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i woke up about 3 hours earlier than my usual wake-up time on this miserable wet and cold and grey tuesday morning to hand gerry his final check when he arrived. steve was supposed to meet me downstairs to present his share, but i was left with the awkward situation of calling him on his doorbell while gerry stood waiting. before gerry left i suddenly remembered that he still has steve's visitor's parking permit. i was about to run after the van and ask for it, but steve told me he already got it back. later i realized through a series of mix-up, he actually has my visitor's permit instead, which he thought was his.

i couldn't stop thinking about the visitor's permit because it meant having to get in touch with gerry again. fortunately he called me back later in the afternoon. i thought maybe he realized he still had the permit and wanted to return it, but actually he called to ask if i could write him a review on google. i said sure, but it put me in a weird position: on the one hand i want to be honest, and i think they did an adequate job but not a great job, and on the other hand, because he asked as a favor, i don't think i can be entirely honest because i know he'll read it. maybe i'll wait until he returns the permit tomorrow before deciding which direction i'm going to go.

did i mention it was cold and wet today? during the weekend i already started using the door snakes, and i flirted with the idea of turning on the heat because it was about 60 degrees in the house and not getting any warmer. i had on my fleece sweatshirt and wool socks, and relocated my base of operations to my bedroom, where i could quickly warm myself up by closing the door and turning on the spaceheater. we're actually 20 degrees colder than average for this time in october. it looks to be like this for the rest of the week, and if it continues like that into next week, i may have to finally turn on the heat. it's usually better to not wait until the very last minute because if the furnace breaks down, i still have time to get heating insurance so i can save myself some money for the eventual repair.

since i was in the bedroom, i spent a good deal of time today backing up some data. i also did a load of laundry. for lunch i just had a simple mustard ham sandwich of wheat bread, with a glass of coffee milk and a wedge of leftover cheese. since i'm a bit lactose intolerant, i paid the price for eating too much dairy about an hour later. a great day for chicken soup, but i didn't have the necessary ingredients so the closest i got was some instant miso soup to keep warm. i also did a load of laundry and vacuumed the house.

i tested out two more wii games today, iron man and onechanbara: bikini zombie slayers. iron man was very faithful to the movie, and i think they even got all the original actors to do the voices. gwyneth paltrow's pepper potts character looks really slutty in the game though. iron man is actually very hard to control, like flying a plane. i couldn't get through the training simulation before giving up. speaking of slutty, then there's onechanbara. this was the game i saw a while back that made me want me to modify my wii so i can play japanese imports. a bikini-clad girl with a cowboy hat kills zombies with swords. i played 30 minutes and managed to work up a sweat.

looking out the window sometime in the afternoon, i spotted bruce walking down the street. he was sporting a leather jacket and a full beard. turns out due to some complicated columbus day scheduling event, he didn't have to teach this week in pittsburgh and decided to come to cambridge until thursday. he admired the new paint job on the house and gave me an update on his pet "toxo" - the toxoplasmosis he managed to contract and now putting him in an enduring state of malaise.

the weather finally started to clear up by late afternoon, and there was even some sun poking through the dissipating clouds. i wanted to run some errands but figured i could wait until tomorrow when the streets had a chance to completely dry out.

for dinner i made some macaroni and cheese.