i called commonwealth choice this morning to ask about the health insurance bill that arrived on friday. it was for a previous coverage, the with the deductible and co-insurances that i didn't want and got them to cancel. i've called so many times over the past week that we're starting to know one another: i had marcy on the line, who remembered my case file. she told me the bill got was just an automated statement. the previous policy was in fact cancelled, and that i could just ignore this bill. 

the lesbian family across the street (who hates me by the way, for some unknown offense) was doing some major yard work yesterday: weeding the flower beds, trimming the hedges, mowing the compact lawn. they also pruned the tree in their driveway, which means now my unobstructed view of beacon street has returned. those overhanging branches were getting so annoying that i was tempted to sneak out one of these nights and snip them off with a pair of garden clippers. fortunately they saved me from having to do that. 

maybe it's all this hot and humid weather we've been having, but i've been feeling awfully tired lately. i've also been waking up earlier, which in turn makes me go to bed earlier as well. and several consecutive days of bicycling can wear me out too. luckily there seems to be a string of 70's degrees days later in the week.

on this hot and humid day (the temperature must've been in the 900's, going outside felt like suffocating), my father was spending his day off out in the backyard drilling and chiseling a hole at the bottom of a large ceramic pot. these pots were originally designed for holding salted eggs he told me, but he's converting them into planters. it took about an hour to cut out a single hole.

later we went to home depot to buy several bags of top soil, a bag of grass seeds (ryegrass), and a 12' strip of wood to make the posts for our trellis addition.¹ back at home, while we worked outside, my mother was indoors watching the world cup, announcing the score whenever brazil scored a goal on chile.

after dinner i continued installing windows 7 on a spare 10gb drive my father installed into his desktop pc. the drive came from a machine that had several flavors of linux running on it, and even though i reformatted the whole thing, i failed to remove the GRUB bootloader, which prevented the disk from booting up. i found a loophole though: as long as the windows 7 installation dvd was in the drive, the computer would always boot up with the windows 7 hard drive. 10gb is barely enough to fit the OS and a few other programs. i'm still working on a dual boot startup with systems on separate hard drives (XP and windows 7).

i tried not to sweat on my way home, but arrived in cambridge soaked in perspiration. i was worried the house would feel like a sauna, but it was kind of cool, despite a room temperature of 82°F. even after a shower, i was sweating a little an hour later. still, i won't install my AC until the first official heat wave of the summer (usually july).

---

¹ the korean cucumbers are growing too fast and tall for the trellises, so we ended up having to make some additional supports with 6' long wood posts and the rest of our wire fencing.