House work

It turns out that there are ground hornets in my front yard. Poor Lee discovered them while he was cutting my grass (as a surprise, I was going to do it later that day after I finished working at the lab). We can't quite figure out where they are, so my yard is sitting half-mowed until I can get rid of them.

I've got about six repeats of the 12-row pattern on the Boneyard Shawl completed. I frogged the striped scarf and am trying to decide between a 1x1 or a 2x2 rib (if i do the 2x2 rib, I was planning to do a left-twist on the knit stitches).

Almost finished with the first Charlaine Harris book on tape (tape here meaning .mp3 on my iPod). I'm loving it. Such delightful brain candy.

Renewed The Garden of Eden at Carlson Library today. I love books so much.

I've been trying to find a cheap pair of outdoor chaise lounges. I would love to be able to sit outside and knit and sunbathe in my back yard. Or read.

But, on the bright side, the interior cleaning has been finished. I packed two more cabinets of glassware at the lab and set up two tanks for breeding tomorrow morning. The guys cleaned some tanks on the system today so I didn't have to, which was amazing. The breeders that are healthy are getting nice and fat.

We've been having some trouble with the animal research facility that is supposed to be in charge of caring for the animals. They're supposed to feed the fish twice a day and keep the tanks clean. Thus far, they haven't been doing anything that they're supposed to be doing. I'm appalled that the administrative body that is supposed to be protecting the dignity and health of these animals forgets to feed them and lets them swim around in filthy water which will only result in their getting sick and dying. We've lost half of the new fish that were in isolation for the first part of the summer (that's how new they are) to parasites that would have been prevented if they cleaned the tanks more than once every two weeks. Breeding group 5, our best breeding group, consisted of three fish: two females (inky and dinky) and one male (dot). Thanks to the animal research facility, inky died. And dinky is looking sick. And I'm so pissed that I could spit.

It's not that I'm an animal rights activist. I'm not. I am, in general, completely in favor of using animals for drug research because in my mind the benefits outweigh the costs. These animals would not exist were it not for the need for research, and they're treated better than their wild counterparts for a huge majority of their lives. DLAR is, in many ways, better than my first apartment. It's climate-controlled, there's an abundance of food (at least for the cute, furry animals) and comfy, generous cages. There's protection from predators. (Yup, it's the opposite from my first apartment in just about every way).

The hypocrisy pisses me off the most. When I was being trained, they treated me as if I was going to beat and starve the little fishies and abuse them in any way I could think of. Or rather, that I already had and that they were reprimanding me. In the fifteen months since I was trained, I've stewed every day when I walk into the fish lab and find that the stupid technician that is supposed to feed the damn fish has decided that it isn't important.

It's not that hard to understand that fish are different from cute, furry mammals. It's not like you can leave a dish of food in an aquarium. Feeding is not hard. Turn off the system, feed the fish, wait about 8 minutes, if they're still hungry, feed them some more, rinse and repeat until they aren't hungry anymore then turn the system back on. And it's easy to tell if they're hungry, because they swim around the top of the tanks and fight each other for the little bits floating around.

The retard that they hired turns off the pumps, squirts less than the recommended amount of brine shrimp into the tanks, then flips the system back on. The dumb broad never feeds them the tetra flakes (which supplies the NUTRIENTS that they need, since the brine shrimp only supply protein). She never lets them eat. She turns the system back on immediately, which doesn't give them time to eat and sucks the food up into the filters. Which further dirties the tanks. Which they don't clean. Bastards.

the ultimate irony is that when animal rights activists get all in a tizzy about animal research, they get angry at us. Us meaning the people doing research using the animals. They side with DLAR, whose mission statement says that they protect animals. Such a lie. Such idiocy. I'm sick of being the bad guy, especially when I'm not. I have never in my life hurt any of the fish in the fish lab. My experiments are run on fish eggs, which the fish would eat themselves if I didn't collect them (and I'm not kidding, even fish find fish eggs delicious). It's a thin point, I know, but it's an important point on my moral compass.

I know that I can't do research on mammals. I've injected mice with drugs before, and I hated it. Fish are an entirely different animal (excuse the pun). No injections (at least, I don't do them), no force-feeding, none of the nasty stuff. Just dissolve the chemical in question in egg water and put the fish eggs in it.

I've tangented. I'm going to go back to knitting and listening to my book. :)