with drew arriving in the late afternoon, i made one last cleanup this morning: storing my junk bikes in the basement, putting away the dishes, clearing the countertop and coffee table, and sweeping the backyard.

i took the motorcycle to belmont, where my parents came back from a supply run at costco/restaurant depot. they brought back some turkey and cheese wraps which i had some for a late lunch as well as cooking up a few buffalo wings. i returned to cambridge around 4:00 to wait for drew's arrival.

drew finally showed up around 5:30. i heard the hesitant scrapes of luggage wheels outside before i even saw him. i helped him with his heavy suitcase, which seemed to be nearly bursting with books. introduced through bruce, drew's a canadian architectural history professor who will be teaching a few courses at MIT for a semester. we hung out on my backyard deck chatting about school districts and home renovations. we continued the conversation in the kitchen, finally into the living room.

it was getting late so we grabbed dinner across the street at the thai/vietnamese place. drew revealed his unconventional upbringing where he was enrolled in a then-experimental french immersion school, hence his early bilingualism. later he took german in high school and italian in college (apparently you need a lot of language skills in architectural history). i told him about the hubway bike rental, which might be a possible mode of transportation for him if we can't find him a suitable bike from my basement collection.

other topics of conversation included: whole foods, sizing up an apartment floor plan, richardsonian romanesque, working on the school newspaper, etching iterations, québécois french, chinese kinship, camberville squares, green/orange subway line extensions, matrix clock, cambridge/somerville town line, bangor canadian transit stop, ice blockage leaking slate roof, jstor, artstor, morning coffee, museum field trips, dewey decimal system, fridge share layout (horizontal versus vertical), LED lit storage closet, virtues of romney care, and 3% pittsburgh municipal wage tax.

we're roughly the same age, so we have that in common. and since canadian and american are pretty much interchangeable on a cultural level, we get each others pop culture references, including a shared love of 80's music. the next 4 months should go along pretty smoothly.