we had our first snowstorm of the season even though winter doesn't officially start until 5 more weeks. at first it wasn't cold enough for the snow to stick, which came down in big wet clumps, but later it did manage to coat much of the landscape in a thin layer of white. in the relative warmth of the house looking outside my living room window into the cold haze of this early snowstorm, all i could think about was how smart a decision it was for me to store the bike away last night. i liked how it was one less thing for me to worry about. i also finally got in touch with a guy who's able to do my gutters, told me he'd swing by early next week (weather permitting) and take a look at it. for lunch i make some campbell soup from a can, chicken with rice but i added some chopped scallions into the mix.

all seemed well. until i saw "it." i was in my bedroom using the computer, when i noticed something crawling on my shirt, a little bug. i picked it up with the tips of my fingers and took a closer look. why, that kind of looks like a flea... i thought to myself. and just like that it jumped out of my hand. i've had a dog before so i know what fleas look like. and the fact that it jumped away and disappeared just confirmed my suspicions. suddenly i started putting the pieces together. i've been having these terrible itches on my legs near by ankles the past few weeks. i thought it was just my dry skin, and didn't think much of it, despite the fact that i scratched the hell out of it. about a week ago i started suspecting that maybe these were bug bites because they looked more like welts than just simple dry skin, but i hadn't seen any bugs and just recently changed the bedsheets. but now i know the awful truth, and that's while i slept in my bed at nights, fleas were feeding on my blood. the thought was sickening. and looking on my legs, seeing all those scabs, i was repulsed.

	041112 to whom it may concern: just recently i have discovered that i have fleas. i am writing this letter to you because you may have visited me within the past few weeks. if this is the case, and if you are experiencing itching resulting from mysterious welts, you have me to blame and i apologize. i'm sorry i gave you fleas. tony yang

i vacuumed the hell out of my bedroom, even crawling underneath the bed like some sort of army drill with my vacuum cleaner. and once i finished vacuuming, i vacuumed again, just to be sure. we humans have an instinctive fear regarding parasites. for the rest of the day i was completely paranoid. anytime i felt any sort of itching i thought it was a flea. the question i ask myself is this though: how did i get fleas to begin with? never had them before in all the time i've lived here. i briefly thought that maybe rob's cat was the culprit, but rob left here back in early october, why would the fleas wait until now to strike? then i did some research and discovered that flea pupas can actually stay dormant for 6 months, waiting for the right opportunity to hatch into adult fleas. what are the right conditions? just so happens that warm temperature is one of the triggers, and it's no coincidence that i've suddenly had my itching as soon as i turned on the heat.

now i'm afraid to sleep in my bedroom. fortunately i have the guest bedroom, which i can stay in for a few days, wait for those fleas to starve to death. hopefully it's not an infestation. i read when they do bite, it's usually in a grouping, so the welts on my ankles my just be from one or two fleas.

i went out for a run. conditions were cold, wet, and miserable, which were just perfect for me. i thought about wearing shorts but the temperature was in the lower 30's and decided to go with some pants instead, as well as a fleece vest and some gloves. a plume of condensed breath escaped from my mouth as i ran my usual route. at one point i rolled up the sleeves of my turtleneck when i got too hot but rolled them back down when my arms became pink from the exposure.

when i came back home i tried burning the dvd's i rented a few days ago before i had to return them. i tried it once before with another dvd (cabin fever) but i remembered it took a long time and i gave up eventually. i had better luck this time around. spring, summer, fall, winter...and spring was small enough to fit on a dvd without any compression, and that took just 30 minutes to copy and burn. audition was a different story, took almost 3 hours to copy, optimize, and burn. regardless, i was surprised it worked. the discs wouldn't play in my internal dvd-rom drive but worked fine in the external drive. i tried it in my circa 1999 dvd player, which didn't work, no surprise there.

my parents came over for dinner bringing with them rice noodles. they were surprised by how warm it was inside the house (i'd turned it up 30 minutes before they arrived). afterwards we had tea and a leftover moon cake from the fridge. i played around with the kaleidoscope, taking photos of things in the living room. i had some dvd's to return and they gave me a ride to mass ave when they went home. it was still snowing. the streets were clear, but a lot of cars were covered in snow.