i got up, foraged for some food, watched the red sox-diamondback game on television. like most weekends, i spent some relaxing time in the backyard. a few new items have appeared outside. the few opened poppies have pollinated, shedding their petals, the seedcases slowly swelling, looking like green balloons with magenta pipe-cleaner octopuses on top of them. the nightshade flowers are out. beautiful flowers, ugly weed. for the time being i'm leaving them alone. they provide food for the three lined potato beetles, and there has never really been a serious invasion of nightshade in the garden. red clover flowers are in bloom. clovers are fine, they add nitrogen to the soil, it's the weedy yellow wood sorrel that i don't like (they have clover like leaves as well). and finally, the honeysuckles are out. dark warm nights and the fragrance of honeysuckle in the air reminds me of summertime.
 poppy seedcase |
 nightshade |
 red clover |
 honeysuckle |
i biked to work today to get my running shoes, which i forgot to pick up when i left the office on friday. before i could go i went to get fuel for the motorcycle. $3 worth of gasoline, 2 gallons, for which i can run 130 miles before my next refuel. that's 65 miles/gallon. for fuel efficiency, you can't beat the motorcycle. when was the last time you filled the tank with just $3? going into kendall square on memorial drive i noticed the heavy traffic leaving the city (end of the red sox game), so coming back i decided to take storrow drive instead, which usually doesn't get tied up. i haven't been on storrow drive via motorcycle for two years now. the only times i used it were the few occasions when i biked to work when i was still at the boston design center. storrow drive is much faster, feels like a highway, versus memorial, which is a 45 mph heavily trafficked road with multiple street light stops. i was hitting 70mph on storrow drive. it's funny, but i didn't even notice, i was just following the car in front of me, who was also doing the same. occasionally i'd have a morbid thought, like imagining what would happen if i fell off the bike, what a broken mess my face would be, how much pain i'd feel, and how many cars behind me would run me over before they could pull to a stop. i have a tremendous respect for the road when i ride, and that's mostly due to the fact that i'm scared of what would happen if i should have an accident, because the rider always gets hurt. inside a car, somebody might ding you, you wouldn't even notice it. somebody dings me on the bike, i'm going to get thrown off and bones will be broken, my bones. but i definitely think that the more i ride, the safer i ride. it's when you're first starting out and you're not quite sure of what to do that i think mistakes can happen. now, i'm pretty much mistakes free, and any accidents, although it'll will be no less painful, i will at least know it wasn't my fault. riding a motorcycle is also knowing where accidents might happen and learning to avoid them. i definitely ride defensively (although i drive offensively). my life is in my hands when i'm on the motorcycle.
after i got home i called dan to arrange to pick up his twin sized bed from his old apartment that he was giving me for free (for one of the bedrooms in the new home). 
i picked him up in allston, we drove to brighton, and moved the bed, pieces of the frame and a mattress, into my parents' ford explorer. we tried taking the box spring as well but that thing wouldn't fit down the spiraling staircase, so we left it. we put the frames inside the car while the mattress we tied to the roof. on the way back we cracked numerous jokes about the mattress on the roof of the car, like how it was definitely a babe magnet.