Author: Mark Alexander

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7 Months Later

It’s been seven—almost eight—months since the fire.

Things are still not fully back to “normal,” and I’m accepting the fact they may never be. Like a celestial body that ventures too close to something possessing a larger gravity well, many aspects of who I was and what interested me got spun off in a totally different direction last November. I like to call this “the new normal.”

I am reminded of this whenever I get emails from The Ocean Floor or Funko.

Trauma changes a person. There’s no denying that. Some of that unexpected fallout was the want or need for an aquarium; something I’ve had in my home continuously for the last thirty-five years.

I still have the tank I downsized to a little over a year ago, but it sits empty and unused in a cabinet in the garage and I’m fighting the urge to just chuck it into a dumpster and revel in hearing it smash to bits. Admittedly, it was a mistake for me to downsize to this tank when I did, as even before the fire it had been a pain in the ass that I fussed over more than any other in memory. I also managed to kill off—accidentally—more fish in that tank than I’d done since the late 80s (when I failed to properly rinse a very porous piece of rock I’d bleached to remove the algae that had been growing on it).

The night of the fire, I handed off my fish to my sister (herself an aquarist). I only realized weeks later that I’d missed one fish in the tank, and to this day it haunts me that he was overlooked and died a most ignoble death.

Yeah, I know, it was just a fish. I mean, I eat fish. But it still hurts that I failed him and his brothers who had died a couple weeks prior so utterly.

Since that time, I’ve had absolutely no desire to get back into the hobby. As I’ve gotten older, the tanks seem to have gotten heavier (one of the reasons I downsized) and with my newfound apathy toward anything aquarium-related, I can’t justify spending a couple hundred dollars on a lightweight plexiglass tank that would be easier to move when I just don’t care about it any more.

But never say never.

The same goes for our Funko collection. It’s still in a box. Again, no desire to haul it out, buy and mount new IKEA shelves, and put it all on display again, only to have to laboriously dust the little motherfuckers every couple weeks. It’s just not important like it was prior to last November. Also, we have no space for the shelves and the figures are now missing most of their stands.

It’s a good thing we weren’t planning on moving back into the old house, because it still hasn’t been fully repaired. Our previous landlord, “Mr. Fix-It” is insisting on doing all the work himself—the hubris that burned us out in the first place.

While we remain good friends with his wife and family, and they would love to have us move back in, that’s not happening. I have no desire to have any contact with “Mr. Fix-It” ever again. If he’d hired a licensed contractor from the beginning to do the work I might have been open to it, but as it stands now, that’s not only no, but hell to the no!

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A Steaming Pile

But unfortunately, it’s a necessary part of my workflow. Since I moved to Mac from Windows a dozen years ago, I have continually mourned the loss of Thumbs Plus, an image cataloging/manipulation program that IMHO is second to none.

Adobe Bridge is the only thing on a Mac that even remotely comes close to the functionality of Thumbs Plus.  I can display images with title, size, date, and a host of other data all displayed under each thumbnail image—something that none of Bridge’s Mac competitors seem to be able to do. It also does this without requiring that you create a catalog file like Apple’s own Photos or the several third-party applications I’ve tried over the years. The biggest problem I run into when trying to change to a new application is that while Bridge will do X, Y, and Z, the alternatives do X and Y, but not Z. Or Z and Y, but not X.

It’s frustrating as hell.

I’ve used Bridge long enough now that I can generally beat it back into submission when it misbehaves, but since getting the M1 MBP, it takes forever to generate thumbnails and searching for solutions online has been fruitless.

Bridge has always been a steaming pile of crap, but the last few iterations have been among the worst I’ve encountered. I can live with it just spontaneously shutting down, or randomly rearranging the workspace, but waiting minutes to generate thumbnails—even in the same folder…one I was just working in a few minutes prior—is just unacceptable.

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