I started out today a little earlier than I had anticipated. Of course, Maura had emailed to confirm our meeting time, but somehow 10:30 am has the ability to sneeks up on a person — especially if that person had accidentally stayed up until 4 am. The night before really started off sometime in the mid-afternoon.

Michelle called to say she was on errand in the Square. Tracy had called moments before, and I told them both that Abby got first priority, as she may’ve been moving to her new appartment and I had offered to help. She, however, was too tired to bother leaving me to meet with the sisters Dionne in Davis.

I focused mainly on notational and layout design problems seiging my thesis; the theory of connections in an appendix on the geometry of principal bundles got some attention, too, but mostly Tracy and I listened to music while what appeared to be alumni members of a college anime society gathered in the back of the cafe.

By the time we finished deliberations and started to leave, my father called me to say he was in the area, ready to take the keys from the Stratus away. Indeed, the engine had seized. The oil intake pump did not take in a sufficient amount of oil, and, despite little warning from the instrument panel, the piston’s metal-on-metal interaction heated up the cars internals until they melted together. The entire process gave us cause to donate the car that once was to Special Olympics as scrap metal. My dad needed the keys, I suppose, to deactivate the LoJack, or, perhaps, he needed them simply for closure. Whatever the reason, I handed them over. He handed me a CD with pictures taken at the air show. To the left you can see a characteristic sample.

The three of us, Tracy, my dad, and I, respected tradition by dining at Boca Grande — the only restaurant my dad knows by name in Cambridge.

Afterward, it was anyone’s guess as to what I’d be doing or where. DJ had promised to come up to watch the game with me at a bar to be determined, but it had rained all day and his car isn’t well equipped to drive even in most climates, let alone mildly inhospitable ones. Tracy reminded me that I had not seen her new appartment nor had I met her 53″ wide-screen, high definition television.

So it was off to Watertown to see the TV and play with the cats and the rats. The academic year before last my U-mates and I babysat Tracy’s hermaphradite Siamese pure-bred Sky(e) — I don’t remember the correct spelling. Tracy, Sky(e), to you I acknowledge my gross insensitivity and send my deepest apologies — until she found an appartment that would allow the both of them. Since then she had been forced out of that appartment by water damage incurred by a fire in the appartment directly upstairs and moved to a much nicer place near Mount Auburn Cemetery, replete with its scenic and historic graves and prehistorically large slugs.

We watched the Sox versus Tampa Bay, flicking back and forth between some Chapel stand-up during the commercial breaks.

Inertia, as anyone will tell you, is a powerful force. Not wanting to walk all the way downstairs to wait for the bus, I decided to stay a bit longer, play with Castor, a rat Tracy is babysitting — sadly, his friend, Pollux, died some time ago — and watch bootleg DVDs of The State, a sketch comedy show first on MTV and then CBS from the mid-90s. Two full DVDs later, the bus had stopped running and it was time to walk home. A few hours later it was time to meet with Sullivan to discuss the grave matter of decimal representation. I think we both suffered ever so slightly.

Afterward, I napped until work at 3 pm, staying until 6 pm. Oh the life of a student worker! By this time I was long overdue for a meal. Uno’s, I recalled correctly, runs an all-you-can-eat special for only eight bucks on Tuesdays. So, I stolled to the Square, walked passed Uno’s, and pointedly entered The Coop to see if they carried a copy of Lisa Randall‘s new book Warped Passages. (Prof. Randall has, by the way, updated her photo on the faculty website since the release of her book. I showed Paul the new picture; we agreed it was nice. I would comment further, but I think it would be unprofessional of me, and, as Susannah proved to me recently, I have no way of knowing who reads this thing. That’s the point, I suppose.) They did. I knew it was either a new, casual physics text or dinner for two days.

I am happy to annouce both that I am a full three chatpers in and that Sox won again tonight.

Tomorrow I must wake up even earlier; this time to babysit Robert, a “fiesty and ubiquitous” five year old, son to our resident dean. (Properly speaking, Catherine is our Allston Burr Senior Tutor, but who’s that proper these days?)

Maybe Robert will walk away knowing a little something about splitting exact sequences, and I’ll walk away with money enough for dinner all this week.