What, you don't name your goldfish? I think you have to when they are this size!

Since I've been thwarted in my quest to grow a big goldfish (like Mom and Dad's giant Moby), I went to the pond shop and bought some big goldfish. It may be unoriginal, but I'm calling my biggest one Moby also. He's around 9 inches long, all orange, and already master of my pond. Zeus is half white/half orange, around 8 inches long, and a clear second-in-command. Both are your common Comet goldfish. We added one more fish to our order, a 6 inch Shubunkin with a white underbelly and traditional speckled Shubunkin-style coloring on top.

The coolest thing is that I can see Moby and Zeus from my bedroom window. That's far enough to be impressive :-)

We had our first softball loss last night, 9-6, after our bats mysteriously went quiet. We had great consistency in flying out. Our lone highlight was the 6-run 4th inning where we took a one-run lead. My line: 1-3, R.

The energy consumed to produce a barrel of corn-based ethanol consumes exceeds the energy offered by that barrel.

GetHuman.com maintains a large list of companies and tricks for navigating through their phone systems in order to talk to a human.

Last night I went with the beginner's group bicycle ride at Cycling Spoken Here. I had a great time, and I was plenty tired by the end. At one point, I almost fell over at an intersection because my legs were too tired to pull my shoes out of the pedal clips. In the end, we went about 22 miles in an hour and a half. I'm looking forward to the next ride already.

If you don't read Off The Mark by Mark Parisi, you should. Here's a recent entry of Off The Mark for your enjoyment.

"Hard things take time to do. Impossible things take a little longer." -Percy Cerutty

We played our second game of the season last night, and boy can these Grandpas hit! In the first and second innings, it was almost continuous -- double, double, single, triple, double. We even fielded decent for the first half of the game. In the end, we defeated last year's champion by a score of 22-11. My line: 2-3, 3B, 2R, 3RBI (not bad for the 9-spot!)

I had my first softball game of the season last night and it was a bit of a letdown. The other team did not have any of their regular pitchers and thus struggled all night to give us anything to hit. We walked a lot as a team, but hit well when given the opportunity. I had the dubious distinction of being 0-2 (error, walk, fielder's choice) with 3 runs scored, before I hit the ugliest triple in softball history. Because they only had three outfielders, and slow ones at that, a popup to right-center field dropped between fielders and gave me ample time to round the bases. We won 25-2. My overall line: 1-3, BB, RBI, 4R.

In more exciting news, we are having a bumper strawberry crop already! Elise made a strawberry pie last night and boy was it delicious. We practically had enough strawberries for two pies. We will definitely be eating well this week :-)

Some fun comics from Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index:

• Kermit?
• Crop circles
• Pavlov