the morning stompings of my upstairs neighbors woke me up at 7:40 and i couldn't fall back to sleep. after fantasizing various ways of retaliating, i woke up and started cleaning the house in preparation for my guest's thursday arrival. i scrubbed the mildew off of my shower curtains. they're the ones i bought when i first moved in 8 years ago so they're kind of old. i do have replacement curtains but now isn't the time to swap them out since it'd take weeks to get rid of that rubbery new curtain smell. next i wiped the toilet area and the tiles (walls and floors) assisted by the revealing glare of an ultraviolet lamp (i'm pretty hardcore about cleaning). soaked in sweat by that point on an increasingly hot day, i jumped into the shower. my hands smelled like bleach.

my plans to run some errands in the late morning was temporarily postponed as i waited out the sudden appearance of a rainstorm. a check of the doppler radar revealed it just spontaneously formed directly over parts of the greater boston area. it was a weird storm, just as quickly changing from ominous overcast to sparkling sun.

i went to the star market across the street to grab some chicken drumsticks on sale, my most favorite part of a chicken. however, for some odd reason, they only had thighs. i returned home to grab the bicycle and went down to the larger star market in porter square. they only had drumsticks (no thighs), which was what i wanted. i also used their rarely-found in-store citizen's bank ATM machine to get some cash (even though i paid with debit card). i went back home to get my stuff then pedaled to belmont in the afternoon.

nobody was home except my father and the dog. my mother and sister went to the korean supermarket in burlington to get some exotic groceries. i arrived sweat soaked and quickly hit the shower to clean up. it was so hot that sparrows circling a puddle of water in the driveway didn't even bother flying away when i stepped back outside. it never rained in belmont though, but my mother and sister hit a patch of bad weather when they were in burlington.

i found a dozen new squash vine borer eggs clinging to the squash stems, which means there must be a new moth visiting the garden. hopefully this is the tail end of their egg laying period, which i read somewhere was about 2 weeks (before all the adults die i presume). the eggs take 10 days to hatch (so there's time to spot them before they become borer worms) and it takes another month for a feeding larva to become a pupa.

i don't know why but both the fancy gourds and the bottle gourds are producing a lot of male flowers but hardly any female ones. the bottle gourds are a little better, but so far i've only counted 2 female fancy gourd flowers: one of them successfully pollinated to became that one fancy gourd i keep on photographings, the other failed to pollinate and the immature miniature proto-gourd finally fell off the vine today.

it took approximately 45 minutes to cook 18 drumsticks on low-medium propane barbecue heat. earlier my father marinated the chicken with some salt, garlic, hot sauce, sweet rice wine, and beer. when they were finally cooked, only then did we slather on the hot sauce. a few drumsticks i used the korean barbecue sauce i put on the corn, but the rest of them my father brushed on a miso yaki sauce my mother had purchased (it came in a pouch with a spout). the miso yaki chicken were good, but i still prefer my sticky sweet korean barbecue sauce.

after watching a few episodes of pawn stars and american pickers, i returned home to cambridge. i continued cleaning the bathroom, this time the black light picking out even more details in the evening. most of it is dust, but it shows up under the UV like glowing dandruff. i felt tired for some reason, until i realized i woke up 2 hours earlier than usual.