I'm not sure what makes it the largest in the world - most square feet? most gallons of water? most species? - and to be honest, I remember the Monterey Aquarium being a) bigger and b) better than the Georgia Aquarium, but that's what you get for approximating the ocean at a thousand feet above sea level.

Whale sharks, despite their unfishy names, are the largest fish in the world; the original four at the aquarium were called Ralph, Norton, Alice and Trixie (Ralph and Norton died and had to be replaced with the more stoically named Taroko and Yushan). Fun fact about moon jellies: that cloverleaf formation inside their dome is a reproductive organ. Wouldn't the whole "when does life begin" debate be easier if we were transparent? Get on that, scientists!

The common cuttlefish, a.k.a. the saddest little cephalopod ever. You'd think something that sounded so snuggly would be less pathetic.

The red lionfish is an invasive species on the east coast, where the local inhabitants have few defenses against its tactics of herding you with its feathery fins and then gulping you down. It's also pretty trippy-looking, and caused at least one aquarium-goer to exclaim, "Oh, that shit is REAL. I'm taking a picture of that."

The house we rent here in Athens is 1,621 square feet, an exact number I know because of the convenient online Clarke County Record Search, and that doesn't include the Olympic-sized attic or the basement or the generous front porch or the fenced-in backyard that we've never fully explored. It's too big for two people (in our minds, at least - McMansion owners may disagree), and too expensive for an unemployed couple, but it boasted a washer and dryer on the main floor, tucked away behind louver doors in a luxurious butler's pantry, and was almost entirely floored with shiny, clean wood, and was in a safe, centrally located neighborhood populated with comparably tidy houses and yards, and was exponentially less horrifying than anything else we'd seen. We agreed to have Steve's brother - the original reason Athens was accepted into our pool of applicant cities - move in with us, which has been nothing but enjoyable (except for his initial arrival, which was permeated by a moldy stench cloaking everything he owned, a parting gift from his previous living situation)(Southern humidity is not to be trifled with).

Even with three people, two constantly relocating bikes, and a fluffy cat weighing in at a healthy fifteen pounds (the vet's words, not mine), the house feels huge. We bought a shoddy couch and chair set from a hotel liquidation warehouse out in the county, and they punctuate the living room like a baby carrot and a lima bean on a dinner plate. From a talkative Jersey transplant in an Atlanta suburb we acquired a table and chairs that are most definitely not solid teak but teak veneer, and their cheap angles and nubby beige upholstery mock me and my memory of our previous table in perpetuum from the dining room, their tawdry presence emphasizing its starkness. When the boys leave and it's just me making the internet in my pajamas and Grendel dreaming about a sea of sightless voles, the emptiness is almost funereal. The only time the house has really felt comfortable is when we had visitors at Halloween, with laptops and cords and coats splayed around the living areas and a dozen pairs of shoes cluttering the bare east side of the kitchen.

I grew up in a place so full of things and stuff and junk that I can easily bet you a hundred dollars and promise to eat a hat if there's an unfilled corner or bare wall there. Our house here is nothing but those things, but I don't think that's what bothers me; our Berkeley home was minimally furnished, but the smallness met the sparseness evenly. It's the bareness, the wide open interior spaces, that I can't stand and that makes me consider the ugliest of carpets and the craziest of decorations. We found a two foot tall basket - the kind that might hold umbrellas, or cobras - while dumpster diving down the street, along with some almost new chair frames and suitcases, and that basket now lives in a corner of the dining room, as if it served a purpose or matched anything or even made anyone happy with its existence.

We talk about moving to New York often, partly because it's something I've always wanted to do and partly because thinking about the extravagance of that city - the energy and opportunities and people - is a balm for living somewhere so devoid of excess. I guess I should savor the space while I have it, even if it's hard to appreciate.

So I'm working alone at night - so much for having Steve's brother move in and be an extra body in the house for the benefit of my "nervous urban coastal nature" (when we thought we might have to craft some sort of proposal about it for the management people, but it turns out family gets a free pass on getting added to the lease, or something, whatever) - and I go to the kitchen for something now forgotten in the heat of battle, and what do I see but the door propped wide open, a thoughtful invitation to every hooligan in northeast Georgia.

That we live in the safest neighborhood in Athens means nothing when it's dark and I'm alone, so my immediate instinct is to flee out the door into the night where at least I'll have a wide range of movement for evasive maneuvers from homicidal psycho ninja thieves, but after ten minutes of first standing uncomfortably with my arms crossed in our side yard and then bumming around our front porch, peering longingly through the windows at my comfy couch nest and rapidly cooling tea, I start to get pissed because moving to a Trader Joe's-less backwater was supposed to supplant this sort of nonsense.

And so after employing my honed verbal derapscallionization tactics ("Hi burglars...I'm getting a large butcher knife out of the drawer...and I'm holding it the right way...with the blade towards your FACE"), and reconnaissancing the dining room, I chicken-heartedly slam shut the door to the hallway and the rest of the house - good luck fending for yourselves, bedroom-based electronics - and am now hunkered down in the living room playing a rousing game of What Was That Noise, a knife to my left and an apathetic Grendel to my right, hoping that blasting searingly whiny British pop music will be enough to evacuate the hoodlum/s.

If you think Travis is bad, you invasive miscreants, just wait - I have the new Avett Brothers and I will forcefully EMOTE you out of my house.

RIGHT AFTER HALLOWEEN. That's the way it's been since the dawn of time (or, if you prefer, since Christ was a kid), and if people think they're tired of hearing carols on the radio before their neighbor's pumpkin has a chance to collapse like a flan in a cupboard, consider how exhausted I am from listening to everyone make what they think is the astute observation that it's "too soon" and "it gets earlier every year!"

No. It doesn't.

The arrival of Christmas decorations has meshed almost seamlessly with the 75%-off-sexy-bumblebee-costumes sale at Target for as long as anyone can remember, and you can search Flickr for "Starbucks red cup" and see that all the way back in 2005 they were showing up in early November. The holidays are a commercial construct - consider the Q1 lobster - and the only reason businesses don't ram their advertising down our throats year-round is because they've consulted corporate psychologists who informed them that bombarding humans nonstop with something eventually numbs them to its meaning and/or atrocity. See also: leggings and factory farming.

In related news, I took this picture of a tree in the Cinncinati airport in 2006, two years after I'd slept beneath the very same plastic decoration during an epic blizzard that stranded me in north Kentucky for three days, including Christmas eve, which was entertaining and sort of an adventure until Starbucks ran out of coffee after the first twelve hours of quarantine and I was rebooked seven times and then it turned out that my $350 SmartKey fob had been stolen from my checked luggage (I'm not even going to go into this other than the fact that you should never, ever check luggage unless hate your luggage and its contents, period, ever), which meant that when I returned to Iowa I had to rent a car to drive an hour home from the airport to pick up my extra keyfob and then back again in the rock-hard frozen remnants of said blizzard.