lesson learned: the saltier tea egg is the more delicious tea egg. not only is the marbling darker, but the egg is completely infused with flavors. next time i hope to do better. maybe the secret is also to steep the eggs for 2 whole days. i dumped out the liquid but i should've saved it; not for reusing to make new tea eggs, but traditionally tea eggs are eaten warm, and i could use the liquids to simmer and heat up the eggs for those who don't like to eat cold eggs.

i was expecting to see snow this morning but woke up to a landscape thoroughly devoid of fresh snow, just the tall dirty piles from before. we may not break that all-time snowfall record after all. next week we're warming up, with temperature in the 40-50's, so this might've been our last chance to get any snow at this point. could spring be close at hand?

i've been watching what i've eating this week and i've dropped down to 148.8 lbs now. i still got at least 10 lbs to go but it's reassuring that it is possible to lose weight. hopefully once more of this snow melts, i can begin biking again. it'd be nice to get around without having to depend on public transportation or car pickups.

i made a bunch of amazon purchases today, including a shower valve socket wrench to fix my parents' bathtub and a weather station.

i've been researching weather stations for a while, ever since i discovered my analog window thermometer had gone bad (the metal spring inside the dial had rusted over the years). i'm kind of obsessed with knowing the outdoor temperature. how i've been doing it for the past few thermometerless months is just getting the temperature reading online (computer, phone, thermostat), but i really want to know the actual temperature outside my house, not some mysterious measuring station miles away. i went with the acurite 02027, which has both temperature and humidity, along with moon phase. now that i think about it, a wireless weather station might be the sort of perfect arduino project. that way i can design my own interface and not have to rely on a prebuilt manufactured version, which can't be customized at all and some are pretty ugly UI-wise. maybe that's something i'll look into at some future date.

i took a creative way to pay for my amazon purchases. i have several rebate gift cards which i hate using because it's such a hassle to get the cashier to split the bill so i pay with the card and whatever left over i pay in cash/credit. amazon doesn't do split payments either (if it's hard enough to do it in a store, it's impossible to do with an online retailer), but i learned you can add the gift card like you would a credit card, then transfer the amount (any amount, down to the cents) on the newly added "credit card" to an amazon gift card balance. amazon will do split payments when you buy with their gift card, so i've managed to easily use up all the money on the rebate gift cards and can finally toss them all out.

i paid another visit to the dollar store then star market. i was looking for a cheap extension cord but i totally blanked out at the dollar store and ended up with some cedar blocks and a box of kleenex. at the supermarket, i bagged some white cheddar popcorn. another packet of circular arrived on my doostep for the 3rd week in a row, so i'm pretty sure on definitely on their mailing list now and it wasn't just a fluke. now i can find out what's on sale next week at market basket without having to go down and pick up one of their circulars.

for dinner i ate the last of my salad, already a little brown around the edges but still edible. i mixed in some chickpeas and used a new ken's balsamic vinegar with honey dressing. it tasted okay, not as sour as italian dressing, but it pours on as a dark brown sauce and makes the salad look pretty dirty, like i'm eating mud. i was hungry enough that i ate early - around 6:00. later in the evening, after discovering it was momofuku ando's birthday today - the inventor of ramen - i had a hankering for instant noodles and found a nongshim korean cup of noodle in the back of the cupboard. unfortunately it'd expired back in 2009, but i was still willing to try it. the flavor was a little off, but the spices covered up most of it, and for a brief glorious moment i was enjoying some hot and spicy ramen.