after some raisin bran cereal for lunch and watching a bit of the first episode of season 5 of the wire marathon, i made my way out of the house to run errands. it was a cold day with temperature in the 20's so i wore my puffy jacket, which made me look like a big blue balloon on a bicycle. i traveled down cambridge street to my first destination, the galleria mall best buy, to finally return the HTC re camera. i just can't get it to work with any of my bluetooth devices, and at this point it's too much hassle to make it worth keeping. i heard a rumor HTC was coming out with a second version of the camera, maybe by that point they'll have worked out all the bugs and i might be tempted to buy the new one.

i then headed to the sav-mor discount liquors by mcgrath highway, to get a bottle of flavored whiskey for my mother's birthday which was today. from the outside you'd never guess this place was a liquor store other than the signs, hidden in an industrial-looking brick building by the side of the highway with no windows. liquor stores always make me feel nervous, like i have no right being there since i barely know anything about alcohol. also surrounded by so much glass containers naturally makes me anxious. maybe because i looked lost, someone there asked if they could help me. "do you have any flavored whiskeys?" the woman helped me find a few; their selection was of course nowhere close to what we saw at the new hampshire liquor stores. i went with the jim beam red stag black cherry infused kentucky whiskey ($21.99).

i wasn't planning on it, but the route i was taking to get back home sent me on a detour to the somerville target. i stopped there to look for some fleece-lined jeans for my father (they didn't have any). i checked out their heavily-discounted christmas decorations. i'm a sucker for led string lights and bought a box of philips-brand 60 count red faceted sphere lights for $3.59 (originally $11.99). i would've bought more had they carried other colors but they only had red (apparently red isn't a big seller). the cashier was a very pretty blonde girl with cold hands wearing leather boots. "looks like we have the same idea," flirted the old man in front of me in line to the girl, pointing to his similar water bottle purchase and the cashier's.

market basket came next: usually i need to figure out a food plan strategy for the week before i visit the supermarket but i didn't have time today. there were probably more things i needed but i just picked up a few immediate items: a package of english muffins and a bag of navel oranges. occasionally it's hard to figure out why sometimes the market is busy and sometimes it's not. today it was busy. were people stocking up for new year's eve celebrations?

after dropping off my groceries at home, i biked to the cafe to deliver the whiskey to my mother. my godmother was there as well. i brought back some large garlic chive dumplings for dinner.

i've been monitoring my activity status ever since i activated my google fit a week ago. the thing i only realized a few days ago is that somehow it knows when i'm biking as well, something my withings pulse activity monitor can't seem to do (it only knows if i'm walking or running). bike monitoring isn't the most accurate though, because sometimes in the course of my biking i might be gliding, and i don't think those times get recorded correctly. but today i finally managed to break the default activity goal of 1 hour. the app doesn't seem to differentiate whether 1 minute of walking is equal to 1 minute of biking or 1 minute of running; the apps sees all activity time as the same. i'm curious to get back into running again just to see if the app can accurately sense my running activity.

i added the red led lights to my festive storage closet. it's so colorful inside, i'm tempted to set up a comfortable chair in there and use it as a super tiny living room.

for dinner i ate those garlic chive dumplings with some hot bean paste sauce. i washed it down with two cans of schweppes pomegranate sparkling seltzer water. since returning home, i'd been watching the last remaining wire episodes. i'm proud to say that within the past 5 days, i've seen about 70% of all the episodes.