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i had some colorful cap'n crunch cereal this morning then prepared myself for an afternoon of sports watching. i was torn between seeing the season opener of the patriots versus bills or the third game of the yankees versus red sox series. i really wanted to watch football, but i didn't want to jinx the red sox by changing up my ("our") routine, since they've won the past two games that i've watched (i know it'd because i've been sending them good luck vibes). so i'm in my bedroom working on my freelance coding, switching between the two channels, alternating between baseball and football. it was a bad day for boston sports fans though, as not only the red sox ended up losing (no surprise, the yankees were due for a victory anyway), but the patriots lost as well. well, the patriots didn't really lose. the sox lost (3-1). the patriots got annihilated (31-0), with former partriot quarterback drew bledsoe and former patriots defenseman lawyer milloy on the opposing team. i actually like the bills more, they're kind of like the misfit patriots, the players that the original patriots didn't want anymore, yet somehow they band together and although they encounter mishaps, they end up winning it all. doesn't america just go crazy for stories like that? i think this season i might root for the bills.

after the games, i headed back to belmont to have dinner with my parents, who were cooking up some ribs on the barbecue. the backyard is a little wild now, a lot of invasive and weedy plants growing out of neglect. i think with some care the backyard can regain its former glory, but with hardly any time to tend to my own backyard in cambridge, it doesn't look like i'll have anytime to properly treat the one in belmont. one of the backyard neighbors has decided to build a new addition to their house, the back porch coming dangerously close to my parents' property. nothing a little tree screen can't solve, and besides, it's northern facing, all those windows are wasted since they're not going to get any sun whatsoever. the bamboos, looking like they were dying during the spring, are now back to their lush green selves, completely engulfing a big section of the yard. that bamboo is a ticking timebomb. as a purveyor of insects, i look for bug signs. i noticed a series of semi-circular bites on some leaves, i'm curious as to what critter could've caused them. if i had to guess, i'd say some sort of leafcutting insect, since if it was just for food, they wouldn't be so evenly spaced and well cut.

dinner was pretty good, besides the barbecued ribs, there was also lime flavored chicken wings, some salsa, garlic blended string beans, potatoes, and for dessert, watermelon and longans. after dinner, my mother gave me a haircut in the kitchen, then i took a shower to clean myself off of the little bits of hairs. one of the things i miss most about living in belmont is the shower. i miss how the knobs turn, the layout where the soap and the shampoos are located, the water temperature and the water pressure, the height of the shower head. afterwards, i watched george bush's address to the nation regarding the situation in iraq. i rolled my eyes during his entire 20 minute speech. i was telling mandy this, but even if al gore was hypothetically the president, i think the economy would've still soured and 9/11 would've still happened, but at least we wouldn't be at war with iraq, which i think is unnecessary and seems more of a personal vendetta between the bushes and the husseins than it is sound foreign policy making. i don't know if i have a solution to all this mess we're in, but at the very least i know when something isn't quite right, and what this current administration is doing feels not quite right.

i came back to cambridge to an empty house, mike once again gone without telling me where he went. do you think it's too demanding of me to know where my roommate is at all times? at this point i've come to accept the fact that mike is the kind of roommate who likes to operate under a certain aura of mystery. speaking of mystery, i marinated my last 4 chick drumsticks with the mongolian barbecue sauce i had in the fridge. i'm going to let them set overnight, then tomorrow i'm going to cook them up and see how they compare to shake and bake.

i figured my evening would end with some pleasant late night coding followed by some sweet sleep. little did i realize this would not be the case. i was talking with mandy over instant messaging, she had to pick up a nyc friend in chinatown at 2am and had some time to kill, so i suggested she come over to my place where we could hit the 24 hour cvs and do some scavenger hunting (or a late night krispy kreme run, opened until 2am). before she could do that however, she first went to a bar in central square for some experimenting. i thought the nature of the experiment was to see how much attention she could get with her new brunette hairdo, but turns out she wanted to know what it was like to go to a bar by herself. the experience did not go well (even though she did get some guy's number), and around 1:30am she finally rang my front doorbell, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke. instead of trying to score some oxy from cvs, we just hung out at my place for 30 minutes, i offering her some jasmine tea and rosemary breadsticks, she providing me with the details of her little science project earlier in the late evening. when her friend finally called, she left, taking her yoga mat with her.