2003-08-11

It's really easy to fall behind on this diary thing. There are several perspectives on this thing and one is the documentation aspect, so I want to stick to it. Not that it's real documentation like a real diary would be -- I don't think I can do that kind of honesty, publicly or not.

���� Ben's in town. We had dinner last week at Mama Mia's on the Plymouth waterfront. We had dinner also at the Emond's on Friday, and I ate fish! I don't currently eat meat but I think I should eat fish, since they're rubbery and strong and it'd be good to be rubbery and strong. Unfortunately I've never liked fish. But they served fish and it wasn't smelly or oily or wet or springy any of the things I dislike. So I ate it and it was good. I mean not good but you know, perfectly good. Adequate as something to eat. Neutral. And the visit was pretty fun. I'm a relative newcomer to the family, so I feel a bit awkward there sometimes, and Friday it was just me and Ben visiting.

���� After the dinner Ben and I did the daycare until midnight, since there was an open house Saturday morning. I also had to get up early to mow the daycare wilderness before all the people showed up. It rained. I slept most of Saturday afternoon.

���� Sunday I mowed half of the home lawn, went swimming, and installed the grill cloth on speaker cabinet. I got it last week at a little repair shop near Berkelee College of Music. I walked down there at lunch time and asked around for a repair place. When I found it, the three guys inside were like grown-up versions of the three geek kids in Sixteen Candles. They gave me a cloth for $10.
���� Here are current pictures: front, back.
���� What's left is I need to get a new piece of wood for the back, attach the rubber button-sheets to the circuit board, and get a piece of glass to cover the display. And maybe a bit of tape around jacks.

���� Last week I was thinking a lot about The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. In the novel, a guy goes up an escalator, first floor to mezzanine, returning to work after buying shoelaces. The book has a ton of fun details and I was thinking of all the things I like about it -- the fantastic number of footnotes, the narrator's inclusion of catalog numbers for the records he likes, how his deliberateness with everything convinces him that he knows things. There's one part where he describes having ordered a rubber stamp with his address on it to make paying bills more efficient. He imagines the chain of events that his order initiated: the receipt of the order in a faraway rubber stamp fabrication facility, the transmission of request from receiver to stamp cutter, the cutting of the stamp from rubber, etc. It doesn't take much time with the book to start feeling actual mechanical interconnectedness everywhere, among all the modern elements. It's really interesting. The protagonist drives me nuts, but it's a great book and you should read it.

���� Later, after reading an article about the Cosmos 1 Solar Sail Spacecraft and a review of the previous night's Timberlake/Aguilera concert, something occurred to me that fans of all kinds might want to know: At an Aguilera concert for example, like the one I read about, hot stage lights generate billions of light particles that fly off of Christina's bare ass at the speed of light, straight into concertgoers' eyeballs. It's not something that can happen while watching tv -- only in person. Physical particles similar to those that may soon push a spacecraft are first on Christina's butt, and then --almost instantaneously-- they're in your eyeball. I guess this may or may not mean something to you depending on how obsessed and/or geeky and/or fetishistic you are. Ben and I were thrilled and astounded by the ridiculousness, although we'd just spent an hour talking about this Ferrari, so we were pretty worked up.

���� I got my mom to play a little Super Smash Bros. yesterday, but she starts to feel guilty and says she has stuff to do. Parents have this annoying insistence in believing that video games are "addictive" and bad. Meanwhile they're watching Trading Spaces and Law and Order four hours a day. Sure, there are a ton of kids who do nothing but play games, but that's not the fault of the games. "Addictive" is just the wrong word. And nobody calls reading addictive but people can get more soaked up in a book than anything.
���� Either way, my Gamecube pretty much just sits there since I have little time / no competitors. My mom's not too hard to hook because you know she wants to play, she's just afraid. I had her on the line yesterday -- when she saw that Zelda could change into Sheik she was definitely interested -- but then my dad came in and she got spooked.

���� Provided it doesn't rain before I get the chance, today looks like a definite bike day. Behind the bogs are some nice trails that are constantly evolving, since dirt bikes and ATVs are always tearing them up. I'd rather they not, but if if it's gonna be that way it's at least a nice result that I get a varying terrain.


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