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marshmallow fluff was actually invented in union square. so naturally somerville - the little town that could - had to have a festival this afternoon in honor of the local specialty, one that features live bands, burlesque dancers, eating contests, fluff sculptures, and a cooking competition.

i must've had fluff before but it's been so long i can't remember. isn't it basically sort like melted marshmallow? when i roast marshmallows, isn't it basically fluff - molten fluff at that? although there were free samples at the festival, it never entered my mind to try it. i just wasn't in the mood to eat something so sickening sweet it could give me instant diabetes.

i was most impressed by the number of fluff dishes competing in the cooking contest. is there nothing you can't make with fluff?

let me fill you in on a little secret: if scantily clad women are somehow involved with your festival, there's a pretty good chance i'll be there.

this morning i was in newton. jerry and olivia - back from their hawaiian honeymoon - invited all the wedding photographers out to dim sum and so we could give them copies of their wedding photos. out of the 4 photographers, only myself and roger managed to make it. we decided to meet at chung shin yaun, a popular local spot for chinese brunch.

i'd forgotten that i've been to chung shin yaun before. the place is so popular on weekends that chinese people line up outside before the restaurant opens its doors at 11:30. although we were all told to meet at 11:15, i was the only person to get there on time to wait in line. i managed to reserve the last 4-person table right when olivia and jerry showed up. the food isn't really dim sum; it's more traditional chinese breakfast favorites with some other delicacy mixed in. i had a sao bing (crispy sesame flatbread) stuffed with beef slices and a bowl of taiwanese rice noodles that i was planning on eating all by myself but then persuaded to share with others. my nose was running from my allergies and at one point jerry silently signaled to me that i had something dripping (so embarrassed!).

i was planning on going straight home, but since i was passing through belmont on my way to cambridge, i stopped by my parents' place, where i found my father painting in his underwear in my parents' bedroom. he had just done the closet and was about to finish the 2 windows. soon afterwards he was called away to the cafe and handed off the brush to me. now originally i wasn't planning on doing anymore painting this weekend, but i guess it's one of those things that keep on sucking me in. i wasn't wearing my painting clothes, so i too had to strip down to my undergarments and spent an hour finishing the windows and cleaning up afterwards.

i managed to collect 5 red tomatoes from my garden; they were just normal size, not the monsters i collected earlier this month.

i realized now that squeezing my tomatillo balloons is very similar to checking oneself for testicular cancer. why i never made that connection before i don't know, but i'm well aware of it now. the largest tomatillo fruit is probably still a little bit more than 1" in diameter. i still not sure when to harvest, i'm just going to leave them on the plant until first frost and see how much bigger the tomatillos can get. i've noticed that some well-developed husks don't have similarly well-developed fruits inside. i'm not particularly worried, i seem to have enough tomatillos that i can at least make one authentic mexican salsa out of it.

my upstairs neighbor drove me crazy tonight. from time to time they seem to blare their music like teenagers with out-of-town parents. i normally don't mind and their stamina for high volume is limited at best, so everything goes back to being quiet after a while. i've never actually complained to them in all the time i've lived here, but there's been some close calls. tonight i just snapped. for some reason it was especially loud, and i thought maybe they had somebody housesitting for them this week and didn't realize that they had a downstairs neighbor. i banged on their door and rang the doorbell a few hundred times, but the music was so deafening they naturally couldn't hear me. it got so bad that i could actually see ripples in my glass of water and i could feel the vibration rattling my teeth. i wrote them a note, saying how i didn't want to seem uncool, but could they please turn down the music just a notch? thanks. it was a lost cause, because they wouldn't see the note until tomorrow, and by then i would've gone insane from the noise. i figured after an hour it'd stop, but 1:30 minutes later i went back outside and bang on their front door so hard i thought the glass window would shatter. steve came downstairs, all smiles, "hi tony!" like i was going to tell him some happy news. he saw my note and picked it up to read it, but not before i asked him, "could you turn it down?" he said it was a new album and immediately went upstairs to turn off the stereo. i felt a little bad afterwards, like a party pooper, but it's one of those things that if i don't say anything, they might never know, and think it's perfectly okay to do it again and again. if it happens again though, i'm going down to the basement next time and cut their electricity.

for dinner i had ramen while watching the encore broadcast of chuck. later i saw the red sox reclaim the best record in baseball, and even if the regular season ends in a tie (with the cleveland indians, who lost tonight), the sox still get home field advantage throughout the playoffs. not that it means anything though: the team with the best record has consistently failed to win the world series in recent years.