my original plan for today was to fix my cargo bike then spent the rest of the day cleaning up the house in anticipation of annie's arrival on saturday. however, i ended up spending most of the day working on the bike starting at 11am. i cleaned up the cable housings with a dremel tool then started routing the cables onto the bike. i replaced the front brake cable and housing because it was too rusty and frayed, though the rear brake cable was still good (i must've replaced them relatively recently). i also soaked the foam grips in oxiclean. usually i take a break around noontime to eat some lunch and watch the news, but i didn't stop until 1:30pm, when i started getting light-headed and had to get some food.
the mail came early today, and with it some more ebay purchases. the oneplus one glass screen protectors i ordered did not look like the photos. i wanted ones with separate holes cut out for the camera and the speaker, 
but the ones that i got was an ugly single cutout. it was less than $2 but i asked for a refund anyway, not sure if they'll even respond, price of postage alone to send it back to china might cost more. a pair of dual red/green rocker switches also arrived. i want to use them for a DIY PSU bench power supply.
i installed the handlebar grips without the foam outer layer as i waited for them to dry. but to install the grips i first had to install the brake levers and trigger shifters. and to do that i needed to know how i routed the cabling housing. unfortunately i didn't take a photo of that, and had to search in the archives for old photos of my bike so i could see how i originally routed them. i dripped a few drops of hand sanitizer as lubricant to get the grips to easily slip onto the handlebars. i then fed the wires through the housing and locked them lightly in place. the one thing i couldn't get was the cabling for the rear derailleur. i decided to move the bike outside so i had more space to work.
i finally installed the cables on both the front and rear derailleurs. the rear shifted fine, skipped a cog or two, but otherwise very smooth. the front however wouldn't shift at all. i played around with the mechanism, made more difficult by my failing eyesight so i kept having to remove and put back my glasses. from what i gathered, the way i was routing the cable from the bottom made it impossible to engage the front derailleur. i started to suspect that maybe derailleurs come in different versions, and the one that i got was a top pull one. i fiddled with it for about an hour but finally called it quits when it started getting close to 5pm.
i did some research on my front derailleur: the shimano tourney FD-TX800 3x7 is a top-swing derailleur with dual-pull. dual-pull! but how? 
the one-page multi-language instruction that came with the derailleur was basically useless, had no info on how to route the cable for a bottom pull. i finally found a shimano manual that was for a different derailleur, but it did have a detailed diagram on how to install for both top pull and bottom pull. by then it was too late, but i promised myself i'd fix it first thing tomorrow, and maybe finally take the cargo bike for a spin.
harvard's commencement was today. had i not been obsessing over my bike, i'd have liked to have gone down to harvard square to get a few snapshots of some happy graduates. angela merkel was the commencement speaker. her departure security detail caused widespread traffic jams throughout boston.
the cup of yogurt i had for lunch wasn't enough and i was still feeling light-headed so i had some korean cup of noodles when i came back inside the house. i also started to do some cleaning, feeling the pressure after annie finally wrote me back today to ask if she could move in tomorrow (friday) night. the fact that she was only now asking me less with less than 24 hours to go was a bit annoying. the house isn't actually that dirty, just a bit of clutter that i can clear up in an hour or two. i did clean the bathroom - scrubbed the shower tiles and bathtub, got rid of some mildew on the curtains, and cleaned the chrome toilet paper pedestal, which got a little rusty from all the water condensation. afterwards i coated it lightly with some WD-40 before putting it back together. i also brought down some stuff into the basement.
for dinner i had some hot dogs and oranges, which has been my routine this week.
1 google home will turn off my tv! the command is, "turn off living room tv." if i say, "turn off tv" it doesn't do anything, and if i say, "turn off tv in living room," it says something about power control not supported. sometimes with google home, command phrasing is important, like casting a spell.