Yesterday Cindy was working until around 4, and then making runs to the store to refill water bottles for a couple of hours (one of the two household chores she is generally in charge of, the other being sorting laundry after it has come back up from the basement of doom's laundry room.)

We don't drink the tap water or use it for cooking, so we tend to go thru a gallon of water a day. Luckily we have a store, the Harvest Co-Op, on Mass Ave that has a water processing machine that filters, UV bacteria kills etc water effectively and cheaply, only 29 cents a gallon. If we had to buy spring water we'd be paying a minimum of $1 a gallon (I know because we had to do that the last few weeks thanks to the weather).

Why do we not trust the water? Easy, we have old pipes as does the city. Actually the city in places has older pipes then we like to think about. Cambridge, like Boston, is a very old city. Ever so often they get a water line break and discover a main that goes back to when the pipes were pine tarred wood, and have to schedule a major reconstruction project. Maintenance is NOT high on the agenda of the city budgets.

Kiralee and I spent the morning with her dealing with accounting (See the Haiku it inspired, and yes that's reflective of what dealing with Kiralee when doing accounting at home, but not at work.) We then made our way to the Bank, Post Office, had a rare lunch out together at Uno's in Harvard Square and a trip to Pandemonium Books & Games. We added a few books to our reading pile (in preparation for our March Airline trip across the country to Seattle), stopped at Newbury Comics (where I picked up an on-sale music album on CD that I wanted to try) and then headed home... where housework consumed much of the rest of the afternoon.

I'm glad to hear that my gift of a free subscription to Tinhouse magazine has been appreciated by my friend Greg aka The Rantmaster and that he's finding it inspiring in his writing efforts. It's an interesting literary publication, that comes out quarterly, which I've been reading now for over a year, and I find it a nice break from my usual selection of material. Chocked full of poetry, short stories and the occasional non-fiction 'unusual experience slice-of-life' it gives me an opportunity to observe styles and concepts of meaning and portrayal of character in dialogue that many forms of genre fiction lack.

Ballistic : Ecks vs Sever Kiralee and I got to watch this back on Thursday Night after her dance class (our weekly night for wine with dinner, for the health benefits of the wine so I don't end up with heart problems like my father did). This was a 2002 film I had never heard about or seen listed in the the theatres, but I took a chance on it from the used DVD bargain bins for a whopping $10. It was much better than expected and definitely worth the money I spent. A nifty combination of martial arts, gun-bunny, revenge and espionage storyline that is done in a reasonable manner without a wire-fu look or a ridiculous amount of CGI obviousness. The acting was good, Lucy Lui has a definite stage prescence that comes out even though her lines are sparse throughout the film. The plot actually holds up reasonably well, with no holes to drive freight trains thru. Enjoyable.

It Look's Like Bush has decided to make pre-emptive finanicial strikes on places in the USA that are unlikely to be voting for him in next year's elections. Target # 1 : San Francisco, according to truthout.org. The man remains a menace to our future. Let us hope something good might come out of the next election or we may all be looking to relocate to escape the economic and social repurcussions of his actions.

Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings.....

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