Zoe has a sleep-over guest tonight; her best friend Katie, whose mom just had a baby this afternoon. Their energy is understandably a little bit high — Zoe’s because she has a friend over, Katie’s because she’s suddenly a Big Sister. Their high energy is translating into two little girls still wide awake and out of their beds and and goofing around two hours post bedtime.

So I just went in there and laid down the Daddy Smackdown: computer off, everyone in bed, everyone stays in bed, good night. And then, to take the edge off the smackdown and give them a little leeway to vent some of the frustration I knew they felt, I asked “Who’s the meanest grownup in the room?” expecting all fingers to point to me. Which they did, along with giggles.

And then Zoe added: “You’re the meanest grownup in the whole house, actually.”

:::Crickets chirping:::

I let her live. But it was definitely lights-out after that little crack.

Remember the other day when I wrote about Dory’s untimely demise? Well, we went out the next day and got Dory II (Cruise Control) … and Dory II joined Dory in that Great Aquarium in the Sky two days later. I caught a crab snacking on her, too, in the morning.

Then Pinky went fins-up in the night and I found a crab munching on her one morning.

Then the very next day Flamey checked out and I literally had to wrestle her masticated body away from a very aggressive crab.

I’ll tell ya, those crabs are eating like kings.

I think the problem is ich, which is a fairly common fish disease that I think Dory I brought into the tank with her and Dory II then supported by bringing in reinforcements. Both Pinky and Flamey (shut up — Zoe named them) were showing symptoms of it before they bought the fish farm, and now two of my remaining three fish are acting a little ich-y.

I’m ready for the carnage to end. I’m asking Death to take a vacation from my fish tank.

I’m running out of euphemisms for “the fish died”!

Oopsie, it’s gone, deleted in a spasm of belated sensitivity.

Don’t dwell on the past, move on!

No, wait, I meant to type “Customer Support” as the title of this entry. Oopsie.

What a gang of tools we have over there in Customer Support… I put in a request for them to do something that required me to have several people stop working until the request was completed. When I submitted the request, I specifically requested that they call me to let me know when they were finished. This should have taken maybe 10 minutes.

An hour and a half later I called them back to see what was going on. Well, they’d completed my request in about 10 minutes, but then the guy who did it sent the request back down to the guy who took the call instead of calling ME, and the guy who took the call was (and still is) in a class all afternoon.

End result: me and several other people sitting around with our thumbs up our asses all afternoon because Tool #2 didn’t bother picking up his phone and dialing 4 digits or even just saying “Hey, Chuck, it’s done!” any one of the three times he walked by my cube in the last hour.

Fucking morons.

I arrived home yesterday afternoon to find that I couldn’t really arrive home — the police had set up a perimeter that happened to include my house.

From a mile or so away I could see a police helicopter circling. That’s not at all unusual in LA so I really didn’t even notice. What I did notice was when I got to two blocks away the police had blocked off the major street right at the smaller one leading to my house. I used a sneaky shortcut down an even smaller street to get around them and got to the intersection my house is at — but could go no further.

There are three streets that intersect at my house in a “K” configuration with my and my neighbor’s houses right in the crook of the K; the police had cut off entry (and exit) to the top right leg by blocking off the vertical leg right at the intersection. They were apparently searching for an armed robbery suspect and he was somewhere in the neighborhood. The end result was that I could get to within 25 yards of my house — in fact I ended up sitting on the curb right across the street — but I couldn’t actually get to it. Turns out Beth and Zoe were in a similar predicament, cut off from home on the other side of the roadblock.

About 15 minutes later they tightened their cordon up a bit, which allowed Beth and I to get home. Home sweet home — or was it? Now we had to deal with a helicopter circling overhead, police cars roaring back and forth, looky-loos — both on foot and in cars — streaming by out front, the dogs going bananas over all of it, Zoe was getting scared… So we did the only sensible thing: we went out to dinner.

Things were just winding down when we got home. The police had caught their guy half a block away and were slowly pulling out. The helicopter kept circling for a little while, police cars kept roaring by for a little while, looky-loos kept wandering around for a little while … but after another little while everything was back to normal.

Well, almost everything. We were left with a souvenir: a 5-inch strip of police tape was left tied to a tree out front, a remnant of the roadblock that had kept me out in the first place. I’m thinking we should frame it.

Or … maybe not.

My father-in-law is blissfully unaware of how offbeat and intrusive he and his requests can be sometimes. His interests are assumed to be yours and of course you want to drop everything to follow up on them. He’s a very generous guy who means well, but sometimes… Oy.

The latest installment:

Over dim sum last weekend he mentioned in passing that he’d watched an interview with a bioethicist on Charlie Rose and asked if any of us had seen it. None of us had. “Oh, that’s too bad,” he said, “It was very interesting. I wish you had seen it.” And he proceeded to tell us just what it was about it that had impressed him so. End of conversation. Or was it…?

In today’s email comes the following, cc’d to me and everyone else who was there:

on july 1, charlie rose had Bioethicist, Author Leon Kass on his show.

try it, i think that it is worth trying to understand the discussion.

