i went down to the community garden this morning to water my plants. i bumped into lynn, who told me she moved again, from a smaller raised bed plot into a full-sized plot on the sunnier eastern half of the garden. lynn was admiring my lunaria, said she hadn't seen that particular plant in a while. she said i always have interesting things growing in my plot, even though when i look at my garden i always find it lacking. i noticed something has been eating the newly planted hydrangea in the northeastern corner of my garden. i think it's rabbits, who like to nibble on the tender young leaves. i'll need to make some kind of barrier, at least until the plants get bigger.

i returned home and had some chicken sausage oatmeal for lunch.

i called concord insurance to let them know my decision to switch homeowner insurance. i could've sent them an e-mail but i felt i owed it to them to break the new via phone call. unfortunately marc wasn't available, so i left the message with his coworker, that i was switching. he asked which company, i said geico.

today was another hot day, but dry instead of humid, a good day for a bike ride. i left for chinatown around 1:45pm. passing by the newbury street area, i began to see shops with boarded up storefronts due to the looting and property destruction. i went to ming's market. the only thing i needed was some sea salt sunflowers, everything else on my grocery list was for my mother. some shelves looked a little empty, but i like ming's because it never gets too crowded and the prices are better compared to other nearby supermarkets. everything except the vegetables and produce though, which prices have skyrocketed the few times i've to chinatown during these coronavirus times.

returning home, instead of my usual route that takes me between the public garden and boston common and back along the charles river bike path, i decided to cut through downtown crossing to see the aftermaths of the looting.

downtown crossing was already empty since most shops are still closed due to the coronavirus lockdown. but now with so many shops with boarded up storefronts, it looked even more desolate, like you couldn't imagine there would ever be any people here. not just stores, but restaurants and even banks boarded up their glass windows to not make themselves easy targets for vandals. one store that was boarded up even had special signs alerting people that it was a black-owned business, but not sure the looters really care (conscientious looter seems like an oyxmoron).

in between disaster tourism, i also had ample opportunities to stock up on pokemon items. more importantly, i wanted to spin some boston landmark pokestops so when i send out gifts, they'll be from the old state house or the site of he boston massacre.

i returned home via cambridge street, crossing the longfellow bridge that would take me back to camberville. i didn't stay long at home, just enough time to down a whole glass of ice tea and towel off some sweat, before i got on the motorcycle and went to belmont to drop off some groceries. i got to my parents' place by 4pm.

i bought a can of cold "black plum drink" which turned out to be 酸梅汤 which was exactly what i was looking for. it was even 冰峰 brand which also makes the classic xi'an orange soda drink. they didn't have any larger servings otherwise i would've bought a bigger size. it's one of my favorite chinese drinks which is very common in china and taiwan but not so much in the US. my parents said they had some "black plum" powder they bought back from taiwan to make our own.

the weather today was perfect for our warm-weather loving plants like jasmines and lotuses. the lotus that seems to be doing best is the one by the basement staircase, where it has already produced 4 leaves, all of which are green. i worry about that barrel because it still uses half chickenwire as fencing, and chickenwire is no match for a curious raccoon looking for aquatic plants to eat. the lotus growing in the best wash basin - the one i got especially from chinatown that has a triple layer of topsoil, clay, and sand - that one also had 4 coin leaves, though one of the leaves is reddish purple for some reason. i was looking for the 5th leaf which should be next in line to sprout but couldn't find it until i discovered a sprout coming out a few inches away from the lotus seed. so this lotus has already started spreading. will we be seeing aerial leaves in the near future?

we planted two hydrangeas in the backyard; one of them already had bigger leaves so the rabbits left it alone; the other one i could see signs that it'd been nibbled. i ended up cutting sections of chickenwire to form a cage around the tender hydrangeas. i also took some chickenwire home for my own backyard hydrangeas and my community garden hydrangeas. the third orchid plant has also started to bloom. it's flower is more speckled magenta, compared to the others, where one is peach and the other is simply white.

i left by 5:30pm. back at home, i coiled the chickenwire to make cages for my backyard hydrangeas, then walked down to the community garden to do the same for those hydrangeas. for whatever reason it was very busy in the garden. anne marie was there, and i even saw dave. besides the chickenwire, i also sprinkled some biotone fertilizer onto the two recently planted eggplants. a fellow gardener was cutting off all her white peony flowers and gave me one. on my way back i bumped into beth who told me she was taking a garden sabbatical this year.

there was a full-moon tonight, one i could see from my backyard. i took some photos but to really capture what i saw would require too much fiddling around, with the super bright moon and the super dark night.

everything seemed to be going fine heading into the evening. i was reheating some more frozen chicken broth for my rice noodles, settling in for a quiet night of dinner and tv. setting up my food on the coffee table, i was moving my glass of ice tea when i fumbled it and drop it right on the glass table top. the drinking glass itself didn't shatter - a miracle - but the table top cracked in a spiderweb pattern. not only did i have to deal with the mess of cleaning up all that spilled tea, but then i had to deal with the glass shards and broken sections of the table top.

i ate my dinner but i was in no mood for eating. i was afraid that maybe small pieces of glass might've flown into my food. while picking off what i thought was a piece of pebble embedded on my knee, i discovered it was actually a thin sliver of glass covered in blood. i ended up doing a quick vacuum of the living room in case there was anymore glass bits around.

at one point i put two of the largest pieces of broken glass back on the coffee table so i could measure it for a replacement. i ended up getting more glass shards on the table and was careful in cleaning it up. i had a price in my head of maybe $300 to get the glass table top replaced, but i was secretly hoping i could get it as low as $100. and went online and found a place that was the first thing in my search, fabglassandmirror.com. i spec'ed out a custom piece of tabletop glass - 1/4" deep x 47" long x 21-1/8" wide. there was a lot of customization options, i went with the tempered glass ($20 more) and pencil polished edges. the final price came out to $160, so better than what i expected, plus free shipping. only downside is it takes a month for them to custom make the glass, so i wouldn't get it until july.

i'll think about it for a few days before deciding. would it be easier just to replacement table altogether? it's just an old coffee table, either a hand-me-down, or quite possibly something my father simply found on the street. the wood surface has a long crack, but the legs keep it from falling apart, and nothing that can't be replaced with some wood filler and stained to match the rest of the wood.

8 more days!

my motorcycle handlebar clock batteries (renata brand) finally arrived today. i'd already taken apart the clock (to see what battery type i should get) so it was a simple matter of replacing the battery and putting everything back together again.