my 2nd night of benadryl sleep was nothing like my first night. there was no fever dreams. i did dream however, close to when i was about to wake up. something about staging a talent show. there was something familiar about it. one of my responsibility was to program a kiosk (which never happened), but also coordinate a flyby between 2 teams of fighter pilots, but somehow somebody lost the jet manuals.

i put another layer of stain on the wood fill but it didn't really make a difference; i will just have to learn to live with the lighter fill color showing through.

i took the motorcycle down to the cafe in the early afternoon to test out some LED bulbs. just as we thought, the clear fixtures are too glaring. i then went to the watertown home depot to return the bulbs, find a matching screw for the guest bedroom door lock faceplate (the best match i could find was stainless #6 x 5/8" oval head phillips), and get a pair of front door keys made.

i swung by my parents' place to water the backyard garden. my mother told me my father had watered in the morning, but it was such a hot day, it wouldn't hurt to give the plants another drink. i took down the white spray-painted cans from yesterday and filled it with bamboo stalks to make a bee house. it's probably too late in the season for solitary bees to be nesting, but maybe i'll get lucky.

back at home, i installed the mortise lock on the guest bedroom door. it's a replacement mortise, so of course it doesn't fit exactly right. the doorknob hole is off-centered, and the door knob connecting shaft doesn't mesh perfectly so i have to attach the door knob to the next available hole, which makes the door knob feel lose. finally, while the door does close, it won't lock, because the door plate is not the same as the mortise. the only way to get it to work is to match the plate exactly to the mortise, and to do that i had to fill in the battered screw holes with wood filler and wait for it to dry.

i made a new spare key, which is essential just my house key superglued to a piece of magnet. i told mary where i hid it before i left for china, but she seemed really worried about this potential security breach (completely missing the point that the spare key is there in case somebody gets locked out of the house, which has happened before). anyway, i went looking for it a week ago and it seemed to have disappeared; i think mary took it because that's the kind of thing she'd do while having a nervous breakdown.

i changed into a pair of shorts before walking down to the community garden in the late afternoon (4pm) to water my own plants. joel was there again, without his bike this time. he gave me some ground cherries. he told me if i had the chance i should visit martha's vineyard, which was where he was this weekend, biking on the island. when i came back home, i watered the plants in the backyard yard and front garden.

i only had an ear of corn for lunch, that's why i felt so hungry by late afternoon. the good news is i'm down to 133 lbs. now. my blood pressure is surprisingly normal too, despite having taken a slew of extra medication within the past few days. of course i haven't been taking readings for months now, so hard to say what it means. maybe i can wean myself off of some of those HBP bills and don't have to take so many.

for dinner i fixed myself an italian sub. i added some hot pepper rings this time, made it more flavorful, and didn't put in any tomatoes (since i don't really like tomatoes anyway).