Tuesday, April 20 2021

feed videos, breakfast burritos, and sister snuggles



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Dear Journal,

Happy Tuesday. How are you feeling today? Did you go to bed early last night? Maybe you had a healthy vegetable snack out of the fridge with a big glass of water on the way up the stairs? That's OK, neither did I. Being my first night off of ticket duty, I went a little crazy with the off-call celebration. Marissa and I had just finished a pretty boring movie and, wanting to end the night on a good note, we gave ourselves a late night extension. I buttered some of that roasted garlic sourdough. We snacked on dry cereal and goldfish. It was a good time, and I knew the price. I'm slowly warming up for the day thanks to a shower and coffee.

This week at work is conference week. My company is throwing an internal tech conference. All the sessions are over Zoom of course, but it still feels kind of like a special week. Instead of meetings, my calendar is chock-full of conference talks, and the prospect of just sitting and listening quietly while pushing the coffee sounds pretty lovely right now. Heck, I bet I could even watch some of the sessions all throughout the house while doing dishes or folding laundry or something.

Sip. Yesterday was Monday, right? How did that all work out for you? I had a perfect Monday - the kind where there's only one measly little meeting on the calendar. I had the entire day to sort out my own work and plan the next phase of the intern project, punctuated by lots of mental breaks walking around the house. Most of these "mental breaks" were just taking Minnie outside to go potty. Marissa and I forgot how frequent the potty breaks are with puppies. If she's not sleeping or in her crate, she needs to be in the backyard every twenty minutes. Still, that's a small price to pay for enjoying a puppy. The puppy phase is so brief, even now I feel like Minnie is a little bigger in size every time I look at her.

It was Marissa's turn to cook dinner last night. Arranging sliced fruit and other ingredients around the kitchen, it was pretty clear she was jazzed about the breakfast burrito recipe she had found. And while the sweet smells of breakfast-for-dinner leaked out of the kitchen, Rodney and I got to hang out on the couch. Together we went down the YouTube rabbit hole of "feeding" videos.

From what I can tell, "feeding videos" are a very popular genre on YouTube, and they're exactly what they sound like - just videos of people feeding their exotic pets with live food. They range in animals, as they also range in quality - anywhere between a high production nature documentary to a 13 year old kid in a dark room with a GoPro.

There were many feeding videos to choose from, but we finally found the diamond in the rough that is the Exotics Lair YouTube channel. It's just one guy filming himself doing regular things for his vast collection of spiders, like adding water to their dishes, cleaning the enclosures, and tong feeding them worms. But something about the way he's caught off guard by sudden moves and how he chastises his spiders makes it hilarious. Rodney and I were practically rolling around on the living room floor with laughter.