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I am back into the desperately seeking parking mode. I hadn't realized how desperate for parking I was until Sarah and I went to park the cars this evening after eating a full meal of chicken tikka masala, nan, and samosas from Rani while watching a couple of Seinfeld episodes. The first was a group of vignettes about everyone traveling on the subway in New York that I was watching with the commentary on and learning things like Julia Louis Dreyfus was pregnant the whole time. The other episode was about Jerry becoming friends with Keith Hernandez from the Mets. The Seinfeld crew kept reviewing the glory of the Mets from 1986 which was also the downfall of the Sox in '86 but it was a funny episode. Luckily we don't have to worry about the curse of the Bambino any more in Boston.

Sarah was very tired and we were out of toilet paper so I went to the video store and Walgreens. When I returned I had expected Sarah to have cleaned-up the Indian food but she was just sleeping on the couch. I was trying to figure out how to get her up so I started watching the next Seinfeld DVD which quickly prompted her to get ready to go. So Sarah went out in her ducky pajamas with me to get on the road to seek a parking spot.

The basic plan we had devised hinged on the concept that Allston is more permissive about parking than Brookline. So we were going to drive both cars to Allston and ditch the PT Cruiser at a space on Commonwealth Ave. near the BSC. I would then bicycle to the BSC tomorrow morning and workout then pick-up the car en route to Burlington. I could then return it to the same location the next night and bicycle back to Brookline so that we could then pick-up food and rent snow equipment for the ski trip on Friday that Sarah has been carefully coordinating to have 18 people come skiing with us in two houses at Sugarloaf.

So the first mistake I made was that I forgot to bring my cellular phone. The next mistake was to follow Sarah. She led me to the gym and then past the parking spaces that were all full on Commonwealth. Rather than turning right on Harvard she then proceeded to drive all the way down Comm. Ave back to the intersection of Comm. and St. Paul. While there was a space available in front of the Sunset Grill Cantina the sign above it clearly indicated the third and final problem. This problem is that in Allston they have street cleaning from 12:01 AM – 8:00 AM every Thursday. As a Wednesday night we just were out of luck. Sarah was getting frustrated at this point and gave me permission to drive in front of her since I was looking for the space and not her. I tried to get back to Harvard and Comm., where the gym is through back roads but they don’t work and they led us back to Comm. Ave. and St. Paul. So I made the decision to take the risk of the $30 ticket for tomorrow morning by parking overnight. I'll try to wake early to move the car from the side street where I parked it since it does warn that there is no parking there from 8 AM – 10 AM but that is separate from the general overnight parking ban throughout Brookline.

This is why my car this morning was parked in Newton underneath a pile of snow in my parent’s driveway. So, after editing the postcard for my Improv class because the time was incorrect, I hit the road for Viapoint. We have a show coming-up that everyone is welcome to attend if they are interested. The dates are March 20 and April 3rd both Sundays and seating is expected to be highly competitive with 11 folks graduating in the class and limited seats in the theatre. The recommendation is that people should reserve early and arrive at least 20 minutes early to claim seats. To do so you can call the box office at 617-576-1253 or reserve online at www.improvboston.com. Anyways I took the T to Newton but I accidentally walked out to St. Paul and Beacon instead of going to Brookline Village. Since I needed to take the D-line this meant I needed to travel into Kenmore Square to catch the train out to Newton. I caught the C-line up Beacon without a problem, but about ten trains passed me by at the Kenmore station where the contract escalator repair team was complaining that the Otis repair people don’t know what they are doing as they stood with four people looking into a hole they had created by removing the bottom steps of the escalator. I was relieved when the D train finally arrived but I had already read most of a scene from Ininite Jest about how the Enfield Tennis Academy would play a mock nuclear war game with tennis balls.

So when I arrived in Newton I started to clear off the car. My mom saw me from the window and knocked on the window to let me know that she was home. I left the car running in the driveway to warm-up and then went inside and we greeted each other. She was holding down Gemini from pouncing on me and was furious at her dance/improv/storytelling teacher who had signed her up for a class a month ago and told her no dance experience was necessary and then cancelled just the night before. We chatted a bit about home remodeling because it was on my mind.

