i decided to wash my turkish rug. mary had stained it when she ripped open the content of a wet vacuum cleaner bag onto the rug. i figured it'd needed to be professionally cleaned, but i decided to risk it by cleaning it myself, using cold water and woolite in the bathtub. immediately i realized it was a mistake, as the colors started to run, staining the white areas a slightly darker hue. but it was already too late, so after drip drying and rolling up the rug, i took it outside to rinse it again before hanging it to dry. the rug does look cleaner, but like i noticed earlier, the white spots are now not so white. not a big deal, i'll just pick up another one the next time i visit turkey.

michael called me to let me know that the wifi printer has been working flawlessly since my last visit at the end of june.

today was a relatively cool day, but judging from the myriads of different clouds up in the sky, it was a transition day, with a week of hot weather arriving tomorrow.

after discovering last night that those pretty purple bellflowers growing in my parents' backyard were in fact an invasive weed, i took it upon myself to eradicate them from the garden. creeping bellflowers seem like they'd be simple to get rid of because they uproot quite easily, but apparently that's all a clever ruse, because underneath the roots are tubers that can produce more plants. i'd never seen these tubers before so armed with a digging shovel i uprooted a bellflower plant up to a foot in depth. sure enough, i pulled up a clutch of tubers that resemble either a string of ginseng or a strand of small thin turnips.

i was still digging when my parents came home. i was covered in a mixture of dirt and sweat. digging out the bellflowers turned out to be quite difficult, as it was growing in an area that also had a lot of underground bamboo roots. finally i decided to pull up all the creeping bellflowers for the time being, and worry about uprooting the tubers and the rhizomes later in the season. at least by getting rid of the flowers they couldn't spread by seeds anymore.

my father and i cut down the last remaining bamboo stalks around the stand of evergreens against the southern fence. the backyard looks quite terrible now, without a screen to block the neighbors. as for the evergreens (some cypress? very fragrant wood), all the lower branches were dead, and the only green were some leaves near the crown. we also cut some more small length bamboo for bee houses. i had some empty cans i used to bundle them together. the cans should probably be painted white at some point, to prevent it from absorbing too much heat from the sun.

i had to stop at my grand uncle's place on my way back to cambridge because his tv wasn't working again. turns out the problem was he had it on the wrong video source (ANT) so there was nothing but snow on his screen. when i returned home there was a small package waiting for me, but i already knew what it was: my thermal fuses had arrived.

i brought my my still-damp turkish rug so it could dry flat on the porch. the staining didn't seem all that bad, maybe one of those things that i only i would really notice. there was some wrinkling around the edges, which was there before. if it doesn't go flat i could try ironing it later when it's dried.

wham improved waste system cleaner (banned in 20 states including massachusetts). smells like strong wintergreen.