Everything I said last time except the opposite.

It's kinda sweet how I naively think I've figured out a few things in life. 

I mean, I have learned to wear proper shoes when shoveling so that I don't bruise my arches, how to light the furnace so that I don't blow my face off and how to hive a colony of bees so that they don't swarm the neighborhood.

These things I know how to do. 

And I KNOW that I know how to do them because I've done them wrong a bunch of times (or one tragic time) and then right a bunch of times (or a few triumphant times), so I feel confident when I say that YES, I know how to, like, do that kind of shit.

But the funny thing that I haven't yet learned how to do is how to NOT say I know how to do something until I've first done it successfully once and then repeated the thing successfully again.

That's what I should do.

But instead, I just go declaring victory when victory hasn't yet even been proven a single time.

I'd make a terrible scientist. All declaring YAY! I've found the cure for cancer! after just making Kool-Aid in a flask or something.

Anyway, today's lessons in Finny Doesn't Know Shit About Shit are as follows:

Dr. Fischoeder's Cleaning Lady, Consuela, doesn't clean a damn thing.

In fact, she makes more of a mess than Dr. Fischoeder and it's pissing me off.

Is that Consuela I see growing on the treasure chest? Why yes it is.

It would seem that Consuela is colonizing the fish bowl. Edging Dr. Fischoeder out perhaps or perhaps just making herself at home and commandeering items that she deems to be her own.

I take.

So all of that nonsense about the moss ball being "like a cleaning lady for the fish bowl" was complete crap. 

Not that I really announced to the world that it was The Truth And Nothing Else, but I did repeat what I'd been told by the dude at the aquarium store and that was a mistake. 

Don't always trust the stoned freak working at the aquarium store. Noted.

And then there are the paperwhites.

Damnitall if I didn't think I'd finally won the battle of These Things Fall All Over The Fucking Place just a little too close to the paperwhites so that they heard me and then rebelled.

WE WIN. AGAIN. STILL.

Yeah. If these flowers weren't so fucking beautiful and didn't smell like heaven and weren't being so hilarious, I probably would have ripped them out of their vases just for mocking me and making me a liar, but they are and they do and so I haven't.

Can't fall over in a vase this tall you say? IS THAT A FACT?

And while this has nothing to do with me being wrong, but more the seasons being off or our tree being absurd, our tree thinks it's fall.

January, November - what's the diff?

I mean, who couldn't use a little fall in their winter?

Even Jada's confused by this tree.

Yeah. Nice try out there, awesomely beautiful but crazy tree.

And then, because I I was feeling bakey, I made the best chocolate cake of my entire life last night.

Also the cutest napkins ever, courtesy of my delightful sister who knows me very well. 

Yeah, if you're looking for a chocolate cake recipe and none of your good-for-nothing cookbooks that claim to have all the recipes in the world in them (Hi. Joy of Cooking. Not as thorough as expected.) have a recipe for just plain chocolate cake, go to Cook's Illustrated and be free.

Thankfully, Bubba had the bright idea for me to scan all of my Cook's Illustrateds into my tablet and then start using that for my recipes, so I just had to search my tablet for "chocolate cake" instead of leafing through a thousand pages of magazine to find it.

He's a smart one, that guy. Which is why I let him eat cake straight from the pan with his hands like a fucking animal.

I used this recipe for chocolate cupcakes, but made a sheet cake because I'm a sunuvabitch like that.

Blame the basil or Dr. Fischoeder or the paperwhites or my hat or whatever

I could get all oh I'm so ashamed that I haven't posted since, like, November, or whatever and oh I'm so sorry, people and shit, but I'm not and I won't.

See, friends, I've been working my tits off over here trying to get my newly designed hydro system to grow a saleable crop of basil before the year is out and YAY DONE.

On day 363 of 2014, my first harvest was loaded on the truck. All 70 pounds of it.

Farewell, babies. Mama loves you. Now get the hell out of here before 2015 comes and you make me a liar.

Nothing like dragging shit out until the last possible moment to make a good impression on the boss.

So yeah - it's been ALL BASIL ALL THE TIME in my life since July (well, really since a while ago) and I've hardly done anything else, but here I am to say...hi!

Missed you guys.

Also, Mr. Fischoeder got a new accessory.

See, Bubba's been traveling a lot. LIKE, A LOT. Like, going to China twice in a month and then Colorado and then Vegas and then London and then London again a lot. And we haven't gotten to hang out and indulge in our ongoing stream of senseless bullshit silliness like we're used to, so now he pranks the fish to see if he can get me to laugh hard enough to vomit.

My life is very romantic, yes.

So, the day before he left for his most recent trip to China, we had lunch. He came down to the farm and took me out for noodles.

