My first X-mas card of 07'

well, here it is.....





Liz beat EVERYONE ELSE.....the rest of you suck. ha ha ha J/K

??????

Finally

Well, I finally have the garage door that I have been waiting for ever since I moved in my house 5 years ago. Not only did I get a garage door, but I also put in a real door to the back of my garage. It has been a chainlink gate which was worthless. ( I will be selling this on ebay, claiming it has the image of "Mary" if anyone is interested) I wonder if this will be like when I end up buying rims for my cars. Every time I buy rims, I end up selling the car a few months later. I dont know why but it always happens. So now that I have this door, I wonder if that means I am going to sell my house soon? Well here are the highly anticipated pictures...

Puppies

While going through pictures to find my fish stuff, I decided to post pictures of the dogs I have owned, from oldest to newest.

Angus (no picture)

Devil Dog




Turtle




Jersey




Precious
(the one I bought)




(the one I recieved)

Here Fishy, Fishy. Fishy

I don’t know how I developed such a great fondness for fish. My parents have always had fish, be it freshwater fish, but I fondly remember the sound of the old bubbler that would create a slight metallic hum as it forced air into the tank. I also remember how we had the big trip to the “city.” If we were lucky, after talking Mom into buying me some $.10 popcorn from King’s we made our way to Teacher’s Pets to look and sometimes buy a fish or two and for my Mom to look at the little quarter-sized turtles that she always told us about. When at the store my Mom always bought the little guppies, which never really held the mastic as a piranha or something, but I still enjoyed the fish. I remember sitting on the couch or chair and watching the fish in the little 10 gallon tank. I could do it for hours and hours. My parents always seemed to have different animals throughout my life. One of these animals was a Red-eared slider water turtle. I think my sister bought it and it ended up at my parent’s house. It had been there for years and had obviously outgrown the small 10 gallon tank that it lived in. So I decided to take the turtle home and give it better living quarters. I bought a nice turtle tank and I also bought some feeder goldfish. I had that turtle for quite a while and from the day I had it, there were 2 goldfish that the turtle wouldn’t eat.

When I finally decided to let the turtle back into the wild, I still had these 2 goldfish. The turtle tank was a tank that you could only fill halfway and it didn’t give the fish much room to swim, so I ran out and bought myself a 30 gallon for these fish. I bought a few other fish to go along with the gold fish and setup the new tank. ( I think a few of these fish may even be a live today :p)



When I went to buy the tank, I was looking at all the fancy saltwater fish, wishing I could do a saltwater tank. At the time, I thought the cost and the maintenance would be too much so I settled on the freshwater tank. I had this tank with the fish for about a year before I met retch2k. She had absolutely no interest in my fish at all and actually told me how much she hated fish. I was still contemplating switching over to saltwater, but the cost seemed way too high. Retch2k and I did some research and came to the conclusion that it would only cost $300-400 to switch over. This seemed relatively cheap from what I thought it would cost so I had planned on starting buy the equipment needed to switch to saltwater. Well, Retch2k and I went on vacation in Mexico (picture may be removed on request)


and while we were there we did some beach combing and found some crabs, some corals, and shells. We caught the critters and decided that we would put them in the saltwater tank which we had yet to switch over to. So when we made it back from Mexico, the race was on. We ran out and found all the stuff needed to switch the tank over before the critters we brought home died. As we were doing this switch over, it was quickly realized that the cost to switch over was WAY more then what we had thought. The things we needed to buy included a skimmer, a refugium, powerheads, the salt mix, live rock, live sand, a light fixture, and of course the pricy fish.

Once I had the tank up and running, I believe this is where my obsession began. After having that tank for about a year, I decided I needed a bigger one. I found a120 gallon tank and decided to buy it, I won’t even comment on how much I have spent on this tank and equipment. (don’t know if I would choose one as big as I did if I did it again)







Maintaining this tank can be somewhat of a pain at times. The time and effort needed to keep it clean and keep everything alive is proportionate to the size. The little 30 gallon tank was really easy and I didn’t have to spend as much time and money to keep things alive. With the big tank, I can’t count how many expensive fish have been purchased only to find them dead a few days later.
Anyway, since scrat2k aka retch2k aka the thief posted a few pictures of her saltwater tank (my old 30g) I decided to write this blog and post a few of mine.

