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i was up since 9am but stayed in bed until 10am surfing the web on my phone. with a rainstorm arriving this evening, today was about hunkering down and waiting out the storm. i was also waiting for ana to wake up so i could do a load of laundry. i left the house around 12:30pm, first to put the cover on my motorcycle, then to pick up my thiazide prescription from rite aid. the pharmacists there are always trying to get me to get a flu shot, and every single time i refuse. i don't get out very much, so my chances of contracting influenza are pretty low. in fact, i think i only had the flu once in my life, and it was either high school or college, or maybe it was when i first started working. i'm usually pretty good about hygiene, not putting my dirty hands on my face (dirty hands on other people's faces however, sure).

next i went to market basket to pick up a few ingredients for vodka prosciutto pasta sauce; i just have a hankering for a hearty serving of carbohydrates tonight. i bought exactly 12 items, including a large bundle of kitchen towels (6, $3.50) to replace all the ones ana used up since her time living here. i planned ahead and brought my bungie netting to tie the towels to the back of my cargo bike.

i was back at the house by 1:30p, stowing the bike back in the basement in anticipation of the rain. ana was still in her bedroom but i knew she was awake because i could hear the faint noises of her shows. i couldn't wait any longer and decided to go ahead with a load of laundry, including my bedsheet and pillowcases. tuesday would've been a good day to do my laundry after i came back from the museum, but i thought she was taking a nap (she actually wasn't home).

a few other things i did today: i spent some time sorting through my coin collection, adding them to my second coin collection album. i seemed to have forgotten that over the years i've amassed a collection of old american coins, like silver quarters, zinc pennies, buffalo nickels, and liberty dimes. i don't think they're worth very much since they're all in circulated conditions (other than the silver), but they're fun to have. i called acme shades to let them know we were going with a cheaper option; i think they can probably read that as "online" option. the woman was very understanding, everything was done very business-like, she didn't try to bargain with me to cut a deal. finally, i cleaned the tub with a bottle of soft scrub, which is the only thing that can get the tub back to white.

so much for door bottom insulation: because ana goes out into the backyard to smoke so often, the wear and tear from just a month since my father and i installed it has quickly taken a toll on the door bottom. i noticed 2 weeks ago one of the fins was ripped off, and today i discovered another broken fin (when i went down to the basement to reset the circuit breaker after ana was using the microwave and the toaster oven at the same time). there is a total of 5 fins and i'm already down to just 3. anymore damage and the door bottom will be useless. and don't even get me started on the insulation around the rim of the door frame: she managed to rip those off in 2 weeks after i put them up.

ana finally broke out of her room at 2pm, fixed herself a quick lunch (probably a simple iberian ham on bread sandwich because i didn't smell anything frying), then went right back to bed close to 3pm. girl likes to sleep!

i finally had some quiet time, folding my laundry after taking them out of the dryer1. the sky grew progressively darker as the storm front made its way into town. the heat kicked in at 6pm the scheduled time. only a little bit, raising the room temperature from 66° to 68°. ever since the software update a few days ago, the temperature on the nest thermostat now matches the temperature on the digital thermometer nearby. in the past, when the nest read 68°, the digital thermometer always read 2 degrees higher at 70°.

ana woke up around 5:30pm to iron some clothes and later take a shower, hanging a bunch of wet delicates in the bathroom. judging from her movements (longer time in the bathroom, talking on the phone) i had a suspicion she was going out and sure enough she left around 8:00pm. i warned her to take an umbrella since it'd be raining later. i used to always bring an umbrella everywhere i went because you know never here in the new england.

i started making my vodka pasta sauce around 7:20p, finished around 8:00p. i don't know why i don't try a different sauce, this one is starting to get a little boring. it's easy to make, but the recipe calls for some ingredients that might not have sitting around. like celery for instance, i always end up buying a bunch that i have a hard time finding other uses for. it also calls for a cup of half-and-half at the end, and i never understood why, because the sauce seems it'd be good enough just with crushed tomatoes. the deli butcher made a mistake, charged me for the 2x more expensive pastrami when i bought the on-sale prosciutto. i accidentally got a little drunk, because while pouring out the vodka i also had a little sip. with my low alcohol tolerance, i was already tipsy. but then while i was eating i also had a bottle of hard cider, and then it was a blur of pasta and alcohol and PBS television.

with ana not here, i could take my time in the bathroom, enjoying the latest issue of entertainment weekly (star wars cover) then later a shower. the bathroom carpet naturally was soaked and covered in strands of girl hair and bits of broken leaves (she wears her shoes in the house). all i know is she'll be gone in less than 2 weeks! i contacted alfonso a few days ago, my next roommate for december. he asked if his visiting friend could crash at our place for 3 days the 2nd week of december. i wanted to say no but there wasn't a way to do it without sounding like a dick so i okayed it. i'm starting feel my place has slowly become a spanish hostel. all i know is 2016 i'm not having anymore roommates!

it was an early night for ana, coming back home around 11:30p. she thanked me for warning her about taking her umbrella since it began to rain.

the fun thing i did last night was to install bootcamp and windows 10 on my macbook pro. i had everything ready: the disk space (on my SSD drive), the thumb drive (for copying the windows installer), and a windows 10 system ISO disc image. unfortunately the image wasn't 64-bit so i had to download a new one online. once that was done i ran bootcamp and allowed it to go through the process of partitioning and then installing windows on my mac.

windows 10 installation was effortless; getting the bootcamp drivers to install was a nightmare. i was using bootcamp 6 but it'd always seem to stall when installing the realtek audio drivers (one reason for not working: i have cirrus audios). i tried multiple iterations, even tried to extract the drivers so i could just manually install them, as well as downgrading to bootcamp 5 (this after i discovered v6 isn't explicitly designed for my mid-2012 macbook pro non-retina).

i kept searching for solutions online until i found one posting about manually stopping individual installs from a batch installer by opening the details pane in force-shutdown window. i force quit the realtek installer (x86) and everything was fine after that. my wifi still seems a little flaky though, i had to manually jiggle the settings to get it to work. but a small price to pay if it means i will soon be able to play games on my windows partition. now all i have to do is to register the software.

finally installed paragon NTFS on my OS X partition so i can read and write to the NTFS-formatted windows side.


1 the dryer is spitting out more lint than usual around the washing machine area, i may need to disassemble it at some point and more sure all the connections are solid. lint trap fire is a real concern.