it was a slow day for the employees of city paint on mass ave when i entered the store this afternoon. they were all sitting around the register, staring listlessly out the window into the greyness. i was the sole customer and only after a little while did somebody offer me some help. i told them i was looking for a natural preservative to apply to some wooden raised garden beds. the guy wrinkled his face in thought and told me they didn't carry anything like that if it even existed at all. paints and preservatives all have chemicals and no chemical is entirely safe. several other employees chimed in with their own ideas until one of them suggested the benjamin moore arborcoat, a water-based exterior stain that comes in a clear waterproof finish. at $17 a pint it was expensive and nothing on the can said it was safe for gardens but it didn't say it wasn't safe either. i told them i'd do some more research online about arborcoat, to make sure it was okay to use.

from there i went to the cafe to drop off a copy of a nova documentary i saw last night about the japanese earthquake. i also tried to help my father with the weird issue he was having with his computer: the screen would dim a minute after login, and no amount of display setting tweaks could fix it. i didn't know what it was but i installed a virus protection program that scanned the drive and detected at least 4 viruses and trojan horse applications by the time i left. if removing those things still doesn't fix the problem, the only solution would be to do a complete windows 7 reinstall.

by early evening it began to rain. sometime during the night it'd start snowing, and then transition back to rain again by morning. it would not be a pretty day tomorrow but unfortunately the day i scheduled my doctor's appointment on.

victor quickly left for the supermarket when he came back home in the evening. less than 10 minutes later he was back again, in a hurry because he didn't want to miss the celtics-spurs game at 8:00. it wouldn't start until 30 minutes later. given the celtics' lackluster performance against inferior opponents, i wasn't confident they could beat san antonio who's currently at the head of the western conference. the game was close throughout despite far better playing on the part of the spurs. starting in the second half, san antonio's offense began to dry up, boston became more aggressive with their own scoring, and improved their defense. to my surprise, the celtics won the game.

the second game was between the mavericks-lakers. we watched until the 3rd quarter, before victor said he had to go to sleep. los angeles was already up by 18 points going into the 4th quarter, the outcome seemed very much decided already.