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pau was noticeably absent this morning, having spent the night at katarina's place. while finishing up my breakfast in the saturday solitude of the living room, i saw my roommate biking home, hair disheveled, clutching an old aretha franklin record he bought yesterday. i'm not even going to bother to ask. after he showered, he asked if it'd be okay if katarina came by for breakfast. that was my cue to hit the road, taking the motorcycle to belmont to do some fall garden clean-up.

i pulled up everything i could, including all the dead pepper and tomato plants, as well as the various vines. with the help of a ladder, i collected all the bottle gourds and put them temporarily on a rack to dry.

i didn't dig out the rosemaries yet, it's just a matter of formality. i still need to prune the raspberry canes, but they're still producing berries so i may hold off until the leaves are dead.

my father left his kindle at home so i got a chance to play with it some more. i loaded a slide show (color photos look washed out in greyscale) and added a few converted (cbr/cbz to mobi) comic book titles (anything with B&W art works best). i also loaded some pdf's which the kindle support natively without the need for conversions.

i came home after dinner to find pau and katarina watching a stream of indiana jones on pau's laptop (perhaps inspired by the raiders of the lost ark theme in this week's big bang). i took the opportunity to ask katarina - who's west german - about the portrayal of nazi villains in american cinema. she's fine with it, as long as people understand that these are caricatures. with christmas next month, we also talked about tree decorating traditions. apparently the germanic decorating style is more folksy, but she expressed interested in observing american style christmas. in majorca they don't do christmas trees; instead they roast a suckling pig for the whole family to feast. i can't wait to take these guys to see the somerville christmas lights!

we finished the evening by watching trading places. i never considered it to be a christmas movie per se, but apparently in germany and spain they always show this film around the holidays. since it was broadcasted on abc family, naturally it was heavily edited: digitally covered-up boobies, redubbed curse words, and virtually no drug references (the scene where eddie murphy's character goes into the bathroom to smoke a joint but only to find out the duke boys' scheme is particularly jarring because he suddenly appears in a bathroom stall with no explanation).

on another note: client P finally cut me a check! i'm still strapped for cash, but at least this will keep me alive for the remainder of the year. i'll probably invest in some bicycle parts with my newfound monetary surplus.