i missed the wake up train today and got up this morning (if you can still call it that) at the obscenely late hour of 12:47pm. this is what happens when you go to bed at 5am without an alarm clock. the house was 5 degrees cooler than what i had been setting it to, a result of my money saving energy policy (a policy that's currently under review, i'm willing to pay a few bucks more just so i don't have to wake up to a freezing house). looking outside the living room window i saw the aftermath of last night's snowfall, the streets already plowed and most of the sidewalks shoveled. sensing a call to duty, i got dressed, went into the basement to get the shovel, cleaned up the sidewalk in front of my house along with the snow on the doorsteps, and brought the trash cans off from the street.

i admired the new snow covered backyard. if this had been in belmont, i would've set out the birdfeeder and watched the birds from the dining room window. here in my little cambridge backyard, there's no good place for a birdfeeder, and by good i mean a place that's safe from hungry winter squirrels. off in the distance i could hear children playing, a happy snow day for those 18 and under.

snow depth

dead flower yesterday

dead flower today

today's smoothie recipe: 2 cups of frozen fruit mix, 5 large tablespoons of plain yogurt, half a cup of kiwi strawberry juice, and a tablespoon of sugar. yogurt is the thing to use if you don't like bananas, but it has a mild sour taste, that's why i had to add the sugar. once again i made too much, and on a cold day like today, i was freezing after drinking two cold smoothies.

i finally painted the bits of uneven ceiling edge in my kitchen. what i still have left to do is to repaint the interior facing door of the bathroom. the more i put it off though, the less i want to bother painting it. around 6pm i took a 2 hour nap in my bedroom with the television on. i would've turned it off, but the on/off button on the remote control is broken and i didn't want to get out of bed, so i just turned down the volume. occasionally i'd get up and catch a glimpse of the news (all about thanksgiving travel) or a tidbit of celebrity info on one of those entertainment news shows. i made soup for dinner, from a can, watching basketball, star trek, and birds of prey. most shows on television are morality tales, preaching what's good and what's bad. you could argue that through television, one could become a moral person. thing is, i would much rather watch a show bathed in ambiguity, that doesn't preach to me. that's what shows like the sopranos, alias, and boomtown are all about. kind of ironic they should all be on sunday, a day traditionally reserved for religion.

so the day before thanksgiving, it's quiet in my neighborhood. most people are probably traveling back to their families to spend thanksgiving. i look around my street, and i see a lot of dark windows. it's twentysomething degrees outside, the snow from last night now frozen hard like cement, coating the streets in a layer of ice.