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i like mornings where i don't have to wake up at a specific time. today was such a morning. i checked my e-mail to make sure clients weren't vying for my attention before i left the house to run some errands. i ran into renee, who was still fuming from her little interaction with my upstairs neighbor steve yesterday. he wrote her a letter asking her to remove the pile of logs she has stacked against our house. i've always thought it was a bad idea because nothing like wet wood to attract termites, but apparently she doesn't think it's a big deal because they're not stacked against her own house. i then ran into ed, whom i've been dreading, because i junked my old bike without "consulting" with him first even though it was really my own business as to what i wanted to do with it in the first place. even though i take what he says with a grain of salt, i put up with it because don't really have anybody else to talk motorcycles with.

i went to city paint on mass ave to look for stains. wood stains to be exact, little tiny samples to test on the house so steve and i can figure out what color is right for us. they didn't carry any benjamin moore stains. the smallest amount i could buy was a pint of stain for $15-16, way more that i needed. i decided to hold off of those. however, cabot does have little 4 oz. cans of sample stains for $5 each, so i picked two, foothill and federal blue.

i brought my laptop to the cafe to show my parents the research i did on HDTV. i also had lunch there, just some leftover with rice. we still couldn't reach a consensus on which set to buy, so i went with my mother to the watertown best buy to gauge the best HDTV for ourselves. we spent about an hour there, just looking at the various sets, deciphering the cryptic model numbers, figuring out which ones were the best. we saw a deal online for a $600 40" toshiba HDTV, and found a similar model at the store. it wasn't as bright as many of the other models, but my mother said the muted colors looked more natural. we also saw some LED HDTV's, including a few samsungs that were only about an inch thick. once we got back to belmont, i finally decided on the 40" samsung LN40B550 and got my mother to order it online.

when i came back to cambridge, i went out and painted a few shingles with the samples i bought earlier. both of them looked much lighter than the color in the brochure. i wrote steve an e-mail telling him to check it out when he came back home.

after having some toaster oven french bread pizza for dinner, i left for harvard square to meet eliza for a movie. we went and saw the 9:50 showing of julie and julia. with just 10 minutes before the movie started, we were the first people in the theatre. 2 girls showed up minutes later and that was pretty much it.

julie and julia was a thoroughly entertaining movie, combining my love of food and blogging. it was also topical in many other ways, like life in france and french cuisine, local book publishers, and how julia child eventually settled in cambridge. the contemporary julie was kind of annoying and prone to neurotic breakdowns. i would've been happy just to watch a movie about the life of julia child instead. her wartime involvement with the US spy agency in china seemed particularly interesting, and i wonder if sampling the local chinese cuisine helped shape her future love for food. jane lynch (wickedly funny on glee) has a minor supporting role as julia's equally tall sister coming to paris for a visit. i also wished that there had been more food cinematography. there was quite a bit, but i still couldn't get a sense of all the deliciousness. i left not feel as hungry as i thought i would.

the theatre was eerily empty by the time eliza and i left sometime after midnight. the projector was running itself, and the lobby was completely empty. we cut across the harvard courtyard before parting ways, eliza towards inman square, me back to the agassiz neighborhood.