woke up monday morning with a headache again.
most other mornings i'd probably be in shorts, but this morning i had the decency to put on a pair of pants for a change. maybe it was because i had to go out briefly to mail off some bills (mortgage, unemployment, health insurance, cable). i'd like to think that i have a certain professional demeanor that would find me properly attired during the day even though there's really no reason for me to do so.
at least i knew it was monday. that's better than most days. well, no, actually, i knew it was monday, but it didn't feel like it. days don't feel anymore, they've lost their distinctive textures now that i've lived in unemployment land for a while. i used to be able to feel mondays. it's probably better that i can't feel it though, from what little i can remember about it, it's not a good feeling.
back to my headache. lack of fluids. nothing mysterious. i'm not coming down with some unknown ailment, no matter how much i pray to god or write to santa.
the whole day i was at home. today, home felt like my 780 square feet prison cell. i need to get out, and as much as possible. there is a thing as having too much of a good thing, and i think i'm about to overdose on house.
at least i was busy though. working. working frees me from that guilty "i'm not working" feeling. i was also mucking around with my linksys BEFSR41 router again, 
that damn thing will not work, and i'm going to have a great time (sarcasm) coordinating help between at&t broadband and linksys tech support. i upgraded the firmware to the latest version with the hopes that it might solve all my problems but after a while the connection went dead (again) and the router wasn't able to shake hands with the modem. when the router was working, briefly, i was running back and forth between the mac in the living room and the pc in the bedroom. the fact that the pc is in my bedroom is not a sign that the pc is more beloved. actually, the real workhorse is still the mac, which is used to do just about everything.
for lunch, i microwaved one of those chicken pot pie hot pockets, it was actually very good, and even now i'm secretly lusting after another one. i also made myself a smoothie. do i have to put in a banana? are bananas like the corn starch of the fruit kingdom? what happens if i don't put it in? will it just be all watery? you know, this is something i could perhaps explore, possibly later tonight. i think i just like to blend all the ingredients together. i definitely like the "making" part more than the "eating" part of smoothie production.
oh, i have to learn how to make a pie for thanksgiving. i was boasting about my rudimentary cooking skills, and i blurted out that i'd be able to bake a nice pie (i think i said, "whatever you want, i can make it - pecan pie, cheesecake, pumpkin pie, whatever") for the annual thanksgiving food orgy. that's what i should've been doing today, getting my pie skill on. it'll have to wait until tomorrow. tomorrow is all about pies!
dinner came in the form of buffalo wings. manny called to ask if i wanted to get some, so we went to this new place he heard about in ball square called zing wingz. could it be better than wings works? the prices were definitely similar. 
on the menu, the description beneath the chinese barbeque flavor read, "ahhhhhhh ssoooooo gooooood!" i almost walked out the door were it not for the chesty cashier working behind the counter. manny and i split a 24 piece order, i had kick azz [sic] buffalo, manny had garlic parmesan. we ate back at my place because i had more cable channels. despite the quantity of options, the quality of shows was something to be desired, and there was nothing good on except entertainment tonight, and i'm just about had it with the 24/7 j.lo coverage. she's pretty and all but i'm not inviting her to my birthday party, i've already decided. 
later, we watched mail call on the history channel, learned about personnel armor throughout history, and the effectiveness of medieval crossbows. by the time i finished my wings my lips were numb from the hot sauce (it was only one spicy star too, i shudder to think what level of pain the higher asterisked denominations might bring). we hung out a little bit, i showed him how our old dean of tufts engineering is now the new president of the museum of fine arts, wrote e-mail to our friend claudio in japan, and i showed him my new pc.
he left at about 10pm, and i had another round of pc debugging, on the phone with lisa while fixing some code. finally everything worked, so i could go watch the taped episode of 24 i recorded on the fx channel (i missed this episode last tuesday). nina! the rest of the evening i finished writing a letter to my upstairs neighbor (we're penpals, this is how the tenant association communicates to one another), created a egg creature -- the triple antlered bush pig, and did some research on scanners. i really like firewire (versus the slower usb), even though these scanners are twice as expensive. it's down to the epson perfection 2450 photo and the microtek scanmaker 6700. microtek will probably win out.