this will be boring, you might just want to look at the photo and skip the read.

i woke up to another restful night of sleep. a couple of things to report.

• i got a letter from mass general hospital, from my doctor, telling all his patients he'll be retiring come this fall. i think he's famous, i see his books in the bookstores all the time. maybe the new doctor i find will have less patients and i can actually get to see him without waiting over an hour each visit.

• my $60 1gb compact flash memory card arrived via fedex. do i really need another card? not really. the portable photo storage device i'll be carrying (it still hasn't arrived yet, i ordered it back in december, i'm afraid i'll have to buy it in japan) is only 40gb, so i have to ration myself and only take 500mb of photos a day (that comes out to 500 photos a day). having 2 500mb cards is already enough, but one of the cards was acting weird, so i figured i'd get a backup for a backup.

• that wonky memory card? i was finally able to save all 198 photos. i ran it through photorescue in ever possible combination and there'd always be 50 photos missing (even though i could see the missing ones with the camera), until i finally just mounted the card manually on the PC and was able to drag and copy the photos without any problems. my photos from the cambridge secret gardens from last year are all still entombed on a damaged 256mb card that i'm keeping in a safe place until technology improves to save those photos.

• the temperature was barely above freezing and it was raining today. in the afternoon, when there seemed to be a lull in the precipitation, i quickly got dressed and went out for a run. i saw an unfamiliar bird swoop down onto the icy river. when i got close enough i realized it was a common merganser (male). it'd swim around the pockets of unfrozen water, occasionally diving below the surface. i watched it for a few minutes then got cold so i left.

• i fixed some code in the weblog that filters out (via eregi) a bit of spam posting i've been receiving via the comments. if you've never noticed, it's because i've been manually deleting them from the database when they occurred, but everything should be fixed now.

• killer tongue (1996) arrived from netflix. a gangster's moll leaves the convent that she'd been hiding in while her man was in prison and goes to wait for him in a deserted house along with her pack of poodles within days before his release from a work detail runned by a sadistic warden. the girlfriend gets exposed to a space rock and she becomes host to a killer alien tongue, while her poodles are transformed into drag queens. a mute nun at the convent has a vision and leaves to find the space rock as well, crossing path with the boyfriend who's escaped from prison. drag queens give the mute nun a sexy makeover. the alien tongue impregnates the girlfriend. still not convinced it's a movie worth watching? what if i told you doug "pinhead" bradley, robert "freddy" englund, and mindy "o.c." clarke are in the movie? and that jonathan "bend it like beckham" rhys-meyers plays one of the poodle-drag-queens? unfortunately the transfer looks like it's straight from video and it's not even letterboxed, so a lot of action gets clipped from the sides of the screen. maybe one day the studio will come out with a better edition for a movie that so rightly deserved it.

i had some leftover gyozas for dinner while watching the final game of the 2004 ALCS. occasionally julie and i would call each other up to voice our opinions concerning the progress of the game. what was the final score, do you remember? does johnny damon hit a grand slam? oh my god why is pedro coming in?