i paved a stone pathway today. it's not finished yet, needs another day of work to be complete, and that'll probably be next friday. while bruce and i paved, dennis was busy cutting the proper size of bluestone. good bricks for the two strips running along the side of the main pathway consisting of bluestones, then bad bricks ("ugly bricklings") line the edges touching the walls. dennis wanted me to paint a meaner picture of him on the weblog, afraid that if i portrayed him as a kind-hearted boss that people would take advantage of him. my favorite tool is the rubber mallet, i thoroughly enjoy smashing bricks into the dirt with it. it's not like a regular mallet, which is heavy and you break stuff with it. the rubber mallet is light and bouncy and i can strike the bricks as hard as i want and they don't break. the weather was exceptional, everyone at one time or another made some sort of "isn't this weather amazing?" comment. we had lunch outside, sitting on the sidewalk in front of the house in folding director chairs. susan came out to join dennis and bruce and myself, while their neighbor bill, who just happened to be coming home, got invited to our "picnic" as well. after about 6 hours and with the pathway 2/3 of the way complete, we called it a day. the pathway looked so good that it seemed it was always like that, a natural look. i wrote out an invoice, went upstairs to get paid, then left to go to jeff's house, where he wanted me to help him take down beams from the ceiling rafters. when i got there, he was on the phone, and i had to wait about 10 minutes before he was ready. he went up into the rafters and handed the wooden beams to me one by one. at one point one of the beams slid down by hands and wooden splinters drove straight through the tip of one of my fingers beneath my fingernails. i pulled them out quickly as blood trickled out of the wound. jeff said i could borrow his gloves. things got a little bit easier after that. after some sweaty 30 minutes of serious lifting, i was finally able to come home, where andrew was already back from vermont. he left shortly afterwards to visit his girlfriend and then go to california for the following week. i was supposed to taking renata out running on this perfect weather day but after a busy day of work she had forgotten about our appointment. on the phone apologizing, she was also stressed about a floral arrangement she had made for a graduating neighbor friend ("it's ugly," she cried). for dinner i had some more tsong-tse, and spent the rest of the evening watching maid in manhattan and game 2 of the nba finals between the spurs and the nets.