Sunday March 30

(March 30, 2008)

March is over already. One more day to March. Did I enjoy it? It was a blur. It feels like I totally just flipped the calendar to March like, a week ago, and here I am getting ready to flip to April.

I realized just now that this is probably the last "free" day I'll have until the end of April.

I slept diabolically late today, even for a Sunday. I'm evil and I don't care. Seriously, last free day for nearly a month.

I woke up to sunshine and clear blue sky, left my incredibly comfy bed, shuffled out to the living room in my rumpled Boston Red Sox T-shirt -- one of two I sleep in. Joe was pacing, because he paces when he's on the phone, and he was on the phone with his sister. He was so jubilant in his repeated congratulations that I thought something big had happened. I stood by expectantly, fixed on his face to see if I could read it, ready to share the joy of some ginormously wild news of Jennifer's like "It's a miracle, they don't know how they missed it but I'm having twins" or something equally worthy of such elation. But when he hung up, the big news was just that Jennifer and munk had found a WII, finally. They'd wanted one since Christmas.

"Oh," I said. Happy for them, they have been actively hunting Best Buys and Circuit Citys for four months. But anyone who knows me knows I'm not quite as bonkers about the WII as the rest of the world. It's fun, of course. Anything is fun for ten minutes -- shoveling snow, baking cookies or washing a car is a blast for the first ten minutes, don't you think? But there's a limit to the fun. The novelty of the WII wore off in about an hour, especially given the family favorite games are bowling and golf. Golf, I'll never understand. Maybe when I'm old. Bowling can be a blasty blast, but for how long? How long can you bowl, really. If you can bowl for more than three hours at once, you've really got to love yourself some serious bowling, and more power to you.

In life, I've noticed a distinct difference between people who grew up enjoying multi-player games, and those of us who grew up left to entertain ourselves. The Kowalski clan definitely falls into the former category -- any time, they're up for any kind of game. Hub's family is like that, too. Like the Kowalskis, there were three kids in the Sinnock house. They'll play anything! Games form a big part of any social gathering.

Makes a big diff', whether you grew up with a lot of games around.

Then there's me, with the books and the solitary-ness. I can read for days. I can assemble 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles for many straight hours. Crosswords, I'll complete them one after another all day long. I draw, I paint, I form and bake polymer clay beads that later I patiently string into bracelets, then un-string and store for some grand project that never materializes.

So yeah, me, not so much with the WII and the board games. I play 'em, but I suspect my lack of competitiveness throws people off. They're whooping, jumping up, pointing into each other's faces yelling "HA! HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW!?" and I'm just sitting there with my little joystick going, "Heh."

Anyway. Games schmames.

We got dressed and headed over to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. I'd never been there, despite living a couple of miles away for all these years. It's a gorgeous place. I kept picturing it as a residence, though that building never really was -- not the whole place, anyway. Mrs. Gardner lived in an apartment on the fourth floor during and after its construction, but she and her husband had it built especially for her art collection, right down to the courtyard. But still, would be something to live---

Oh my GOD. My neighbors must die. I'm sitting here trying to string some nice thoughts together about the museum, and every five minutes I hear:

"Ffffffffffffffff. Ffffffffffffffff.. Ffffffffffffffff. Ffffffffffffffff..."

Thirty times.

Thirty times, every five minutes.

All. Weekend. Long.

My neighbors seem to have left for the weekend (I hope just the weekend!) leaving SOMETHING on. 'the fuck IS it?

We put our ears to the wall, then Joe stood on the bed holding the ceiling, to see if it is coming from next door or upstairs. We think it's next door.

"But what IS it?"

Joe thinks it's a cell phone or pager, on a wooden table, that has received a text or call and has been vibrating its "incoming message" alert every five minutes for two days.

There it goes again.

If this keeps up I'm going to have to sleep on the couch.