Dusty

Happy Thursday! Today is October first so I can no longer even sort of pretend that it's still summer. To rub it in my face, the dry awful winds picked up and are tormenting me and my sinuses. I remember having to do PE during the Santa Anas and those were some of the most unhappy times of my life. :<

Lemme tell you about the miracle fish. So all the babies but one got eaten, yeah? To safeguard the sole survivor (accidentally dubbed Pepito -- he's a bad hat), I installed a tank divider. Everyone was fine. Then I come to clean the tank.

I net out little Pepito for fear of throwing him out with the bath water, so to speak, and set him up in the goldfishes' old box. I wash all these marbles that Carolyn gave me to put in the tank. I mix the detoxifiers with the new water and prepare to dump that in. Then I pull the filter off the back of the tank, to dump out its water reservoir and see what kind of junk is built up in there.

Dumped into the sink! And who should I see among the marbles--rapidly sliding towards the drain--but flashes of orange, rice-sized shapes somewhat familiar and altogether shocking. I pull the stopper but I don't think I was fast enough to save one. I quickly net out the guy who's basically standing in the film of water strung between the marbles, and spirit him away to the safe side of the tank.

Stuck to the inside of the filter, not washed out with the water, is another one. I pour him out into the sink (safely plugged, and adequately watered) and net him away to safety. Carefully I refill the filter and dump it out again, and sure enough there's yet another. Another refill and dump, but I didn't see any more.

SO, Pepito is now the proud leader of a gang of four. There's one guy almost as big as he is (not so good nutrition being sucked into the filter, I guess), and the other two are puny and mostly see-through. But now I have ten fish, which is my max for my tank, so now I just have to wait for them to grow up. And that's the story of the miracle fish what got sucked into the filter and lived because of it.

My week so far has literally been work and DEADWOOD. Did I tell you that somebody quit and somebody else is on vacation? That I have five times the hours of the lowest part of the summer? Oh my gosh. It's like I live there. Today's the first day off I've had since....some point last week, I'm sure.

Finished DEADWOOD, so I can go back to DEXTER. Need to snap through season three (like that's going to be a challenge) so I can watch season four in real time.

HEROES needs no commenting on other than that I actually liked Sylar's bit--from now on the "usual" will be overall D-, Sylar bits A+ --even though I knew what was going to happen. But that actually helped because I thought "it would be cool if it were really like this" but I didn't imagine the writers to be that savvy, but they were! So that was a pleasant surprise. To see the twist ahead of time. Yep, this show is bad.

HIMYM was full of fun. Loved Alyson Hannigan's extra role. Lolarious.

Oh, finally caught the DOLLHOUSE premiere, and can I just tell you that that was was this show needed to be all along? What it could have been all along? Startlingly powerful, that episode is. I recommend it even (or especially?!) if you didn't catch season one. Seriously, go to http://www.fox.com/fod/play.php?sh=dollhouse and watch Vows, and if you have any questions afterward, I'm full of answers.

(Megan, I especially recommend this to you, since not only Jamie Bamber but Alexis Denisof guest starred. It was like a BSG/Angel reunion. Now they just need to drop Summer Glau in there and it could be a Firefly one, too.)

The OFFICE made me laugh several times, especially at the end. And Creed. He's so very underused. But if they used him more, would he be overused?

FLASHFORWARD. Or is it two words. This show irritates me. What gets my Irish up the most is how they slop together these highly inconsequential lines of dialogue (and the uninformed deliveries don't help, either) that are presented as compelling and mystery-unraveling scenes when actually they are irrelevant, uninteresting, and uninformative. Who's directing this? It's like these people are having three different conversations exclusively with themselves. In any case, it's not standard writing, maybe not sub par, but not avant-garde, either. It's just grating.

And to top it all off, they tag on something truly shocking at the very end, just in time so as even though you're at the point of "well I ain't wasting my hour on this next week," your mind is suddenly and irrevocably changed and it really has nothing to do with the strength of the show at all. You may like this show just fine, but it really irritates me.

(AND THAT LITTLE GIRL AND HER CHILD ACTING YOU CAN FIND QUALITY CHILD ACTORS THESE DAYS YOU DON'T NEED THAT ONE)

Okay. I'm going to calm down, feed the fish, sneeze my brains out, watch DEXTER, and go to sleep. Catch ya on the flip side.

-Steph

ps
Firefox's suggestions for the misspelled word "avantgarde:"
Ermengarde?
advantage?
Hildagarde?
roofgarden?