every single person that i've hired to work on the house from general contractor to electrician to plumber to window guys and now floor guys have delayed my home renovation schedule one way or another, promising to show up for work on so and so day but ending up not showing up at all. this marks the third occasion where the floor guys were suppose to come but ended up canceling. can i really trust a crew that's stood me up on three separate occasions? unfortunately, i'm at their mercy. i've already paid for all the materials, piles of wood planks sitting idle in my bedrooms. so it's not entirely my fault that over 2 months later i'm still not moved into my new place. home renovation is one of those things were you think it's going to take a certain amount of time but then you should double it in order to get the actual time it's going to take to do it. and each delay bumps out the schedule even more. is this the kind of fun project managers have to go through?
so instead of spending a day watching the crew put in new floors for the bedrooms, i found myself at a loss as to what to do with the rest of my day. 
so i fell back on the old standby of paint stripping, getting a little bit more done on the master bedroom's door frame. my father and i also moved the refrigerator from the kitchen into the hallway (using a flatbed scooter borrowed from the used furniture next to their cafe), so the floor guys can sand underneath the fridge. putting the fridge in the hallway isn't such a bad idea, it allows easy equidistant access to food from both the kitchen and the living room. because i had jeremy put in an outlet in the hallway, the fridge is totally functionally, no food will have to spoil because of the relocation.
close to noon i got a surprise call from mike lee, my western china roommate, who lives just a block away from me (but only for 2 more days, then he moves 4 blocks away from me). we arranged to go out for lunch in 20 minutes. 
40 minutes later he shows up on my doorstep (i actually had to go outside and signal to him where i lived, he looked lost, even though he lives just a few houses down from me). i gave him the tour, the place looking a little bit out of the ordinary with zero furnitures and a fridge in the middle of the hallway. we walked to the porter exchange, where i noticed mike was sort of pale for a kid from sacramento. i remember when i first met him two years ago, i thought he was black because he was so tanned! that's what a new england summer will do to you, i was secretly proud that i was darker than mike. we ended up going for some cafe mami action. i had the spicy beef bowl lunch special for $5 with a $3 green tea milk shake. mike, who goes to harvard law, gave me the inside scoop on legally blonde, how a first year harvard law student would never get such a posh pad as depicted in the movie ("you get something like a cell," he informed me), and how a first year law student would never get to defend a murder trial. we also shared what television shows we were watching, i told him not to watch alias or gilmore girls so that those two shows can remain cool for people like me. there was a wall of people waiting for seats behind us, i felt some pressure to hurry up and eat and go. mike's wellesley girlfriend jenna stopped by a few times (she just happened to be hanging out in porter exchange as well), eventually giving me a ride back to my place.
when i came back to the house my father had already left, having wired the two bedrooms to the central switchbox in the hallway closet. 
i went ahead and put ethernet plugs on the cat5 cables. the connection between the master bedroom and the closet isn't working, so i'll have to redo that, 
but i'm going to have to redo all of them anyway because i realized they needed to be spliced to the cat5 wall modules. i think also also damaged the ethernet port on my ibook by forcing a handcrafted ethernet cable that just didn't want to go in. i have to go buy a new box of connectors. the ones that i got from leviton are too tight, i just want some cheapy generic brand connectors.
i wish major league baseball will strike tomorrow. the red sox are sucking really bad, and it'd give them the perfect excuse to sweep away a lackluster season underneath the carpet. at the mediocre rate that they're going, there's no way they can get to the playoffs. strike strike strike strike!
and if you live in the cambridge area (or the new england area for that matter) and use at&t broadband with a linksys befsr41 router, please contact me! i'm having so much trouble with my router, i hate it hate it!