(no subject)

[dragonlady7]

OK, the coffee along with the ice cream was a bad idea. It was good at the time-- in fact it was perfect, and I have never enjoyed a cafe latte so much as I did just then-- but the timestamp on this is actually correct. And not half an hour ago poor Z was up and wandering about, and I can hear him tossing and turning under his duvet in the next room. Whoops: daylight come soon and the work bus leave early. T-minus 5 hours until last wakeup call.

I have managed to bang out about 4/5ths of the story, though. I just have to work in a couple cheesy human-interest bits, and of course come up with a lede. (I feel all cool knowing what one of those is, although everybody spells it differently... I give credit to kkatowll along with blame for any knowledge I have on the topic, and any errors in said knowledge. She is an award-winning journalist after all, but one with a penchant for typos in personal correspondence. ;D)

The editor has said that she'll use the story sometime in the next two weeks, either as a cover or at least as a feature. I told her whatever she wanted to do with it was fine by me, but my Energy Guru contractor friend will be so sad if it doesn't run. Speaking of which, I should probably answer his last email, in which he said he wanted to see my house. (Gods, it's a mess, and I haven't even started considering how to insulate the attic-- which I do want to do, but when? When?)

It is probably too flippant of me to tell the readers of the magazine that they should just wear a sweater instead of turning the heat up. But I think it bears repeating. Z was wandering around the house in underpants and no shirt, and makes a beeline for the thermostat, and I had to put the Sarcasm Ray on full blast. I too have been guilty of turning up the heat, but I have also put clothes on first!

In other news, we got a tank heater for the Fooshie Palace. It was 60 degrees in the house, and the boys were hella sluggish, so Z got one, erring on the side of not powerful enough (there was either a "10-15 gallon" one that was 100 watts, or a "15-30 gallon" one that was 200 watts, so he got the smaller one, as our tank is 15 gallons). It took the thing two days to get the water to 77 (which is good-- sudden temperature changes, even from a poor temperature to an ideal one, are never good for fish), but it's there now, and the boys are active, hungry, quick to react, full of enthusiastic hate for everyone and everything, and bright in color. It's just eerie to put a hand against the glass on a cold morning and feel that it's warm in there. Gibson's color has been exceptional of late, even before the heater-- I don't know why, he's just a brilliant mother-of-pearl blue-green. Al's fins are ragged as hell and have been for some time, mysteriously, but he's still iridescent cobalt. Mai Tai is astonishingly chameleon-like, to the point that he was pink-white just before the transfer to the big tank, and was dark red within a few hours of the move. Z theorizes that it's because most of his pigment is in his fins, so when he goes pale it's more noticeable than the others? I don't know; I do think it's interesting that when he's excited you can see horizontal darker stripes along his flanks, but when he chills out he's a solid red-brown. Al went blue-gray when he was very ill and we thought he'd die, and poor malnourished agoraphobic Gibson was white when we bought him, but apart from that the other two don't really change color. Certainly not by mood, as Mai Tai does.

Ponderables, I suppose. It's coming up on 3 am and I got shit to do tomorrow, so I'm going to attempt to sleep now. We'll see. ... But it was such a good cafe latte. I don't feel wired, I'm just not sleepy. Bah.

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

Typoes notwithstanding, my editors spell it "lede." But in school they spelled it "lead." All I can guess is that like everything else at my paper, the editors prefer to type as little as possible while spelling everything phonetically. So we make assignments for photogs, not photographers, and we use ledes which cannot be confused with that stuff that's bad for kids if they eat old paint. :)