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).