with his last full day in town, i figured my roommate wouldn't be doing any work. he didn't get out of bed until almost noontime. he washed some clothes then went to the post office with a suitcase of books to be mailed home. he left the house once more, i'm guessing to his office to return some keys. he left a rent check on the kitchen counter; for some reason he added an extra $15 (a tip?).
all day it was raining intermittently. during a lull, i rode the bicycle to the comcast office to pick up some information on their channel line-ups. my parents are toying with the idea of switching back to comcast from verizon FIOS because of their cheaper deals. i stopped by the cafe briefly, and ended up staying a bit longer because it suddenly started pouring outside. all i could think about were the windows i left open at home. normally i'd close them all before leaving the house (theft prevention), but it was so humid, i wanted some circulation. thankfully it wasn't too bad, just some wet windowsills.
my roommate left the house once more in the late afternoon with yet another suitcase full of books to mail (he's not shipping the suitcase, just using it to carry the books to the post office, first shipment was only $14).
the other big news today was the 600+ points drop in the [dow jones] stock market. i know it's something bad, but it's so far removed from my everyday life that it's not even worth worrying about (for me at least). just waiting to see if the stock market will continue to plunge tomorrow. all signs say yes, since the asian markets are dropping in early morning tradings.
even on his last day my roommate remains a mystery to me. instead of volunteering this info, i had to actually ask him when exactly was he leaving tomorrow. his flight is 12:30, i want to be up before he goes so i can get my house key back from him. in the evening he got all dressed up and went out for one last time.
i'm starting to watch baseball again. it helps that it's the only game in town, since basketball (if it'll even start on time due to the labor dispute) and football are in their off-season (though once in a while i see football guys training). i personally swore off baseball this year, after talking with my spanish roommates and coming to the conclusion that these games are pretty tedious. in this age of short attention span, what other activity besides sleep would you sit around 3+ hours for? but with the red sox on top of the division, their weekend victories against the yankees, their recent slew of final inning heroics, and wakefield chasing baseball history trying to get his 200th career win, baseball is starting to suck me back in. half the players are new, so it's still going to take time to build up a relationship with them, but it's nice to see the old guys (wakefield, beckett, lester, ortiz, pedroia, ellsbury, youkilis, papelbon, even veritek on a limited basis).1
i was brushing up on some jquery coding stuff for much of the day. for lunch and dinner i finished my leftover lasagna.
1 my roommate bram hates baseball. early on, when he first moved in, i made some random crack about baseball and he went on a mini-tirade, one of the rare instances where he actually contributed to a conversation. unbeknownst to him however, even though i was showing my dissatisfaction at the time, i've logged not hundreds but thousands of baseball watching hours, so i'm more pro baseball than against it. this is another example of our diverging interests.