glen street, somerville

as far as i'm concerned, the holiday isn't over yet since nobody was online this morning, it was like an internet ghost town. i woke up right before my father called to let me know he was coming over to pick me up so i could go return those 9x12 frames in everett and buy some more 11x14 frames. later i went with him to get some supplies from costco. returning to cambridge we stopped by microcenter to check out the post-christmas sale. doors were open at 8am and they had some real bargains like a limited number of $200 laptops but nobody in my family was masochistic enough to want to wait outside the store overnight in order to be one of the first people inside. my father ended up buying a 500gb SATA drive for $130.

i finally watched kiss kiss, bang bang, a movie that'd been sitting around on my desktop for about a month now. a pretty good film, a tongue-in-cheek crime sleuth drama. though i'm not normally moved by robert downey jr. (you'd have to go back to 1985 weird science to find a movie of his that i liked), i thought his performance was adequate. my one question: who is michelle monaghan and where i can see more of her?

came evening julie drove us around to see some somerville christmas lights. i'm not sure what the rule is as to how long you're supposed to keep them up after christmas, but i think it's definitely at least to new year's. i went last christmas as well, and seemed to have seen more lights - perhaps it was just the newness of it all, or maybe the weather was colder (don't they twinkle more in subzero temperature?). tonight felt like a cool spring night, definitely not december heading into january. nobody thinks it'll stay this way for long though; if anything, we're due for a deep freeze, and i'm afraid when it does arrive, it'll catch us all by surprise. i'm ready though, me and my dry skin and my industrial bottle of moisturizing lotion.

the house on glen street we tried to see last year but only saw it in the dark was lit up tonight to showcase all its amazing illuminated glory. i don't care what your religious denomination is (or in my case, absolutely zero) but i think we can all agree that christmas lights are just so damn pretty. the symbolism is so fascinating as well. you have the obvious religion motifs, like the manger and virgin mary and baby jesus, and then you have the santa lore, with jolly st.nick in various incarnations along with mrs.claus and the reindeers. then you have characters from christmas stories, like the nutcracker or the drummer boy, and finally, the accoutrements of the holiday season, things like candy canes and wreaths.

for dinner we drove all the way past arlington center to the blue ribbon barbecue to get some takeout and bring it back to my place. i got the dual combo, texas burnt ends with spicy sausage. we watched a primetime NBC special report on illegal immigration hosted by tom brokaw. neither one of us could finish our orders and both ended up with leftovers.

it's been a while since i gave an aquarium progress report. things are stable, no major problems. i feed often, anywhere from 2-4 times a day, because the fishes always seem hungry. only two baby guppies have survived, they're about a centimeter each and although neither have shown any colors, they're starting to develop a prominent fan-shaped tail. the plants are growing a little bit, but will never reach their full potential without injected CO2, which i can't do anymore because it'll drop the pH and stress the guppies.