Monday, August 27, 2007

badumpa da da, dadumpa da da da da

Hey America, how are you? You look good.

I haven't been updating that much, b/c I've been quite busy. I don't even have time to write out the "b/c" I have to abbreviate it, that's how busy I am.

I've been moving, or I've moved actually, everything is complete, there remains only a few stray boxes of miscellaneous junk that has no place that needs to be recategorized. The only idea I have for that so far is to pile it all in the corner and put a blanket over it. So now I live in the Medical Center, in the heart of Condoland. I'll post some pictures soon.

This weekend, Claudia and I caught Pulp Fiction at the midnight movie on Friday, so that was cool and the Theater District Open House was yesterday and that was very nice too. We saw the symphony and a scene from the Marriage of Figaro and some Colombian dancers and got some cookies and some cheescake from Artista, all for free, so that was cool. Oh yeah, and we saw the projection booth at the Angelika and the guy gave us all a foot or so of actual film from the Harry Porter movie. And I asked the guy if it was still a problem for the film to catch fire and he seemed to not know what I was talking about, so I guess he didn't see Cinema Paradiso.

I've been running a little. Not as much as someone who's supposed to be marathon training, but once in a while there is enough time and energy for a run. The longest was about 6 miles around the new place. There is some good running in the new area, so that's nice.

The only problem with the moving is how much money gets spent without really paying much attention to it. And with a frightful look at my bank account I decided that I would challenge myself this week to spend as little as possible. I had a twenty dollar bill at the time, so I decided to spend no more than that 20$ bill until payday on Friday. Claudia is taking the same challenge. Somehow though, we decided yesterday that 7$ on a giant burrito from Chipotle was a good idea, so it was almost half gone in the first day. It was worth it though, I loves me my giant burritos. With the burrito and some necessities from the grocery store I've got 8.62 + 1.71 that Claudia owes me so thats... $10.33 remaining. There's a 6$ monday special at the pizza place around the corner, and Tuesday is chicken day, with .89$ chicken at Popeye's, so if I split those with Claudita I can get by for two days on about 5$ and then I'll have to come up with something else for the next three days.

more to come...
Keith.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Tank # 2

Hi America,

Here's what happened with the frogs, and how they're all gone now. I think they are tree frogs, gray tree frogs, I think, which makes them quite a handful. They can climb straight up the sides of things. This is one we named sticky. He is something of a pioneer.

They are also capable of climbing straight up the sides of the glass fish tank.

So we prepared a second tank, designed for animals which are primarily terrestrial. Here you can see the flowerpot, with an assortment of plants, a food dish, and a bridge made of skeleton bones.

We tried feeding them bloodworms, which one website says they like, but I don't think they ever ate any of them.

But they had a nice home, I think, with plenty of things to climb on.

And some nice props for some exciting roleplaying games to invent. This could be the bridge to hell for example.

We borrowed some drosophila melanogaster from one of the labs to see if our babies would be interested in them.

They were interested. Very interested.

There is some video footage of this particular encounter. Check it out.

But there were too many frogs. Somehow, we started with 59 tadpoles, which we counted very carefully when switching tanks the first time, but then switching the grown frogs from the tadpole tank to the frog tank, there were 63! We always planned to set most of them free, so we did. We took all but four with their flowerpot to the Burke-Crenshaw park, by my house.

I think they're probably doing okay, there seemed to be tons of life around that spot. Hopefully they're doing some major damage to the fireant population that I encountered while I was there.

Anyways, Rock on.
Keith.