Hi, kettle? This is the pot

I need to learn to keep my pie-hole closed:

1) Yesterday, I was lecturing my brother, mom, and dad about the need to get my new brother-in-law spectacular gifts for his birthday, which is this week. After hearing me go on for about ten minutes about how generous he was over xmas and we needed to act accordingly, my mom finally shut my yap by asking when MY gift was arriving. For it is written in the Book of Her Ladyship that my presents shall never, not even by accident, arrive in the same lunar cycle of someone's birthday, much less on time or (gasp!) before. Ahem. Sorry to say that this will be no different. I have his gift AND card in my office - I even bought them ahead of time, while I was in Alaska - but I always seem to have a lag between getting stuff ready to mail and actually mailing them. It's a nice gift, though, and I'm sure he'll get just as much enjoyment out of it when it arrives sometime next summer.

2) I was emailing back and forth with some friends about office etiquette and how some people can't follow basic rules about keeping the kitchen looking respectable. I think I'd just typed, "Where were these people raised, in a barn?" when an email came out over my work account. Someone had left a bottle in the freezer too long, causing it to explode all over everyone's food, and our VP urged the guilty party to fess up. I realized that sometime around New Year's Eve I'd bought on a whim some Diet Cricket Cola and stuffed in the freezer because it was room temperature and obviously undrinkable. I also realized that while I remembered putting it INTO the freezer, I didn't remember taking it OUT of the freezer, and that it very likely was my fault. So I spent a good chunk of this morning scrubbing out the freezer. On the bright side, defrosting a freezer is no longer a mystery to me and I'm willing to share my newfound knowledge for a small fee. On the bad side, I got multiple derisive emails from my colleagues mocking me for my "cricket" cola.

3) This isn't really hypocritical but I have nowhere else to put this: I think my long love-hate relationship with my fish has come to an end. When my friend EnviroGrrl left DC, she had three tetras that needed a home. I hate fish - I've had a running series of nightmares about them jumping out at me (yes lame I know) - but I didn't want her to have to kill her pets and I figured, how long could fish live? As it turns out, a pretty long fucking time. One of them died almost instantly, the second held out for a year, and the third has been pissing me off for three years now. I was perplexed by its long lifespan because I did pretty much nothing other than toss food in the tank once a day or so and occasionally replenish its water. I guess benign neglect pays off. But this fall, when I had the exterminator over for repeat visits thanks to the Great Moth Incident, I decided it would be safer to bring the fish to my office instead of burdening any of my friends with him. And then I kept him here, because I'm lazy and why not. Well, looks like my office's water didn't agree with him so much because I came in the office this morning to see him floating sideways at the top of the tank. I'll give him until tomorrow to recover but I'm thinking it's time he went to visit the big Fish Tank in the Sky. The office cleaning lady will be devastated. I've been working late recently so we chat and she's expressed to me, in her bad English and my bad Spanish, that she checks up on him every day to make sure (insert fish swimming motions).