Get with the 90's

Well, I was on one of the forums I frequent, and someone posed this: <3
Surprisingly enough, there were multiple people who did not have a clue what that meant. The comments ranged from, "what's less than 3" to "Umm, I think you mistyped something" to " <3 ? I dont get it".
This was kind of a shock to me seeing as the email emoticons started around the early to mid 90's, but alas there are still people who don't know what they are and what they mean. This is my time to "teach" the computer illiterate a little techiness to impress friends and family. (assuming they also missed the 90's and have never seen You got Mail or for the advanced crowd ygm)
Smiley’s ( smilley faces, emoticons for email ) if you do not see them try turning your head sideway on most of them<3 Love or heart
:-) happy
:-( sad
:-& tongue-tied
:-< realy upset
:- angry
:-(O) yelling
:-d laughing
;-) winking
:-} grinning
8-) wide-eyed
:- apathetic
:-o shocked or amazed
:-] apply sarcasm
:-[ sad sarcasm
:-( fell like crying
:!-( crying
%-) happy confused
:-* kiss
:-\ undecided
:-# my lips are sealed
8-0 shocked
:-/ skeptical
:-> Sarcastic smile
;^) Smirking smile
X-( brain dead
>:-) devilish
0:-) Angelic
:-P sticking tongue out
<.)))-< dead fish
<*(((-< alive fish

Thank the “John” above, we now have real emoticons that make a whole lot more sense!!!

Some people call is blasphemy, I call it Brilliance.

Have you ever sat and pondered why things happen the way they do? Why some seemingly good people get murdered, get cancer or even their house burns to the ground. Some people even just disappear without a speck of evidence. Some people might say that is it just a coincidence or the way GOD wanted it to be, however what if it is more than that. What if what you call a world is all just part of some kid’s video game? I’m not talking the Matrix where a computer uses humans that are kept in suspended animation and live their “lives” connected to a computer which feeds their brain with ideas. I am talking about a situation where there are no actually physical bodies.
This might sound a little farfetched, but have you ever played the Sims, WOW, or any of the virtual realities game out there? Do the people in the game know they are not real? Do they know they are just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s placed together to create a “life”? If you have played the Sims you know that you as the “overseer” gives gentle whispers to the mind of the people to have them look for jobs, clean, eat, shower, dance, hug, and the list goes one. Does this count as a still small voice?
Furthermore, currently many companies and governments have software that can test most anything you can think of. They create virtual worlds to test airplanes, boats, how the wind blows, and millions of other things they can think of. So say for the sake of this discussion, we continue to advance our technology; we will be able to create thinking, breathing, eating, and living people inside of a computer. We will be able to burn a house and see how they react. We will be able to create a virus and see how many people dies before one of the “lives” finds the cure. This actually took place in the game of WOW if any of you remember and it was done intentionally to see how people in a virtual world would respond to the problem.
Let’s imagine (if that is allowed in this simulation) our “creator” is just a kid playing on a highly advanced virtual world game on his brand new PS-239(I'll call him John). He would create the world, he would create the plants and animals, and he would create the entire world as you would know it. In this world he has the ability to “delete” you at any time for any reason. He can create storms, fires, diseases, and can even destroy the entire world, just to start again. I know in the game Sims, you can control how fast the day goes, so I can assume you can do that in the future as well. That would mean the “creator” lives a virtually eternal life. Billions of “virtual earth” years could pass in the creator’s time spent playing the game. John may or may not consider himself a "GOD" of this world and people in this world may or may not believe there is a GOD. Some may feel there is a higher power, in which they vest their lives in. These people spend their lives praying to a GOD to ensure they go to "heaven" and rely on faith of that GOD to get them there. Some people may feel there is no higher power and live their life wondering if there is a heaven or hell. However, the creator does as he sees fit with no thoughts of this in his mind other than trying to "win" the game.
Now we all know our technology is advancing at tremendous rates, so how do we know there isn’t someone else that has already advanced further then us? Could we all be just a computer program that is running to test how a culture would react to global warming or to a deadly disease? You might say, “That’s not possible, I know who I am and I can touch things and I have my own mind.”
Well I bet Furby would have said the exact same thing. Unfortunately my Furby has pasted....