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i realized the old school false wood paneling radio shack alarm clock that i've been using since forever won't sound its alarm if i sit it vertically underneath my bed. that's why in my bedroom it now rests across the room on the television. that's fine for somebody with perfect vision, but i can't see it with my beady myopic eyes. i've been leaning on the edge on the bed and squinting like crazy in the mornings just to see what time it is. not that it matters anyway, but not wanting to live like a complete lazy slob, i try to get up at a decent hour so i have some daylight to enjoy. so here's the scenario: i set my alarm clock (the radio shack one), and in the morning when the clock radio alarm kicks in, i crawl out of bed, walk across the room (it's not a long walk, a few steps at most, but in the morning, still not yet awake, not wanting to get out of a warm bed, it feels like a mile), and turn off the alarm clock. not even bother snoozing. snoozing means repeating that whole ordeal again, i rather just remember what time it is and sort of count off in my head. so last night, while fiddling with my cellphone, i saw that it had an alarm clock feature (that's feature 4-2-2 on your nokia cellphone). now i have to sleep with a cellphone anyway, not because of any sicko phone fetish, but rather there's currently no phone in my bedroom, and what if somebody needs to call me? so i set the alarm and went to bed.

promptly at 9am my cellphone started vibrating and ringing, like i was getting some sort of super urgent phone call. it's a cool feature, but there's no snooze button other than to go through the series of steps in order to reset the alarm clock time, which is what i did.

at 10am i got up and started to plan out my day. somehow painting would factor in a big part in my schedule. my father showed up and we went to city paints to return an expensive can of unused semi-gloss benjamin moore primer, to buy some foam brushes, and to pick up a gallon of autumn red, or as i like to call it, "pink" (let's not kid ourselves, that's exactly what that color is). when we got back home, i did some prep work before walking done to harvard square to run some errands. i fedex'ed a cd with project source codes for one of my freelance programming gigs. it was a fedex station inside of kinko's, it was pretty busy, right in the middle of lunch hour. next, i cashed some checks. with errands done, i walked back home, cutting across harvard courtyard. big mistake. it must've been right when classes were over (1pm), because suddenly the entire campus was swarming with students. not just any students mind you, harvard students. smarties! but it's kind of hard to tell if they're really harvard students or not. here's how i figure it: if they're carrying books, then there's a pretty good chance, if they're hot (like this one blonde girl i saw, red pants, i wish i had an eye camera so you could've seen what i saw), i figure they don't go to harvard. being surrounded by so many people made me kind of claustrophobic, having pretty much been living the life of a hermit hiding in my house renovating. the few visitors i have are the only times i have human contact. otherwise i'm all by myself. i haven't started talking to inanimated objects yet, but i expect that to happen pretty soon.

i came back to the house and my sister showed up as well. while my father and she painted the kitchen, i was in the bathroom putting on the second and final coat of green. it was very tedious work, mainly because of the edges. took more than 2 hours to edge with a foam brush freehand (i shun the edger tool), and only 20 minutes to roll. midway through my painting, i heard some commotion in the kitchen. my father was telling my sister to be careful with the ceiling edges, to not get so much paint on the ceiling, and she got really angry at the construtive criticism, screaming at my father, "it's not your house, why do you care?" it's that kind of attention to detail that made me tell her maybe she should paint the walls with a roller or work on the easier bottom edges, instead of ceiling duty. she got mad and stormed out of the house.

finally i finished the bathroom, and moved on to the kitchen, where my father was still edging. i climbed on the ladder and did some ceiling work, but it was just too tedious. finally i decided to do what i did for the other rooms, which is to tape the ceiling. the only downside to that is when i remove the tape, it might rip some of the paint off, but it's a small price to pay for not having to carefully trace the edges of the ceiling. with the ceiling perimeter of the kitchen taped, i was able to very quickly paint the edges in under 30 minutes, following my father as he applied big rollstrokes of pink onto the walls, covering up the previous salsa color. i missed salsa increasingly more as we started to cover it up. i had an idea of maybe horizontally stripping the kitchen walls with alternating bands of autumn red (pink) and salsa (red). i've seen it on trading spaces, so i know it can be done! i'm just trying to find creative ways to use my 2 gallons worth of salsa paint that i bought.

by 6pm we were done with the kitchen. my brand new pink kitchen. not sure which i hate more, the red kitchen or the pink kitchen. JUST KIDDING! pink is fine. it doesn't fight me like red. with the proper dark lighting, it sort of looks kind of red. pink makes you think of eating, right? red just makes you want to punch somebody in the face. pink is all about let's play dress-up and have a tea party. NO! i need to butch up that kitchen. how about a pink kitchen adorned with lovely animal head trophies? that could be an idea. i've also want to give some serious consideration to my banding idea, alternating red/pink on the walls.

oh, by the way, i'm back in belmont again tonight, using my sister's pc. helped my parents move the futon frame into their bedroom, cleaned up the remaining junk in my old bedroom a little bit.