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can you see my garden? i mean, can you see the jungle that used to be my garden? although i'm happy to see so much green, most of that is weed. maybe in a few weeks when the flowers come in, there will at least be some colorful highlights. the good thing is i don't think anybody would want to steal anything from my secret garden. besides the fact that all my vegetables are hidden, there's also this foul rotten mulberry smell, courtesy of the nearby mulberry tree. i don't mind it though, reminded me of some of the places i've visited in my travels.

in the 2 days since i was last in the garden, the cypress vines have now all climbed onto the chicken wires. they're actually growing surprisingly fast; maybe because they don't waste time making leaves and seem more inclined to grow as tall as possible. they're actually in a race with the wild morning glories as well as some wild cucumbers. there's plenty of room for everyone at the moment so i'm not going to do any pruning but the cypress vines definitely have the right of way.

my father came by in the afternoon with some ingredients for making pad thai. on a whim we decided to take a killawatt measurement of my old air conditioner. with just the fan it was 88 watts, but with the dial set to the lowest cool, the usage jumped tenfolds to 880 watts. it seemed excessive, but we didn't have any numbers to compare that to, so maybe it's normal for an air conditioner. my father left with the PC i'd been fixing up last night along with the reader. later in the evening when he got back home, he took a reading of the air conditioner in his study: 400 watts. only the portable air conditioner in the air living used more electricity at 880 watts, but that thing was a large 10,000 BTU unit. verdict: my old air conditioner, though seemingly reliable and gets the job done, is a complete resource waster when it comes to electricity. as a result, i might have to get a new AC, one that uses less power (figuring about a 5000 BTU unit).

julie came over around 7pm and i made some chicken pad thai. the highlight of the evening was the season finale of you got the look. there was two elimination round tonight, with the winner being selected in the second round. celeste got eliminated in the first round, which pleased me to no end because after seeing some earlier episodes, i realized she was a bossy poser that deserved elimination, despite being a remarkably well-preserved 50 year old woman (i'm starting to think maybe she had some plastic surgery done). all signs point to bahia as the winner, and i was definitely rooting for her. but of course i should've known that the most obvious choice never wins in the end. bahia was too good to be a model anyway. she's like a rare beautiful animal that deserves to live out in the wild inside of caged inside the superficial modeling industry. however, with her looks, she could easily compete in america's next top model and give all those younger girls (bahia is just 37) a run for their money. karin was there just for comic relief, especially after she designed a self magazine cover shoot where she was breaking out of a symbolic va-jay-jay. tanya - 45 year old mother of 5 - ended up winning. in the end she seemed the most obvious choice - married with children and of an age that most people can consider to be not so young. she also seemed the safe choice, the consummate professional, and a steady disposition not prone to drama. but oh bahia! in my version of SGTL, she's the winner.