the beep beep sound of the reversing van told me cleber was back at work this morning. reluctantly i jumped out of bed to warn him that there was street cleaning today and he risked getting ticketed and towed. fortunately he was already on top of the situation and quickly moved his vehicle. a few other cars weren't as lucky, including a green volkswagon with maine license plates. welcome to cambridge! now pay the $200 ransom for your car!

the weather was surprisingly warm today, with temperature as high as 63 degrees. i went around the house opening all the windows to let the cold air out and the warm air in. i probably felt warmer than i should because i've been dressing for the winter the past few days. good news is the weather will be warm for the next few days. i may just be able to postpone turning on the heat until next week.

cleber was painting the front porch area including the bottom of the doors so i had to be home pretty much the whole day. i didn't managed to sneak away to harvard square around noontime for about an hour to watch the new ben affleck movie being filmed (based on amanda's tip). i didn't see any celebrities (no jon hamm, no blake lively, and no ben affleck) as the handlers were busy corralling pedestrians out of the shot. there were those who weren't ushered away, and they turned out to be extras, even down to the two boys performing skateboard tricks. the scene i saw was a security guard pushing a cart full of money into a bank. they shot it twice, i left soon afterwards when i realized there'd be no celebrity sightings today. coming back across the harvard campus i walked through the farmers' market.

gerry had asked me to write a google review for him and i've been sitting on it a for a while but i finally got around to it today. i signed in using a new e-mail account so there'd be no way the review could be traced back to me. it was basically a very positive review, but it left a bad taste in my mouth because i wasn't entirely honest. there were many things about gerry i didn't like and i'm not quite sure if i'd use him again in the future.

we finally paid cleber today. he was reluctant to take the money because he wasn't entirely finished, but i trusted him. after oiling the steps, cleber had nothing else to do other than to wait for it to dry (he used too much oil, it'll probably take days for it to completely dry). he did a little side project for my neighbor renee, pull out some rotten shingles, putting in new ones, and then paint it. when steve came back home, cleber wanted us to do a walkthrough to see if there was anything else he forgot to paint. both steve and i were happy with the work and in a private moment steve thanked me personally for managing this whole project. we paid cleber an additional $100 for the gutter downspouts he bought and painted for us. when he showed us the receipt as proof, we noticed it was actually $107, and both steve and i each pitched in an extra $5 in cash. cleber said he was coming back tomorrow to put in my lights and to paint a small area on the foundation. with the house all fixed and painted, steve asked the question, "now what?" i guess our next project will be to landscape the backyard, but i'm in no hurry.

onechanbara is actually a pretty short game and i managed to finish it on the easy level. it was annoying when i couldn't exit out of the credit movie and had to wait several minutes for it to end so i could get my reward (ability to play with an unlocked character). next up is metroid prime 3: corruption, a 2007 wii game with a lot of glowing reviews.

in the late evening my father dropped by after work to deliver the portable pressure washer i'm using tomorrow to clean the flagstone pathway in my backyard.