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shannon dropped by this morning with her dog anezka to check out the house. she's just one amongst a handful of people who's seen my place when i first got it (back in june), before all the home renovation work took place. afterwards we walked down beacon street to inman square, where we got coffee at the 1369 coffee house. it was my first time there, most of the people inside looked like regulars, sort of a bohemian hangout, with members of the band working behind the counter. at that time of the day, i'm assuming the clientele is either unemployed people (like me) or people who don't work the 9-5 (like shannon). i went for a large hot chocolate (today was an overcasted day deserving of hot chocolate) and shannona and i both got this dense cheese muffin pastry thing. i've always found inman square to be a weird place. too far from any convenient source of public transportation (unless you take a bus), it's kind of hard to get to, hidden away in cambridge between central and kendall square. we sat outsiding eating and drinking, watching people go by. that place is a prime location to people watch, too bad i didn't bring my camera (next time). with food and drink consumed, we went back home.

finally after a 4 days hiatus i painted the second coat of blue in the master bedroom. it took me exactly 3:45 hours, by the time i finished it was already starting to get dark. i've painted each room so many times now that i've got the routine down: use the roller to paint the main areas of the walls, leaving the edges; paint the edges, starting with the area above the baseboards and working around the room, making sure to wipe off any paint that gets on the baseboards; paint all the corners of the room (the master bedroom was especially difficult, a strangely shaped 9 sided room) as far as i can reach; paint around all the windows and doors as far as i can reach; climb the ladder, and starting painting the area below the ceiling trims, working my way around the perimeter of the room, wiping off any paint that gets on the trims; finally, paint the remaining top half of all the corners and windows and doors. all that and i'm still not done! done with the wall painting, yes, but the room still needs to have all its trims painted, and i need to tape for that (yeah, i'm going to go with taping, it's a little bit of work to tape around, but it makes detail painting so much easier).

do i need any help? actually, i don't want help. there's a certain satisfaction knowing that i singlehandedly painted the inside of my house (other than the priming), and nobody would do as good a job or as careful a job than me. what i wouldn't mind though is a little company, painting is so boring, but i have my music to keep me from becoming insane. today, heavy rotation of stevie wonder and dean martin, my old favorites. i could hear my neighbor moving around upstairs, i hope my music wasn't too loud.


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with some time to kill, i actually started priming the trims in the guest bedroom closet and that little recessed alcove square in the living room wall. tomorrow i need to go to the store to get a gallon of premium white semi-gloss paint.

when it was all over, i cooled off by having a mango on my living room floor watching some tv news. i got mango pulp stuck in my teeth and was in the kitchen sink pulling them out. i spent some time vegging in the kitchen, sitting by the dining room table, trying to imagine what the kitchen would look like in salsa red (i'll find out in a few days), trying to see if i made the right choice by going with such a deep color. i even opened up a can of the salsa red just to see how red it really was, but seeing the paint in the can is no way to determine what it'd look like on the walls. it looked okay though, i think it'll work.