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On Friday night Sarah and I went over to Kate and Matt's for a poker night. We had eaten at Zaftigs at the bar where our waitress apologized for ignoring us every time that she came to do anything. We were watching the televisions trying to make sense of the Entertainment channel programming without closed captioning. We were coming from the Sprint store where I had gone on a mission to port my number again from the old ChannelWave to Sarah's Sprint account. The attempt to transfer the number is now well into it’s third week with little sign of a resolution in sight.

I began by getting a letter written from Peter that worked for John to transfer his number. Since the Sprint store is within walking distance we went there and they determined that Sarah could add me on her plan at no cost. All I needed to do was buy a new phone to port to which I did for $20. The phone was not going to port over quickly but when it didn’t transfer in three days as expected I returned to the store with Sarah again. This time I got a combination of the helpful person who had worked with me the first time and another man who was a new trainee. The trainee was about thirty years senior to the helpful kid who appeared to know everything about the operations of Sprint wireless. They are funny in the store because they don’t ever use a landline phone. Everything goes through the wireless phones. I had brought the letter again and they analyzed it called a bunch of people and finally resolved that everything was taken care of. This was on Monday and I was contacted by the Commerce5, formerly ChannelWave HR department, eagerly looking to wrap-up the telephone port. I told them it would only be a day or more then I could return the phone and declare the port complete but by Friday I realized something was not working right. So I went to the Sprint store before we went to Zaftigs for dinner and as I walked through the door I received a call from the Sprint porting center letting me know that the port had failed because the port didn't check-out through the Cingular porting center. I was in the Sprint store at the time but since they had finally resorted to calling me I tried to work things out on the phone. Unfortunately my only recourse was to refer the Sprint folks to the Commerce5 HR department, which they can’t call until Tuesday afternoon because of the long weekend. I am not that worried about it all because my phone is still working. I'll see what happens in the next few weeks. This reminds me of the Launch/Yahoo! shenanigans I had a few months ago trying to pay two dollars a month for Internet radio.

We got right to playing poker but because we are the bad news bears of poker we had to write the order of hands down again. We also had the wrong amounts of chips for the amount of money that we each put into the pot. This led to the realization three hours into the poker game that everyone, even folks who were losing their shirts, were "up" about three or four dollars. We also didn't do a great job of maintaining continuity during the hands because people kept disappearing during the game or wandering off to the bathroom. Sarah was sick with some stomach ailment and asked Matt for PeptoBismol. He didn't have any but instead collected his full complement of non-perscription drugs and offered them to us. We were playing with five people, the fifth being Meredith, Kate’s chef in training friend.

Meredith is currently working the pasta station at Olive's in the North End. The pasta station is low on the ladder but the foot into the door of the chef world. Everyone asks her to provide the pasta from her six burners worth of pasta and lets her know that regardless of how long it will be before they need the pasta that it will be two minutes before they need it. Meredith has been worried about the apocalypse lately due to the problems with mudslides and the tsunami. She even warned some of her friends about it. We discussed what you are supposed to do when the apocalypse is coming. Some ideas were to stock-up on duct tape, pray, build an ark, and figure out where the local fall-out shelters are located. Another idea was to bury a bus in the ground like the people did for the Y2K crisis. Meredith's cooking prowess got me very interested in the potential of a wicked good brunch the next morning. Meredith and the Kate and Matt team did make the brunch the next day using the money pooled from the poker game that everyone decided to contribute to the breakfast rather than cashing out. Sarah and I had thought we'd make it back to their place by ten but we made it over at 11:30 instead. During the prep time for the breakfast Kate was mentioning that we should all go to Mohican Sun to show off our new found gambling talents. She mentioned that she had been there to see DA-LEE. I assumed she meant that she had seen a Dali art exhibit but she clarified that she meant Dolly Pardon. Matt was busy trying to edit pops and squeaks out of a recording his uncle made of a vinyl album.

Matt and I had played squash in the morning on Friday before the poker game and I must continue to report that I lost to Matt three times this week. He beat me on three different occasions. I can try to blame the time he hit my head with the squash ball and caused me permanent squash brain damage but the real reason continues to be that I am terrible at squash and still have made no progress towards obtaining a respectable backhand. We played again after we ate the big brunch, talked more about movies, talked about the decorated gates in Central park, and watched the Sci-fi channel Raider's of the Lost Ark. Talk about the apocalypse. The end of Raiders is actually very funny because Lucas gives you the impression that there is a big warehouse full of these lost arks and similar relics where it was filed away as if the government gets about thirty of these lost arks of the covenant per week. I posted an ad on craigslist for more squash partners. Nobody has replied yet. I’ve found that craigslist is like a defective genie in a bottle. You can ask it for anything you wish for and you will usually get some bad facsimile of what you were looking for.

Last night I finally made it out to the Mainstage show at ImprovBoston. Before the show I ran into my old ImprovBoston classmates from a year ago who graduated five sessions ahead of me. They now have their own troupe and are performing on Saturday nights at 6PM. I gave them a hard time for not having put me on the mailing list to see them perform. Sharon and crew did a great job with the Mainstage show. The room was completely packed. Among the funniest gags in the show was one where one man was pretending to be an architect and the audience was asked about what he would propose for the lawn. The audience member suggested lawn gnomes. They then proceeded to transition into a scene where all of the cast were different lawn gnomes chatting during their daily work of standing around. It got me to thinking that lawn gnomes would be very popular among jews if they didn’t look so much like little Christian characters with their Santa-like hat. I could make a lot of money selling Jewish looking lawn gnomes, dressed in a traditional Chasidic outfit, talits, and a kippa.

After the show I went to a new wine bar called the Z bar that is an offshoot of the Abbey Lounge with Aaron, Mike, and a girl Aaron knows. Mike knows everyone at the Z Bar because he is friends with the owner. Aaron had gotten an acting job being a Russian who got shot through nefilm.com, a site where filmmakers post their wishes and get them fulfilled with some facsimile of what they were looking for. I’ll be looking for work there. I also might audition for the ad posted on ImprovBoston’s site regarding South City Theatre next weekend. Aaron's female friend was having a tough day including not having brought a coat out in the middle of winter, leaving her ATM card in the ATM machine. She mentioned that it would be a problem for her to not have income for a few weeks after she cancelled her card. She also had been enamored by an 18 year old Northeastern student/audience member named Madeleine was called onto the stage to perform with the troupe because it was her birthday.

Things have continued to go downhill in my technology world. At 2:00 when I got home last night the hard drive on my computer in the bedroom decided that it wanted to do it’s best jet engine impersonation.

Mack went missing the other day from my parents' house. These people at global pet finder need to get their product to market finally so we can start retrieving Mack. It looks like Sarah and I will have double pugs next weekend because both Alex and Stephanie are traveling and leaving us with their pug dogs. Leelin and Manju can finally have their Valentine’s day celebration.

Jorey and I have been trying to get together for about three weeks. He mentioned that he had felt violated by the blog but he clarified in an email when I asked him what he wanted me to change with this…

“if i wanted you to change anything, i would have already emailed. i'm
exaggerating when i say violated. i was just surprised. i did a search after your sister mentioned she had seen my name a bunch of times. not a big deal, but privacy is scary between blogs and camera phones. we're not going to see a 1984 version of big brother (unless you live in china); it will be more distributed than that. put that in your next blog. J”