i spent the late morning upgrading some tools on my macbook. i installed the OSX version of FUSE (3.5.2) and sshfs (2.5.0) so i can mount pi zero directories as local folders on my desktop. i tried installing fuse-ext2 (0.0.7) so i can mount linux drives (in case if i ever wanted to directly tweak raspbian data partitions on my mac) but it gave me an incompatibility warning so i decided against installing. besides, there are other (paid) options like paragon extfs drivers. i then installed the homebrew package manager (2.10.1), but first i had to install the xcode command line tools. i used homebrew to update the local version of nano on my mac, from 2.0 to 2.7. an update was required so i can access color syntax highlighting in the nano text editor. finally, i did some reading and am now clearer on the distinctive between BSD unix (e.g. OSX) and linux (e.g. raspbian).

cristina left this morning to attend a diabetes cure walk in boston common. we tentatively scheduled to go out for brunch again if she can make it back home around noontime. at 11:30am she sent me a whatsapp text saying she was still walking. i waited 2 hours until 1:30pm then decided to leave because i was getting too hungry. i arrived at my parents' place by 2pm via motorcycle and that's when she texted me that she just got home. in hindsight i should've waited a bit longer (although she didn't respond to any of my text) because my parents weren't home and there wasn't anything to eat in the house besides snacks. they ended up not returning home until 4:30pm, although my sister showed up a few times, bringing home different cars to clean (she may have a prospective buyer for her old toyota SUV).

i watched MSNBC, which is my televised channel of choice these days with just weeks before the election. too bad it doesn't chromecast otherwise i'd be streaming it from home all the time. on the dining table was a sample of pink bermuda sand. the sand is composed of grains of shells and coral, including some reddish foraminifera which gives the sand a pinkish hue. at one point i got sleepy enough that i went to the bedroom to take a nap.

when my parents came back they showed me a slideshow of the 900 photos my father took with the xiaomi note phone. we used the roku picasa app to see them from google photos, but it could only go backwards. my mother had an additional 1200 photos she took using the panasonic lumix camera i lent her; i added those to the google photos stack once i copied everything onto my computer.

after dinner i returned home. cristina was out, eating hot pot dinner at the house of a chinese coworker from xi'an. i turned up the heat, took a shower, and finished watching prizzi's honor over a bowl of red grapes (not a very good movie, i wouldn't recommend it). cristina came home around midnight. it seems after dinner she went out with her friend paula to a harvard square bar for the farewell party of somebody they knew. we chatted for a little while before she finished packing and went to sleep. she's leaving tomorrow at noon, after she finishes volunteering for a kidney walk down by lechmere. her xi'an friend promised to drive her to the airport, i'll see her one more time before she leaves.