Seriously, I have no idea. At all. You’ll probably just get a random video of me and mom goofing around.)

After reading what a friend posted in her journal about getting three more betta fish to add to her family, I loved reading about them so much that I wanted a betta too. I’ve been wanting a fish for a while, but that wonderful girl’s post made me actually get off my ass and go to the pet store.

I dragged my friend/co-worker David along, who was highly amused at the fact that I randomly decided to buy a fish. We got to the pet store and I made a beeline for the fish section, and at first was disappointed ’cause I thought they didn’t have betta fish. But I turned around and saw they were in plastic containers piled up on a sink. I stared at all the fishies, trying to find one that called out to me, and figured I’d better find a tank first. I found a box labeled Cove For Bettas which has a full tank setup, a bit of food, and conditioner for tap water, so I totally picked that up. I misread the box and thought it came with gravel and plants, so I only picked up a little pack of gravel and nothing else. But we had gravel at home and I ended up going back to pick up everything else. Since I found the fish’s home, it was time to pick out a fish. I went back to the pile and stared some more.

At this point, David started to get fidgety, and jokingly snapped “Just pick one already!” I told him he should know what it’s like to shop with a girl, and he laughed and said he’s never been shopping for a fish before. I told him that’s what shopping with me is like because I don’t really shop for shoes or clothing. I do that kind of shopping online, I don’t get to try stuff on but at least I don’t have to wait for people to get out of my way.

The first fish I saw was a gorgeous shade of red, but just red. I’d made up my mind that I wanted a rainbowy fish, so I kept looking. I was considering a pretty blue fish, and then David lifted a container saying he liked that one, and it was perfect. Rainbowy! I toddled over to the register with my stuff, and off we went. As we walked, I’d mentioned that I hadn’t completely intended to actually buy a fish today, I just wanted to look, but I’d ended up choosing a name before I’d even left the house, so it was fate.

I named him Sammy, short for Salmon Roll.

The day after I got him is when I went back to buy plants and other stuff, I dropped more money than I realized I would, but it was totally worth it. Yesterday I went back again to buy medication after discovering Sammy has fin rot, which is simply a bacterial infection caused by unclean water, which basically means PetCo doesn’t take care of their fish. At least not the bettas, which of course makes me want to go save more of them. Altogether I’ve spent about $200 on Sammy, and the experience of owning a fish I actually care about has been fantastic. I had stupid little goldfish as a child, but I was never all that interested in them, much to my father’s dismay. I’m determined to take care of Sammy all by myself, and so far I’d like to think I’ve been doing a really good job.