just finished up with some freelance work (4am), now i'm just taking some time to chill out, enjoying the silence. figuring out what i'm going to be doing tomorrow. wonder if it's going to be cold again? right now it's 42 degrees outside. a quick check of the weather says it'll only be the high 50's tomorrow. i remember reading the paint label, said something about not painting below 50 degrees. ah, autumn, with winter not far behind. my mind is still stuck in summer, i still go about my daily business in shorts whenever possible. it'll all change at the end of the month when we enter daylight saving's time and enter the dark period of new england weather. i hope my house is cozy, but i get the feeling that a 100 year old house wouldn't be the best insulated structure. i remember seeing the house back in april, when the weather was still kind of cold, that it was warm inside. it could be just a trick though, they could've just turned on the heat for a few hours, and then when everybody's gone, the house becomes a refrigerator again. maybe i should invest in a bathrobe that i can wear always and a pair of fuzzy slippers. and i'll sit in my living room after a hot morning shower, sipping tea, reading the newspaper, listening to music, enjoying the nice tranquil domestic life.

i won't be able to paint on thursday because i'm going to marion. hopefully it's only for a day, and i can get back to painting on friday.

in the four months i've parked outside my house illegally without a visitor's permit or a residential sticker, today was the first time i got a ticket, $15. how the metermaid wandered into my little area of cambridge, i'll never know. i figured it was a dead zone since i'm right next to somerville, that they don't even bother ticketing because they can't figure out where the town line ends. i wonder if she'll be back tomorrow, since she got a bite today? i'll just move my car 10 feet into somerville, that's all. the trick is knowing when she's coming. i got this idea i learned from watching the smurfs, where i tie a bell to the metermaid's neck while she's sleeping, that way i can hear her coming.

i hate the sound of a ticking clock. i can't sleep if i can hear a clock ticking. thank god i have bad hearing.

i love training day. i can watch that movie over and over again without getting bored. the whole movie takes place in one day, but you never see them grab some lunch or dinner, nor do you see them go on bathroom breaks. early in the movie they do meet for the first time in a diner, but that might explain why alonzo isn't hungry, but i didn't see the rookie get anything to eat. maybe smoking some sherms made him lose his appetite. also, there's a recurring children theme in the movie. in this seedy world of violence and corruption, there are all these children around. alonzo's son, the little hispanic girl using an imac, the little boy in the house during a false evidence raid, the 14 year old school girl who was almost raped, the rookie's daughter, roger supposedly selling dope to kids. and did you notice all the musical cameos? snoop dogg, macy gray, doctor dre.

dsl has returned to belmont, but not because i received the installation disc. actually, that never came. however, i did get something from verizon in the mail, a sweet mousepad. i'm not kidding. i guess having a nice padded surface to rest my hand on was more important than actually getting me online. so i called their tech support service to get them to send me the installation cd again. i was talking with this indian guy with a very soft voice, who laughed but then quickly apologized when i told him verizon sent me a mousepad instead of the installation kit i'd requested. he told me that if i was running os x, i could set up my account manually since os x has built-in PPPoE support. after i switched startup disks (to my os x partition), he basically walked me through the setup, and in a matter of minutes i had internet access, the first time since the start of this month. he then forwarded me to their account manager person who created a new account for me with a legitimate username and password. i typed them into the PPPoE setup window of my router's online admin tool and everything was back to normal. actually, all they had to do was to create a new account for me and i could've done the rest, i didn't need to be walked through the whole setup. now that i'm back with verizon, i don't know if i'm willing to switch to earthlink. earthlink is the better service by far, with 20 hours/month dial-up connection in the event of dsl failure, but i just don't want to be caught up in another prolonged downtime. maybe i'll switch after my promotional discount runs out, i'm getting my first month free, followed by 2 months of $30 service, before returning to the $50/month rate. so i should be looking to switch again sometime in january 2003.

it's weird, having gone almost a week with no internet access at nights, it makes me appreciate my internet connection that much more now that i finally have it back. i almost don't want to turn my computer off, i just want to be online 24/7. not that i'm missing anything, not like there's an online community waiting for me at nights, where friends are all instant messaging each other. most of my friends have lives, lives that take them far away from their computers.

i woke up with blood on my pillow.

sometime during the night my shave wound started to bleed. with dried blood caked on my face, i grabbed my things and drove to cambridge, where i had a supply of bandaids. i removed the old bandaid (failing to wait the prescribed 24-48 hours before doing so) and inspected the area where my nevus used to be, now just a small shallow bloody crater next to my eye. i took a shower (staying away from the cut) and redressed the wound, putting some ointment on it in the process.

while eating my usual breakfast of cereal, i finally wrote out some checks to pay the bills. actually, to pay off at&t, who owns me. they're my virtual extortionist (and whatever they don't take, nstar gets), every month i pay them $160 in protection money, in return they provide me with all the comforts of a modern high tech society: internet, cable, landline telephone, and cell phone. i called their wireless department contesting some mysterious charges on my bill (what else is new?). the plan i have gives me a calling area that covers most of the northeast region, but some reason, calls that i made from new york got charged as long distance even though they shouldn't, and likewise with some local calls as well. judy, my customer care provider, reimbursed me for the long distance charges, but had no answer as how to fix my account so it doesn't do that, other than trying to get me to go on a long distance plan which would've added another 6 months to my 1 year calling plan. i just hate at&t (verizon's no good either).

i actually worked on my freelance programming project until 1pm (receiving 16 e-mails related to work), before i stopped doing that and went back to my painting.

the baseboards of the hallway closet, the closet door frame and folding closet door, and some parts of the hallway itself were the only things i was able to prime. my father came to visit at one point to see the progress, and later my mother along with my grandmother and aunt. trim painting isn't the most exciting thing to see, not like the drama of color wall painting. slowly but surely i will get there however, i'm only one person, i can only paint so much in a single day! it was really cold in the house too, and i couldn't turn on the heat because all the vents are still covered up with rosen paper.

i'm almost out of semi-gloss primer too. originally i figured a gallon would cover all the trims and still be enough left over to prime the bathroom walls. with only about a third of the house finished with semi-gloss primer, looks like i need to get another gallon. this gives me an opportunity to visit home depot, which i haven't visited in almost a week. remember the good old days when i use to go just about everyday?

and a year ago today, i was wandering around amsterdam after coming back from a vacation in turkey, waiting for my connecting flight to boston to arrive. those were some exciting times! no vacation for me this year though. my vacation streak has come to a halt.