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sometimes i think there are invisible forces conspiring to prevent me from having a good night sleep. either it's sunmeng texting me from china in the early morning (forgetting the 12 hour time difference), or it's my sister texting in the early morning about no internet service at her place (texting instead of calling, either way the phone is chirping). i just can't seem to sleep any later than 8am, even though i go to bed around 2-3a (sometimes even later).

i ended up calling comcast customer service to see if i could solve the problem remotely. the woman i spoke with said since i wasn't physically at the location, there wasn't much so could do besides sent a reset signal. later i told my sister to call but all she was able to do was set up an appointment for a comcast technician to come by on thursday.

in the early afternoon i biked into boston to buy a t-shirt for sunmeng. i stopped by the community garden to do some watering and got trapped in a conversation with a fellow gardener for 20 minutes. i raced down to haymarket station, hoping to find the cheap t-shirt sellers that normally congregate outside, but it seems like they might've taken labor day off. i stashed my bike by the holocaust memorial then walked to faneuil hall looking for a pushcart vendor dealing in t-shirts. many sections of those interior pushcart malls have been converted into fancy bar restaurants. of the few pushcarts that remained, i found one that sold boston t-shirts for $10.

originally i was just going to send that little statue of liberty figure to sunmeng. but the smallest box i could find still had a lot of room in it, that's when i had the bright idea of including a t-shirt. the t-shirt can also serve as padding for the figurine. i rolled up the statue inside the t-shirt like a burrito then put that into a ziploc bag before putting it inside the box. everything fits perfectly, i just have to ship it off tomorrow.

for some reason i decided to put away my fuji bike and go back to my old cargo bike when i left for belmont in the afternoon. that turned out to be a mistake, as that bike is heavy and slow, not good on an already nearly-unbearably-hot day with temperature in the lower 90's. my thinking was i might find some trash treasures along the way but i didn't see anything, the bonanza of discarded objects is over now that all the students have moved in. i tried going as slow as possible but i still ended up covered in sweat by the time i arrived.

i had a late lunch then some dinner, sleeping for half an hour around 5:30p. after that i returned home. ana didn't get back until 10:30p. she finally paid the rent, all in 20's, except for the last week of august, the amount which she'll give my tomorrow.

i finally got around to updating the firmware (with rockbox) of that spare sansa clip+ i rediscovered a few days ago. this is great because the old clip+ i was using has a broken clip and the battery goes dead after just 2 days of use when i was sanding (6-8 hours).