I will be blogging irregularly over the next four days. We’re flying out this afternoon to Seattle to look for a house. Now that my start date is less than six weeks away—wow, time has flown—it’s time to bite the bullet and step up to find a house. We’re pretty excited; we’ve been renting for the last four and a half years of marriage and for longer before that, so the prospect of getting equity is pretty attractive. If anyone can recommend a really nice house in Queen Anne or Magnolia, we’d be most appreciative…

Quiet day so far here in the North End. Lots of errands. I think that all the errands I used to do have expanded to fill the extra time I have now that classes are over.

But it’s been a productive day—returned some DVDs and the rental car we got yesterday to get Lisa to her endodontist appointment; emptied my locker at Sloan; and finally remembered to get my hair cut. Small victories as I check each item off in my organizer.

Sitting in the barber’s chair, I watched the workmen from NStar disappear beneath the road surface. “Quite a show you’ve got out there,” I said. The barber said that this was another gas leak—the second this year in more or less the same spot, right under our window. Later I passed one of the workmen holding a length of corroded pipe. “Normally they last longer than 40 years, but this one…” Heap of soft gray sub-street dirt, 200-year old fill and former river bottom, on the sidewalk beside him as the schoolkids walk by on the Freedom Trail en route to Paul Revere’s house.