So now I have a choice: Spend however long it takes to download this thing, watch it, take notes, write up my talking points, and then call him so we can discuss this issue I have zero interest in… or just don’t and be made to feel guilty for it.

Guilt is leading right now.

This is another one of those poker entries Beth finds so incomprehensible and boring. It’s basically an entry for me, so you might want to just skip it…

Took the day off today so I could play in a No-Limit Hold ‘Em tournament at 12:15. I was on my home by 2:30… Clearly, not a good day.

First of all, I wasn’t playing my game, I was very tenative and passive, which is just begging to get run over. On top of that I was getting crap cards — in fact, the hand I went out on was A3s. And then finally, when I did get good cards, they didn’t hold up.

I had AA cracked twice, by 3 Jacks the first time and 3 Kings the second; KK drawn out on by 3 Jacks; I had to lay AK down to a board of 355 when I tried to slow-play it; and the one time I tried to go in hard on my straight the dealer didn’t hear me and dealt the next card before I could bet. I won the hand, but the pot wasn’t nearly what I would have been if I’d gotten my bet in because the schmuck I was in against definitely would have called. Don’t even get me started on the hand where I put the guy all-in with K2 with 2 Kings on the board and we ended up chopping because he had something like K4.

Just a bad day all-around. Bad play, bad cards, no luck, 3 rebuys and an add-on and I go home early.

All you ever really need in NLHE is a chip and a chair, it’s true, but a little cooperation from the Poker Gods never hurts.

Reason #37 why I love my wife:

She had her lipoma “procedure” done the other day and is now sporting a stitched-up slash on her forearm. When people ask her what happened, I love her answer:

“Knife fight.”

We had a death in the fish tank last night. Our tiny little Blue Tang Dory (just like in the movie)… Well, I was going to say she was “sleeping with the fishes,” but that’s not the problem — she was alive when she went to sleep with the fishes, but then she woke up dead.

This poor little fish had a hard, short life. She was okay when she first went into the tank, but then she somehow got tangled up with the anemone in the middle of the night and it almost killed her. She was never the same after that — swimming blindly into the rocks in the tank, lying motionless on the bottom, drifting in the current as if she were dead… We kept thinking she had finally died, and then she’d suddenly perk up and start swiming around as though nothing was wrong. She was a weird little fish.

Then she came down with ich. And then last night she got tangled up in one of the pumps. First she got stuck sideways across the intake, and then when I tried to pull her off she slipped out of my fingers and went head-first into the damned thing. It started spewing… stuff. I killed the power as quickly as I could, but not before I figured it had chewed up at least half of Dory — the front half, I assumed. It was a real Fargo moment.

When I took the pump out of the tank and into the kitchen to clean out what was left of Dory, I found she was intact and whole — she had gotten wedged sideways in the pump and in fact it was a snail who was getting chewed up — ground down right in half, in fact. I shook the pump to dislodge Dory so I could put her back in the tank and she fell right out … and missed my hand. Instead, she landed in the dirty stir-fry pan that was in the sink, coated with soy sauce.

I finally got her back into the tank, but she wasn’t looking too good: anemone-shocked, ichy, stuck on a pump and then nearly pureed alive, out of the water for 3 or 4 minutes, and finally soy sauced. You can perhaps understand why she just sort of drifted weakly to the bottom when I put her in.

And then the carnivorous starfish snaked out an arm, snagged her, and started to pull her under a rock, going for some impromptu sushi. This poor fish couldn’t win. I saved her from the starfish, and she finally perked up enough to swim up onto a relatively safe rock and collapse there.

And then the cleaner shrimp grabbed her. Now, he was only trying to help — they’re good for helping cure ich — but Dory was having none of it. She struggled free and found a hiding place in the back of the tank between two rocks where she was quiet and alone and relatively safe. And she lay there, hyperventilating, twitching occasionally as an emerald crab would reach up and harrass her. That’s where I left her as I turned the tank lights off. I hoped the dark and the quiet would help her recover and that she’d be back to her old anemone-addled self in the morning.

But alas, it was not to be. This morning, as I turned the tank lights on, I saw that Dory was not only dead, Dory was also breakfast. One of the crabs who’d been harrassing her was now eating her; it was holding her in one claw and digging into her guts with the other. Her eyes were missing already, so clearly he’d gone for the good stuff first.

I rescued her one final time, wrapped her up in a paper napkin, and put her in the kitchen trash. In retrospect that seems too cold and I feel like I should have flushed her down the toilet, but that isn’t much better when you think about it. Burial might have been nice but there’s no way I was going outside to dig a grave in the yard — I just wanted to make sure Zoe didn’t see her picked-apart little body. Dignity was a side consideration, getting to work on time took priority.

So Dory’s gone to that big fish tank in the sky. We’ll miss her … but we’ll also replace her. I probably wouldn’t be making such a big deal about her if it wasn’t for that pump incident. I can’t describe the horror I felt when it started spewing what I thought was Dory. I guess I feel guilty about it even if it wasn’t her.

She was a cool little fish.

Okay, I went too far even for me, and that’s saying something. So I’ve deleted the truly tasteless joke (which I still think is funny as shit), and I offer this tamer one in its stead:

Q: How many ADD kids does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Hey, wanna go bike-riding???