I was biking back from lunch with Stephanie and was mesmerized by the fall weather and foliage to stop at a bench and enjoy the atmosphere. So I'm lying using my helmet as a pillow with my head in the bucket underneath a slightly balding weeping willow tree.

Lunch with Stephanie was interesting. We hadn't had time alone to sit and talk in about a year. She had been looking forwards to it and wore eye make-up that her colleagues noticed when she arrived at work this morning. She brought my birthday present wrapped in a wrapping paper with smiley-faced cupcakes on it. Taped to the wrapping paper were two fortune cookie fortunes that she had saved among the many years we dated. They were from the Chinese restaurant near Washington Square that has a logo made from a fish head pressed in paint with a body from corn. The logo is on the fortunes.

Fortune number one: “a routine trip turns into an enchanting escapade”.
Fortune number two: “you are unique and find it difficult to live within conventional guidelines.”

The present inside was a calendar made on ophoto out of pictures of Leelin, her pug dog. It starts in November of 2004 and ends in October 2005. I loaned Stephanie my new portable disk drive at her office in the Museum with all of our old digital pictures so that she could copy them back to her laptop. As I was leaving the Museum of Science three buses were lined-up full of children chanting "Bye Bye Birdie" in honor of the Red Sox Cardinals series. It was a little unnerving to see kids drawn into a negative chant. It made me think of how easy it is to create hate in children for things far away that they don't understand. But what are you going to expect from a bus driver who wants to keep his kids excited about baseball?

Jeremy was chatting away with his many online female acquaintances this morning as I left this morning. His computer sounded like a musical instrument with all of the 'whling's. He had learned that we will have a full lunar eclipse tonight at about the same time as the end of the Red Sox game. It gives all of the superstitious people a chance to compare this game to a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Tomb Raider where the hero needs to line-up amulets to bring a clue into alignment at just the right moment in the astrological cycle.

Last night I didn't have improv class but I walked over anyways because I had forgotten. Since I didn't have a car or bike I walked across the Harvard bridge. I had my camera with me so I took some good shots of Boston at night with the reflections in the water and the moon blaring like the sun through the high exposure.

We were all meeting at Abe and Louie’s which was a terrible plan for watching the game because it meant a long sit down dinner. I pushed to do drinks at Unos before to catch some of the game. At Unos we were approached by the Jaeggermeister girls who were promoting by giving out lays and t-shirts. They recommended a blend including a honey liqueur mixed with Jaeggermeister called BerenJaegger. We passed on it.

Matt and Jeff were perfectly happy to spend the cash at Abe’s to get their now 35 dollar steak dishes. That is because Matt got dumped or at least got called into a break in his four year relationship with a nagging girlfriend Helen. Jeff was happy because he won $800 playing online poker earlier in the day.

Kate was shocked at the prices but went along and told the whole story of her coming out as a debutant when she was 19 back in North Carolina. At one point we were discussing racism and segregation and Matt mentioned that while people from Boston think it is integrated and liberal anyone from outside sees the city as very segregated into white communities and black ones that don't mix.

After dinner we watched the end of the game. Pedro pitched a great game holding a shut-out through seven and if Foulke hadn't given up a one run shot to Walker we would have had a shut out through 9. People weren't too excited about the win because there was less drama in it. The black guy sitting next to me kept hitting on every girl in our group as they came over one by one from the dinner table. He was a nice guy so we had a chuckle about it together.

On the drive back Kate was marveling about how great it must be for Sarah to have known what she wanted to do and to be doing it. Kate had wanted to be an actress back when she was coming out as a debutante. Her parents quashed that dream and she hasn’t been as excited about other things like she once was about becoming an actress. Now she is in publishing and she can't find the right job here in Boston. She wants to be a compositor which she thinks she will like better than her current job because her favorite part of her job is that she gets to use Quark and do layout. Her least favorite job is having long deadlines on things like cover art and after working 30 days to finalize a cover of a textbook to have her boss tell her that the brown colored covers never sell so she needed to go with another cover. Magazine jobs are mostly in New York. If she left she would probably have to break-up with her boyfriend because he wouldn't likely move given that his family owns a house in Gloucester that he goes to every weekend. We joked about making our own magazine but couldn’t find a segment that hasn’t already been covered or a new angle to the magazine business.

When we got home Sarah was acting insane. She told me to fire the cleaning people because she found white powder on her toiletry bag. Then she stubbed her toe on a trunk in the bedroom and started ranting about moving the trunk out. I used one of her tools and put her in a time out. Finally when she calmed down and was in bed she knew she would regret having a temper tantrum from being tired and recommended that she might act-up less if I threatened her with ultimatums like “I will leave you if you act like this.”