i had a hard time sleeping. normally i go to bed with the door open, but since i have a roommate now, i kept it closed, which created poor circulation. i tossed and turned, trying to find that shifting cool spot on the bed. i then woke up earlier than usual (8:30) in anticipation of the morning phone call from my craig's list contact. i tiptoed out of my room so as to not disturbing my still sleeping roommate, but i was shocked when i realized he'd already left for work. here is the kind of roommate i like: never see him in the morning, works late, sleeps early, never cooks. if i'd known it'd be this easy, i would've never made any fuss about his stay here.

in the midafternoon i made a quick stop to the korean supermarket in union square to get some mung bean sprouts for my mother (she uses them in her pad thai recipe). surprisingly they didn't have any stock, but in a bit of what i thought to be thinking outside the box, i noticed a delivery trunk outside with several open cartons of bean sprouts. so i grabbed one and paid inside. unfortunately when i dropped them off at the cafe, but mother told me the sprouts were kind of old and barely usable. i went to belmont briefly to check up on hailey and to also water the garden before returning home to cambridge.

a loud noise that i thought was a collapsing scaffolding turned out to be the sound of a thunderstorm. today's warm weather was finally favorable enough to create isolated spots of torrential downpours. a check of the local doppler radar showed bright red and yellow patches directly over the city. the sky quickly turned dark and soon the crackle of raindrops hitting the back of the air conditioning unit was all i could hear. just as quickly as it started to rain it also stopped, with strong sunshine warming all the new puddles.

my craig's list contact never did call me back, although a few other folks with tv for sale got in touch with me. i finally had to e-mail him asking if the tv was still available. he wrote back saying he tried calling but nobody answered and said i could come by in the early evening to grab the set. when i called my parents asking if i could borrow the car, my mother told me they actually have a spare tv i can have. so all my craig's list work was for naught, as i wrote everyone back apologizing i wouldn't be buying their tv's after all.

it was supposed to do a work day but once i learned that there wasn't a deadline tomorrow, my motivation to code dropped to zero.

my father brought over their spare set, a small white 14" GE tv/vcr combo. he actually found it on the side of the street a while back thinking it was an old imac. the unusually large remote was taped to the top of the tv at the time, but my father couldn't find anymore. i tried to add more channels with the universal remote function on my remotes, but the GE tv/combo must be a very old model because none of the codes i used worked. fortunately my father did manage to find the missing remote after all and i went down to the cafe to pick it up along with some lychee nuts and these tiny sweet yellow plums.

besides the heat, i felt something else last night: that familiar throat tickle i get at the end of the summer and the start of autumn, the first hint that ragweed season is about to begin. as i've gotten older, i'm become more allergic to things, which hurt the credibility of my personal theory that allergies are also psychosomatic. i've become lactose intolerant and every fall i suffer a bit from hay fever. i don't need a throat tickle to know it's ragweed season, since i've already seen them growing in the community garden. ragweed is funny because it's hard to tell when they're blooming, but i figured once i see they're already slowly starting to make my life a little less comfortable.

i'm going through a sandwich phase at the moment: a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, then a ham mustard sandwich for dinner. it's just too hot to do any cooking right now, but maybe i'll be inspired to make something next week.

my roommate returned home around 8:00. he thanked me for getting him a replacement television. "you left pretty early this morning," i said. he told he still hadn't gotten over his jetlag and woke up early. i found out a little bit more about him. from what i was able to gather, his research concerns the imaging of distant galaxies. i noticed he had very western tastes in food and he admitted developing a fondness for things like cheese during his years spent in europe. he said one of things he wanted to do during his month long stay in boston was to enjoy as much cheese as possible (there isn't as much cheese varieties in china, if at all) and i recommended a few nearby cheese shops. my roommate commented on how clean i keep the house. i smiled, "it's all an act. normally, when i'm living alone, there'd be dirty dishes in the sink."

and the best thing about having project runway on lifetime? no more annoying disaronno commercials!