I had gone to meet Jeff K. in Newton on Monday morning. He lives in a newly remodeled Victorian house that was completely gutted before he moved into it. The house is filled with large black and white photographs that his father took as an amateur photographer and pictures of the house before it was rebuilt. Jeff has been so focused on home improvement and interior decorating that he is thinking of building a business around it using some clever web ideas. I can’t let anyone know about his idea since it is too early but it was similar to my idea relating to having a virtual assistant sell you clothing online by dressing a picture of you in clothing from various brands and then shipping a fitted order to your door like a catalog. The "fashion consultant" would then be compensated with a commission for making the sale and could be some stay at home mom or a college student looking to make some extra cash. Among the other interesting things I saw at Jeff's place was a large house made out of paper in his eight year old daughter’s room. The house was built entirely of old ChannelWave stationery. Jeff also is convinced that a ghost lives in the house because his daughter told him that she was talking to a woman in the attic named Jane Woodman or something like that and upon researching the history of the house there was a woman with the same name who had lived there many years ago.

By the time I made it into Burlington today it was about 11:30 but since I had finished off the egg salad and eaten the last bagel with olive cream cheese I was able to fend-off my hunger for lunch for a few more hours. I did manage to make some progress on my to do list but I keep getting the feeling that one of the most important things we need to do is to resolve a lot of the gaps in the product itself that keep it from shining in front of the press people we are collecting to present it to. Everything needs to work to succeed. I did feel good when I was reading an article about Blinkx where the CEO was interviewed and was excited that the $10M invested in the company wouldn’t be running out for another year so it wasn’t that important that they didn’t have any revenue yet. At least we aren’t a high flying VC backed start-up with a lot of people to please. I also spent about a half an hour looking for a parking space on craigslist and found a couple of options. Once I got home and settled from the parking fiasco I went to post on craigslist and someone had just posted a spot that is $120 and 24 hour parking not too far away. They didn’t take emails and it was 10:30 so I gambled and called them. I got an answering machine telling me that they were probably in the garden harvesting the fruits of their labor. I was hoping to enjoy the fruits of my parking space hunting labors. Hopefully they will call me tomorrow and I can put the parking worries behind me.

I also have been feeling a void after letting go of the two pugs who were over for the weekend. I think I know what it is like to be a foster parent or a grandparent. It is tricky to gain and lose the responsibility of full care for a pet. I was enjoying playing with both the dogs and even after Leelin had to go home on Sunday night we still had Manju for another two days. She kept looking cuter every day. My guess was that she was losing weight because of all the exercise she got with Leelin but I also thought she was very happy to have had a pug friend to play with. Manju clearly was the dominant, more energetic pug dog. She had been nudging Leelin with her nose when Leelin was so exhausted that he lay flat on the ground refusing to play. The funny thing about the void from the pets leaving is that the four days is just long enough for me to develop a routine of walking, greeting, and playing with the dogs. The routine left me imagining ghost dogs throughout my day that I keep thinking I see when I wake-up, as I'm sitting on the couch, or when I am leaving. It will help when I pack away the dog bed.

Everyone has been showing me the new automated pet training product on the cover of the Sharper Image. It is just the treat release system that would be a component of the full pet video game system. They want $170 for it. It bodes well for the future of pet electronic appliances. The important part for me is to have the pets and keep them happy. I like to see pets happy.

I had finally gotten around to watching Ghost in the Shell 2 – Innocence on Monday night. The movie is much like the first one including a lot of difficult to decipher Japanese cyber babble like arguments about what Descartes meant and how the hacker was thwarted because of a trick relating to erasing of words like they did with golem the clay god. The movie is worth watching just for the amazing opening scene of an incredible CGI of an electronic fetus developing into a gynoid robot meant to be a sex toy. To the best I could gather the movie was based on the idea that little girls were abducted by the Yakuza, Japanese mafia, in order to have their souls/ghosts imprinted into the gynoid sex dolls because the innocence of the children made the sex dolls more attractive to customers. The girls were trapped in matrix like chambers to provide this service. The sex dolls had gone mad and killed people in horrifying crimes to draw attention and cause and investigation.

The main character, the cyborg detective who has weird screws for eyes, kept trying to secretly take care of a large floppy eared basset hound that became a weakness because he had regular habits of buying dog food. The cyborg detective gets hacked into and tried to shoot himself and all the people in a convenience store as he was buying the dog food. The movie was threaded with a theme of innocence and the thin bridge between the inanimate and cognizant. They focused on how animals and children are all forms of innocent beings and people always want to create dolls that are like those innocent beings that will eventually need to evolve into sentient and potentially dangerous creatures to fulfill our fantasies of them. The idea was out there that birth is just creation and evolution is moving from the inanimate machine to the machine that has a ghost in it. At least that was my read on it from the sub-titles.



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