earlier i went across the street to my neighbor julia's open house. the real estate agent was there giving me the pitch but i knew more about the place than she did, being a neighbor, and also one of the painters when it originally belonged to jeff and he was still flipping the place. sure, there's off-street parking, but you'll be buried in the snow come winter since it's not a garage. even though the backyard is shared, it really belongs to the lesbians downstairs. there's 2 bedrooms, but the 2nd bedroom is shaped like a skewed rectangle that it's impossible to find a bed that's fit that shape. a second floor balcony loft overlooks the living room, but the only way up is by climbing a ladder. all this for the asking price of a grand shy of half a million. is this negotiation tactic? because no way can that place be worth that much, unless i'm outdated in my housing market knowledge.

after buying a new replacement laptop, marco wanted to bike out to deer island, a distance of 12 miles and a google estimate of more than an hour of bicycle traveling time. it was an ambitious sunday plan and i only regret i wouldn't be joining him. i also suggested heading north to middlesex fells (didn't tell him it was a gay hookup place) or west along the minuteman bike path.

i left my place soon afterwards. my father was up in new hampshire today helping some friends prepare sushi at a market basket grand opening, so my mother was working at the cafe instead. i showed her my knitting sample, asked her how much my stitches keeping on growing. she said i did a passable job, a little ragged on the edges, but fine in the center. she actually thought i found real knitting needles before i told her they were shish-kabob skewers. when she tried to use them she found out the difference: dangerously sharp and prone to splintering and catching. she also thought i had real yarn until i told it her was just a spool of twine - fancy shiny twine, but twine nonetheless. still, it would make for a pretty project (just don't expect to keep warm).

later i went to belmont to watch the patriots-bills game. when new england was up 21-0 in the first half, i figured the game was all but won. but 4 interceptions and a handful of missed catches later, buffalo not only tied the game but took the lead. they ended up the game by strategically playing out the clock. i'm sure i'm not the only patriots fan who thought, there goes the perfect season. the bills are now first place in the division, an undefeated 3-0, while the patriots drop down to 2-1. the bar in new england is set so high, it's almost inconceivable to think the team could ever lose.

the moonflowers - confused by the grey weather - opened up early. i smelled their fragrance before seeing the large white flowers. the unpicked cocozelle has ballooned into a monstrous oversized squash. i picked off all the zinnias (and a few calendulas) but they'll be more again within a week. the most prolific flowering plant has got to be the nasturtiums, which have been blossoming their reds and pinks and yellows and oranges ever since spring non-stop. if we could bring them indoors i wouldn't be surprised to see winter blooming nasturtiums as well.

when my mother came home in the early evening, she and i went over to my godmother's house. i was there to fix her wireless, my mother was there to return some yarns. my godmother forgot her wireless password; fixing it was the simple matter of reseting the router and then reassigning a new password. she needed wifi access to get her HP tablet to work. alex came home briefly to use the bathroom, on his new job as a taxi driver.

when my mother and i got home, my father was already back, cooking in the kitchen with my sister. he returned with a quartet of lobsters and a bag of leftover fish heads for making seafood stew.

back in cambridge, i saw the house was dark, but when i went inside, the lights were on in the kitchen. marco was home. he couldn't figure out how to turn on the lights in the living room, so he was camped out in the kitchen instead. he got his new computer, a 15.6" samsung laptop with i3 processor for $380 from best buy (based on my recommendation). i found out he didn't go to deer island after all but did something far more ambitious: together with his friend david, they rode the minuteman bike path all the way to concord and walden pond and back. they left at 3:00 and didn't get back until 8:00. by then the path was pitch dark, but luckily david brought his lights.

instead of breaking bad, i tried the new

pan am drama at 10:00. it was also for marco's sake, who yesterday revealed to me that breaking bad is one of his favorite american shows, so i didn't want to spoil it for him (he's only on season 2, currently it's season 4). i wanted to fall in love with pan am (a 1960's drama about stewardesses during the golden age of air travel? what's not to love?) but i just couldn't do it. i didn't find the flight attendants all that interesting. i was hoping for a mad men on a plane, but the level of period detail is nowhere close to matching mad men.

with marco asleep, i watched the encore of breaking bad at 1:00. spoiler alert! wow. though nowhere as awesome as last sunday's episode, this episode was pretty intense, especially the last few minutes, when walt discovers that skylar gave away all their money to ted, her tax-cheating former boss/lover. they could've ended the season with just this episode and i would've been happy. walt laughing in the crawlspace over the futility of his situation is too perfect. it's about to get real. i wonder how walt's going to get himself out of this jam? judging from the preview for the penultimate episode, looks like it might involve a little macgyver action. i also love the scene at the start of the episode, how gus had everything planned, even down to a team of doctors waiting nearby with a blood transfusion to flush out the poison, and even bags of blood waiting for jesse and mike, in case they needed emergency care after taking out the cartel. how can walter even go up against a guy like gus, who's always a few steps ahead of him? gus is the perfect foil for walter white, but is his end coming soon courtesy of our brilliant meth cook? hate to see gus gone. does that mean somehow walter rising higher up in the ranks of criminality? also, when walt drove his car into oncoming traffic, was he trying to kill hank in the process? murder by car? that sequence of events got me most concerned, has be come to this point where he's capable of killing his brother-in-law? but in the next scene, hank is a little battered but okay.