And next to this one noodle joint in the midst of a billion Mexican restaurants is an aquarium store. One that I actually went into after our noodle lunch to get some random shit for my hydro system (it's really something to be The Weird One in an aquarium store, by the way. Load of freaks in there.) and the same place where I got Mr Fischoeder's cleaning lady, Consuela.

What I did not know was that Bubba went into said aquarium store, hung out with my favorite turtle for a while and then did a hilarious thing.

And later that day, when I was standing at the bar sorting mail and decided to look over at Mr Fischoeder and Consuela between recycling a thousand catalogs of bullshit, I nearly honk-laughed myself into the grave.

Yup. Treasure chest.

Now, I didn't vomit, but when I lay gasp-honking for air on the kitchen floor, Bubba knew exactly what had happened and left his suitcase mid-pack to show his naughty face and pretend ineffectively to have no idea why I might be happily laughing myself to death. And also to see if I was going to laugh-vomit.

He is hilarious. And also a perfect gentleman.

And Mr Fischoeder, who's actually recently been promoted to Dr. Fischoeder and moved to a lit and heated location on the grow rack so that he and Consuela would survive the cold winter, is getting used to his elevated status in life.

He's started pooping behind Consuela is how I know.

Civilized, this guy.

And I finally cracked the code on the fucking paperwhites.

You know - those little white daffodils that smell incredible/reek balls (depending on who you ask) and grow in gravel in a little bowl in your house in winter when everything else outside is hiding under snow/unraked leaves?

They look awesome at first and green and pretty and then suddenly they're too tall for their bowl or whatever and Aw shit the paperwhites fell over and I have to, like, tie them up with a piece of rustic twine or something to keep them from crash landing on the floor while also keeping them from looking stupid?

You know.

Well, not this year. This year I win the paperwhites game. Which no one knew they were playing, but we all were.

JUST TRY TO FALL OVER NOW, YOU BEAUTIFUL FUCKS.

The hurricane vases were my secret weapon in this game against the paperwhites.

"GET TALL, YOU FUCKS!" I screamed.

"YOU CAN NEVER GET THAT TALL!" I screamed some more.

And then Bubba came in from the garage to find out what the hell was going on and then realized what was going on and then just went back out to the garage to contemplate a few decisions he's made in life.

But oh. OH do I just win.

Fuck you, paperwhites. Right in your sweetly beautiful flower faces that I love.

OH! And Bubba got me this sweet hat for Chrismahanukwanzawhatever...

The basil was very impressed by my hat.
And if you think I didn't consult the basil on the look of my new hat then I don't even know you anymore.

So, yeah, kinda random I know. But I couldn't let the year end without saying hi and telling you that I'm doing a passable job at work, our fish is potty trained, I outsmarted a plant and I wear woolen hats in an 88 degree greenhouse.

Priorities in life. I have them.

Mr. Fischoeder gets a cleaning lady

Probably I haven't told you that I got a fish.

Please enjoy the fish's ironic backdrop because we know he does.

Not that I haven't caught fish - I've definitely told you about that - but that I have an actual fish living in my house. In a bowl. A fish bowl.

Like a pet fish would.

And like any pet fish, his name is obviously Mr. Fischoeder.

Because we love Bob's Burgers and when you love that show and then you get a fish, what the hell else are you going to call it? Ravioli?

No, that was for my pre-Bob's Burgers fish. Now, though, there is only one name - Mr. Fischoeder. Because it sounds like Fish Odor and that's amusing.

Every time I feed the fish or stare drunkenly at him in his big bowl (now anyway, he used to live in a tiny glass vase and before that in the ill-fated and useless AquaFarm), I laugh.

"Hehe - Hi, Mr. Fischoeder. You look lovely today, Mr. Fischoeder. You have no odor, Mr Fischoeder. Come face cuddle me, Mr. Fischoeder."

And so on. Because I'm a child that's also really easily amused.

Do those exist? I may be the first.

Anyway, so I have this fish with the amusing name and the pretty fluttery fins and also a semi-sordid history with pet fish.

Like, during my undergrad I basically rented some fish to swim around in a fish tank in my apartment and keep me company while I lay hungover on the floor with my hair stuck to the carpet with barf.

And also to entertain the maintenance guy who came around every so often to unclog my kitchen drain that was definitely not full of aquarium gravel.

Oh no. Never ever.

Once I graduated, I promptly returned to the aquarium store from which I purchased this little school of tetra and gave them back. They took them, quarantined them, and then started what I can only imagine was a mildly lucrative fish rental program for strange undergrads that have no time or the sobriety level for normal pets, but can't be left alone while they muddle through their hangovers.

I imagine. I don't know. That's what I would have done if I were an aquarium store owner.

