We had (note past tense) two tiny cute goldfish for exactly one week, until last night when I went in to check on them and M before going to bed and found both fish dead and floaty.

A quick Google on goldfish care indicates that they probably died of a combination of massive overfeeding and possibly inadequate chlorine removal when I changed a bit of the water. Hmmmmmm. So much for goldfish being good hardy starter pets!

So D and I got a cup, scooped them out and flushed them. This morning I broke the news to M. before she had a chance to get up and find them missing.

Me: …and we didn’t want you to wake up and find them dead and floating, so we gave them a water burial.
M: But I wanted to bury them in the stones! And what’s a water burial anyway?
D: (muffled coughing noise)
Me, deciding a degree of honesty is the best policy: We flushed them down the toilet, hon, so they’ll end up buried in the lake with all the other fish.
D: (muffled comment about a rather indirect route, sewage treatment plants, etc.)

After some weepiness on M’s part we decided we will give everything in the tank a good cleaning and will go buy some new fish on Thursday after school.

The status of the water snail remains unknown. I am crossing my fingers.

7: À la Recherche du Temps Perdu – Marcel Proust

Yes, yes, he tasted a biscuit that made him think of childhood, we’ve all done that. If I want to remember my childhood I look at some photographs.

– from Richard Wilson’s 10 books not to read before you die, a list extracted from his book Can’t Be Arsed: 101 Things Not to Do Before You Die.

Very refreshing — I’m unspeakably happy to find someone else who was bored spitless by Hemingway. I disagree about Lord of the Rings, not that I ever made it past the interminable trudging through forest in the middle of the second book — but I would cheerfully go to Peter Gabriel concerts and did read Dune (which mostly sucked). And I did like Pride and Prejudice.

Shadow

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

From this summer, a photoessay by my 2-year-old niece:

Zoe washes the car with Grampa

(This afternoon I’m working on my performance appraisal for work and this floated through my RSS. As I look back on the last year of work I am hoping not to encounter similar disasters…)

This is a picture I did not take of four older guys in hard hats, reflective vests and workboots, sitting in a row on the edge of a flowerbed with their Thermos cooler lunchboxes between their feet, all working away at the tiny keys of their fancy cellphones.

Quotation of the Day for September 8, 2008

“Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym.”

- Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

In honour of our most-likely-imminent election:

Quotation of the Day for August 30, 2008

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”

- Sir Ernest Benn

In sorting through various papers last night I encountered my Master’s thesis. I re-read big chunks of it and you know? It’s pretty good. Huh. Still, I am glad I didn’t re-encounter it previously; 12 years’ distance seems about right.

In other news, M’s school has not revised their class-allocation process, which I can summarize by way of a conversation I had this morning with a staff person from our daycare as we all walked to the same place.

Her: … and now I just have to go find out what class J. is in.
Me: Oh, that bit where 500 kids and their parents and small siblings and dogs all squish into the very constrained space between the shortest wall of the school and the fence, trying to peer at 12-pt-font signs on the wall to get their kid in the right line-up and the whole thing is total chaos?
Her: Yeah, that.

M’s grade 2 class looks like a good bunch of kids and an entirely decent teacher. Obligatory first-day photo:

But the school drives me nuts. Why don’t you just email me a week ahead and tell me to which exit/entrance to deliver my kid instead of inflicting this stressful chaos, at the same time thus freeing up staff to help out folks who didn’t get the emails? Why the total lack of technology? I can’t even email her teachers. I can’t email the office to let them know will be late or absent. It’s all phone and bits of paper. SO inefficient.