I thought that keeping fish was supposed to be good for your mental health, but I'm finding it depressing. Sixty percent of our fish have died. Dr. Kevorkian had a better survival rate with his patients than that. I realize now that neon tetras were the wrong kind of fish to put in our newly set-up tank. They're pretty, but they're not very hardy. Let that be a lesson to all you young men out there. Especially my brother Mike. Here's something else that's strange. Emma has taken to calling me by my first name. I don't know how to feel about that.

Our three remaining Neon Tetras have come down with a case of the ich (a.k.a. ick, white spot, Ichthyophthirius). We've been treating them with some Quick Cure loaned to us by Kelly Talley and they're getting somewhat better. This will probably delay us from adding more fish, which we were planning on doing today.

There's a big phat Christian Rock festival at Starlight next Saturday (8-30-03). Be there or be square. Rock the Light IV will feature Audio Adrenaline, Sonicflood, Reliant K, Superchic[k], Rachel Lampa and Souljahz. The cost is $25 at the gate. We'll be taking the new church bus and leaving the church at 2 pm. If you have questions, call me. You can read more about it at www.Rockthelight.comWe had a good time at this last year. FCA went and I got to be their sponsor for the day. We saw Third Day and tobyMac. This year should be fun, too.

Sara and I spent yesterday helping Erin to move into her dorm at NMSU, Maryville. We had a fun trip and Erin did a great job of handling the whole experience. The school provides a computer for each room. Since it has blazing fast internet (as high as 170 KB/sec) I downloaded a couple of programs to make her computer better. I installed Mozilla for a web browser and Trillion as an all-in-one replacement for AOL IM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc. Erin also bought a fish. She still hadn't named him when we left. Any suggestions?

I don't think I've yet posted a link to Brandon's livejournal:

Monday night I watched my first Woody Allen movie. It happened to be Woddy Allen's first movie as writer-director: Take the Money and Run. Thanks to Matt Sears for loaning it to me. I thought it was pretty funny. I think it must have been a heavy influence on several of Christopher Guest's faux-documentary films.Our three remaining fish are still swimming. I think they're getting more healthy because I've switched them over to the protien diet. I've made them cut way back on their french fries, toast and pasta.

Monday morning we found another dead fish in our aquarium. I strongly suspect that our fish are infected with monkey pox. I sent the fish's body off to the lab to be analyzed and tested for the disease. Ok, actually I just flushed it. The other three seem to be doing fine, but then again, I have no idea what I'm talking about. We've been trying to care for this aquarium by the book, so I don't know why fish keep dying. Maybe they were sad because when I poured Sprite into their tank I didn't give enough for everyone. Just kidding. I gave them two cans, that's enough to go around.

I regret to inform you that one of our fish died. He (or she) has now gone to that great aquarium in the sky. Actually, it just got flushed. The other four fish seem to be doing just fine. I actually felt pretty sad for a while. We were afraid Emma might be upset, but she originally thought there were six fish and she still thinks there are six fish. I think that's mainly because she can't count. But she does like to say her numbers. She can go all the way up to ten. It's my day off and I should be mowing my yard, but a) it's going to be 103 degrees today and 2) I went outside for about 2 minutes earlier and I spent the next 40 minutes sneezing violently. The pollen count must be off the charts today. Au revoir!

Sara, Emma and I welcomed some new additions into our family last night. We brought home five Neon Tetras from Petco. We got a 29 gallon aquarium on Monday and they told us to let it run for 4 days to get the water stabalized. We could hardly wait that long. So las night we went back up to the Lee's Summit Petco and picked up the fish. When we finally released them into the tank, Emma was giddy. She kept laughing and pointing and saying "fishy!" (and trying to smash the glass with her fist). So, if you're in the area, feel free to stop by and say hello to our new friends. We should be able to add some more fish after about a week.

You may have been hearing about the new virus that's running rampant this week. I just heard that some locals have been infected. Click here to download the patch that will fix the vulnerabilty in Windows. If you're not sure if you're protected. Click the link above and install the file that downloads. If you think you might have MS Blast, don't panic. It looks like it can be removed fairly easily. It also doesn't seem to be all that dangerous. Click here for instructions on how to remove the virus.