Then about eight years later, when I was working on a new product at Google and it finally came out of beta, my cheeky sunuvabitch of a coworker got us all beta fish in little bowls with little gravels and ha ha he he ha.

My beta fish was blue and cheerful and I named him Ravioli because obviously.

He swam around in that bowl for almost a year and a half until one day I came in and he was not so much a fish, but a cloudy mass vaguely resembling a fish. It was a wee bit grody, but I gave him a proper burial and sent him to the great fish bowl in the sky toilet.

Farewell, Ravioli. You were a regal and trustworthy friend. Or something.

Then I quit that job and my life in high-tech to be a farmer. But instead of being a traditional farmer, I became a hydroponic farmer and got to also grow food the aquaponic way, and that is with fish.

About 400 koi, to be not exact at all.

And also a few sneaky hider catfish that swim along all dark and sneaky at the bottom of the dark tank so that you don't know they're there until you drain the tank and OH WHOOPSY who's that on the floor? Sorry, buddy.

But I was mostly really good to those fish. I made sure their feeders were full, clarifier was emptied regularly, airstones were pumping away and all that fun stuff that aquaponic growers do to keep their fertilizer machines working away happily. I even answered questions from snide bullshit hippies who gave me beef about how I was exploiting another creature for my own gain.

"You seem like fun!"

Asses.

Anyway, then I got the AquaFarm. I'll spare you the stupid details, but basically after running the aquaponic lettuce crop for a while and then having 18 people tell me that I should get one of the AquaFarm things "just to try it out and see if it works even though you keep rolling your eyes like that", I got one and it didn't work just like I knew it wouldn't.

Or something like that.

Basically, yes, it grows microgreens. Hooray. I don't need a $70 over-engineered fish tank to grow a few handfuls of microgreens. I have a jar for that. I think it cost me around $1 a bunch of years ago when I got a flat of them for $8 so that I could can some jam or something.

The other stuff it was supposed to do, like grow basil and lettuce, were, um...false. Even from starts I brought home from the greenhouse that had been growing fine in my work aquaponics system, they just sat and sat and then eventually keeled over and died in the thing. Because it doesn't have any light and Mr. Fischoeder, the resident fertilizer machine, could only poop so much.

Mostly though, it was the light.

Anyway, whatever. The AquaFarm got disassembled and put away in the shame corner of the garage for a future Goodwill outing and Mr. Fischoeder got downsized to an abandoned flower vase with a few bits of gravel but with a prominent spot on the bar.

He socialized a lot back then because we did. He got a lot of attention swimming round and round in his wee bowl because it was so damn small he couldn't do much more than go round and round.

Poor guy. He was probably sea sick. If a fish can be such a thing. Which I'm sure they can't.

Anyway, Bubba was horrified at the guy's living conditions, so eventually I upgraded him to a big boy bowl - a proper actual Fish Bowl. And to fancy it up further, I poured a good portion of my sea glass collection in the bottom because I felt guilty about his former living conditions and was afraid he was going to file an HR claim against me with management.

HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT! Maybe we should have named him Archer?

But, here's the thing with a fish bowl that doesn't have a filter or plants filtering it - it gets dirty and needs cleaning. Which, no thank you.

I mean, I did it, because of my extreme and ongoing guilt and also because I don't like dirty things, but I was not a fan.

So, to get to the point of this random ass post, today while I was at the aquarium store getting some random ass shit for work, I had a random ass encounter with a very nice woman who was essentially buying a cleaning lady for her fish tank.

See, here I was standing in front of the glass case and a wall full of pumps and filters and handle jugs of Anti-Ich juice with my back to a billion aquariums humming away full of fish with my thermometers and humidity sensors and I look over to see what the lady next to me is getting and all she has is a plastic bag with a green ball in it.

"Uh. Whatcha got, there?" (Because I'm friendly sometimes.)

"I don't know, but it's cute!" (Because other people are sometimes adorable older gals making impulse purchases.)

"Hell yeah it is! What does it do?" (Because I always swear.)

"Um...entertain me?" (Because this is who I want to grow up to be.)

"It's a moss ball, ladies, and it doesn't do much more than look pretty and clean your fish's water." (Because aquarium store owners can only listen to so much nonsense before they have to interject and ruin our fun.)

"Ooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh." In unison, of course, because this woman is a kindred spirit.

"I want one." (Because I'm greedy)

"YAY! Isn't it funny what entertains us?" (Because she's adorable.)

"Indeed it is. Do you think I could pet it?" (Because I'm retarded.)

So, yeah, while I was out getting stuff for work, I bought my fish a cleaning lady.

Tell me, Moss Ball, do you do windows?

He's stoked.