i've also got this weird back tingly thing, my left side gets all prickly...like someone's touching it. i'm a mess.

Spike Angelfish hurt his eyeball. i dont know how he did it, possibly ran into something in the dark (we still alternate tank lights because of the stupid algae problem) but that's how we lost our last one. he's still flirty with the ladies, so i think he'll be okay, and it doesnt look as bad as it could. we did a water change so he has nice clean water to bathe his eye in, and added some melafix and pimafix to help him fight it off. we also gave him a little extra salt, which will help.

there's something wrong with the filter in that tank, too. nick broke the impeller while cleaning it, but then we fixed that...we thought the lines were clogged, so we cleaned those, as well as the filter layers...the flow still sucks, and we dont know why. anyone know anything about canister filter pumps?

the pH is finally coming down in another tank...we're trying to get down to 6.5 so we can use a certain medication to de-worm our wild-caught fishes, but something is doing some major buffering in there, because we have a bigass chunk of driftwood and bags of peat in there, and it's not coming down much, even when we add pH lowering chemicals. our water is almost 8 normally, which is fine for everyone usually, but it just doesnt wanna come down when we need it to. my biggest fear is that it's going to hit the equivalence point and then take a dive. gotta watch.

wedding stuff is going better. we have a little dilemma, though. the hall we want has a minimum of 250 people. with our current guest list, we'll be a little short of that, i think (assuming about 75-80% come). if we dont get 250, we still pay for that many. do we go ahead and book it, since we both really like it, or go with our second choice? we can expand the list to get 250, which i'd be okay with doing, i just dont know if that's what we should do. we'd hate to pay for people who arent there, but even so it's cheaper than a lot of places.

we did, however, find a church. we both like this one quite a bit, and we like the minister as well. we went to a service there last week, and on the way home nick commented that he liked it, and we should go again. having grown up catholic, i'm totally fine with going to a service where it's not just all following a script just because that's what we do, going thru the motions, etc. here, the reverend (a woman!) actually stops during the gospels and whatever to clarify what a word means, etc. it's much more my style, like we're participating, not being preached to. it just kind of figures that the church that isnt trying to force us to attend service in order to be married there is the one that we'd attend voluntarily. that's probably an indication that it's the one we should go with. we were also told about some awesome decorating options which are cool. the rev was very open to us coming to a service to check things out, and talked to us about how they usually handle non-member weddings. it's very nice, they're very friendly there. obviously, we were encouraged to come back, but it was really nice that we had people say "oh, you're new here, here's a program to follow along with!" and kind of help us through our first experience there.

work sucks extra much lately. it seems that new chicky has all the traits they claimed to not hire me for...except she has them about 5x worse than me. we're all equal in the lab, nobody has a job someone else can't do...but when certain tasks are "beneath her" that really disrupts the feeling of teamwork we have going on. well, as much as you can have when you've been told you're not wanted on the team. we've told the boss-guy about her lack of respect for the temps (who've been doing the job longer than her, btw) who're training her. we can't train someone when they won't listen, and neither of us wants to be blamed when she does something really dumb later. we're state certified, thus we have to do a lot of really anal-retentive things to maintain that...i've been trained to be anal, and i'm not going to relax that for someone who's never had to do that before. when it has to be done, don't tell me that your last job didnt require that so you dont see why we should here....just fucking do it.

nick's been in a bunch of pain lately, his shoulder is sore, and the pain makes him tense, and then it hurts more, and he gets more tense, and...we're beginning to consider prescription painkillers. i think all it'll take is one dose, which will then allow him to relax just once, and his muscles can stop being so tight. less pain, less tense, less pain. i'd suggest muscle relaxants, except i'd worry he'd have seizures if he took em. (his seizures seem to be related to control...if he's too tired, he gets twitchy, like his nerves can't control what's going on. hence, if he cant control his muscles as well, i'm worried)

i think it's time i went to bed...my day went way too fast. tonight was my last night tutoring for the summer. i might end up tutoring more later on but it depends on how long the college is willing to pay me when i dont actually go there anymore. i need to convince nick that he needs to sleep too, so that i can be snuggled.