— tapioca world tour

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February, 2009 Monthly archive

Found out today that our landlords are indeed quite serious about returning to Cape Verde stat — which potentially means compromising on a lower price for the house, and both them and us moving out. Stat. We didn’t take the threat of moving very seriously until a large family swarmed the house today, accompanied by the ambitious realtor (as seen in Landlords Try To Sell The House During Housing Crash – Take One). I wasn’t home to witness the spontaneous showing, but to DD it seemed like a potential sell, with a potential offer. Which brings me to a call to internet people in my neighborhood or beyond:

Do you know of any apartments opening up (in the next ~1-3 months) in Savin Hill? Cheap apartments? And by cheap I mean 12 Benjamins or less, sans multiple deposits, because we have been spoiled here by our kind landlords. Small places are ok. Just has to be near the T (JFK works too, or really anywhere on either end of the red line between SH & Alewife) and absolutely rid of even the possibility of insects. We are clean! So clean! And responsible and studious and audio/visual and respectable professionals beyond our 20s, without pets or cigarettes.

Yes, I am still bent on moving to Europa in summer/fall of 2010 with DD in tow, but we need a place until then. Kendall would work too, since I spend 88% of my time at MIT anyway, although I would sorely miss Savin Hill. Dear Boston internet people I may or may not know, if you hear of anything, can you please share?

During my workshop class last night, our modern artist teacher gave us a 15-minute assignment to find someone and ask them to draw us a map — of anything, anywhere. (The session was on the history of maps.) I found W. online and, from her dorm room in Rome, she drew this map of her walk to school:

i walk by the jewish ghetto, by a temple. then by a fountain with turtles, called the turtle fountain, whatever that is in italian. well over the tiber island first.

map of rome walk

*** UPDATE ***
Part II of our mapping assignment was to design an animated version of the map in Scratch, a programming app for kids. E. is a video game programmer and turned W.’s map into this interactive game (controlled via your arrow keys). I had it embedded but the music kept playing automatically, which was annoying, so just follow the link.

Uncle and niece got quite competitive the other day.

playing on wii

So apparently there will be six more weeks of winter, although you wouldn’t know it from the random warm front we’ve gotten today. But you might know it from the mounds and mounds of snow that have turned a permanent brown and, like the lawn chairs jammed hastily into parking spots all over Dorchester, will not disappear.

It’s the day before classes start. I slept late (unintentionally, kinda) to commemorate my last 24 hours of quasi-leisure, and now I’m scanning chapters on the elements of documentary and printing out hoards of packets to read this week. And so it begins.

I also signed up for another pottery class that I don’t have time for. I’m trying to work on task commitment these days, and clay is just so dang relaxing. Hopefully this semester I will come away with more than just one unglazed bowl. I had a bunch of interesting videos to post for you this week, but the only one I can remember is this — a neat musical mashup to the economic crisis, courtesy Gizmodo: