it rained pretty much the entire day. my father stopped by in the afternoon to give me a ride to belmont. while he was here, he checked out my new bike. bargain-wise, he said this was the best deal for my money out of all the bikes i've bought this year (compared with the $84 schwinn 7-speed, $25 ross compact 10-speed, and $40 ross compact 3-speed). my father suggested we could bring the bike back to belmont to fix (i got the sense he wanted to fix it up as much as i wanted to) but in the end i decided to keep it in cambridge for the time being. too bad the weather was so foul, otherwise i'd ride it to their place.

in the backyard, the rain barrels were already to capacity so all that extra rain came out of the overflow outlets. ever since we moved the garden the basement has yet to flood. surprisingly the next door neighbors - who's basement never flooded before - noticed some leaks a few weeks ago. they thought maybe the overflow from our gutters had something to do with it because it was redirected to the property line, so my father reconfigured the gutter to pour the rain water into the streets. the problem seems more to do with their landscape contractors who recently dug a moat of mulch around their house for some shrubs, but this moat gets flooded with water during big storms and the water ends up seeping into their basement.

there's a profusion of sunflowers this year, much to the detriment of some cocozelle squashes and pickling cucumbers growing below that never got enough sunlight to produce any vegetables. the weird thing is all the flowers look the same, even though i bought a variety pack that's supposed to give me colors like red and orange. it'd be one thing if these were edible sunflowers, but the small flowers are only good enough for floral arrangements.

my mother was busy with her knitting while my father was busy with his book edits. i linked up some endnotes for a single chapter as a proof-of-concept (too tedious to edit by hand, there has to be an easier way using grep). i also converted one of the charts to an HTML table so it'd display better. my sister was at a doctor's appointment and hailey slept in the basement for much of the day.

for dinner, some kind of braised soy sauce cooked beef with rice. my mother picked some fresh basil from the garden. i had no appetite (hoping for noodles instead) but i managed to finish everything. afterwards my sister gave me a ride home because she needed to feed a friend's cat. i brought back some leftovers for tomorrow night.

i wish my house was big enough so i could ride the bike indoors. every once in a while i'll climb onto the bike, balancing with one arm either on a chair or a door frame, just to get a feel for it. i ended up lowering the seat by just an inch so i wasn't straining too much to get my toes on the ground. the lady style definitely makes a safer dismount, but it's kind of strange not having a bottle cage (even though i'd hardly ever use it).

in the evening i started another batch of no-knead bread, this time with unbleached flour. it probably won't make a difference because my parents use bleached flour all the time in their homemade meat buns and the bread rises without any problems. i also used just a tiny less water than the normal 1-1/2 cups. when i was mixing everything in the bowl the dough seemed drier than usual. i guess i'll find out tomorrow if any of this made a difference.