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all this unemployment is giving me insomnia! or maybe it's all this house stuff i have to do. whatever it is to blame, i can't sleep. it's 5am in the morning, the sun's already out, the birds are chirping, and i can't fall asleep. so might as well wake up and...put some thoughts down. maybe it's the fact that i took a nap today. or maybe i had too much caffeine. i had at least two pepsis today and i drank some coke during dinner. my body is weird about caffeine, sometimes its hypersensitive, other times it could care less. that's why i think to some extent it's all psychosomatic. if i was adventurous, i'd go out running, beat the heat, get my run on. but what kind of psycho runs at 5am in the morning? i think i know somebody like that. maybe i have too much on my mind. i don't feel stressed but maybe i am stressed, just kind of buried it underneath layers of false calm. is there such a thing, false calm? at least it's not unbearably hot anymore. it's 74 degrees outside, which is warm, but the humidity has gone way done, i can feel it. or maybe that's because of the air conditioning. but i have one of my bedroom windows opened, and i could swear i felt a breeze coming through.

the bad thing is eventually i'm going to get sleepy and go to bed, but i'm going to wake up at some obscene hour, like late afternoon, when most of the day is already over. and i have to make an effort to keep track of my days otherwise i'll fall into this structureless void where everyday feels like saturday. the novelty of that little feeling is starting to wear off. by tomorrow (friday, 020705) it will be two weeks since i've been laid off, and already it seems like forever. so time is actually moving very slowly for me, which is a sign that says i'm not having fun at all.

okay, i think i felt something. i'm going to give this sleep thing another try.

i only know what day it is today because it is the fourth day of the boston heat wave, and i know this heat wave started on monday, so today must be thursday. i drove to cambridge for my daily visit of my empty condo. i was actually there to use the cablemodem because of its faster upload speed versus my usual dsl connection. i also took the time to sample the 200 digital channels i'm suppose to be receiving (i got as high as channel 80), but settled on the familiar fox 25 to watch the red sox versus the blue jays game (red sox won behind lowe's pitching). my father arrived soon afterwards, in what seems to be a routine now, father and son, at the new place, working on our own thing (he was there trying to wire the home networking system). my friend gary showed up too, curious to see the house. he recently sold his quincy condo and had some unwanted furnitures that he wanted to give me, mainly a kitchen table and some chairs. gary is the 10th visitor to my new home. gary give me a job tip, which was, go work as a secuity guard, they make as much as $1000/month after taxes for basically just sitting on their ass all day. it'd also give me a lot of time to study or do homework if i should decide to take some courses. the only thing is a grand won't cover my mortgage, i'm better off sticking with unemployment until i get a more substantial full-time job.

back in belmont, the heat wave drove us to install a second air conditioner, this time in the living room. there was a bit of surprise when pushing up the storm windows and the screens, we saw an active wasp's nest built in the corner. my plan is to wait at night and then quickly remove the nest while all the wasps are asleep. they do go to sleep at nights, don't they? i've only seen them during the day. thankfully it's just a small nest, about the size of a chestnut.

at 7pm i went with my parents and my aunt to a family friend's house in cambridgeport, where he lived on the 15th floor of an apartment complex which had a terrific view of the eventual 4th of july fireworks. we had dinner there, got a great look at cambridgeport, watched the sunset, and then saw the fireworks.


greek church

deck party

deck party (details)


cambridgeport
(pearl street)

cambridgeport
(boston bkgnd)

cambridgeport
(pearl street)

fireworks started at 10pm, but we were outside on the balcony before 9pm. off in the distance we could see local fireworks of neighboring towns. occasionally some neighborhood kids would light a firework or two as we watched the lights wiggle into the air and disappear. in the sky was a stationary blimp with an animated american flag billowing in the wind. from the balcony, with a pair of binoculars, i could see kendall square (identifiable from the familiar clock tower), and beyond that, the longfellow bridge covered by a sea of spectators, with a large jumbotron broadcasting live hatch shell activities. at 10pm the fireworks started, and for the next 20 minutes we were dazzled by a display of awe-inspiring pyrotechnics. fireworks are one of those things you have to see live. watching it on television, you don't get a sense of how loud it is and how three-dimensional the explosions are.

the evening had one more excitement in store for us when we got back to the car and found the battery dead because my father forgot to turn off the headlights. we had to get our family friend to come back down from his apartment and help jump start our car with his car. we were also parked on one of those infamous narrow one way busy residential cambridge streets, but luckily the car in front of us left, giving us enough space to park the "charger" car. after about 10-15 minutes of charging, the dead car started and we all finally went home.