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marcello the roofer and general contractor was a no-show for our 11:00 estimate appointment. i called his number twice but got his voicemail. he never called me back. to make matters worse, both steve and paul were waiting at home as well.

in the early afternoon i went out to run errands on my motorcycle: walgreen's to sign up for a card and to check 9V battery prices; microcenter to look for cheap wires to fix the roomba (cheapest was $1.99, not sure if it'd even work); trader joe's to get some cheap cooking wine; hess gas station to fuel up the motorcycle; and finally across union square to rite aid to buy some pear's soap.

i went to belmont to do some painting prep work but the shopvac still wasn't available. instead i picked up all the dog droppings on the lawn and did some fall weeding. the past few instances of rainy weather left the soil soft and damp, easier for pulling out weeds like dandelions.

once again, another great year for rosemary, and we have more than we need. the plants are so large now that it'd be a hassle to move them indoors, and my father has suggested we leave them outside this season. i feel like we need another raised bed just to put all the rosemaries, which seem to take up a lot of room.

snapdragons are amazing, they really are everflowering. my only complaint is they grow so rampant, the plants end up toppling over and continue to grow in a zigzag fashion. i'm curious to see if they survive into next spring (like the dark pink snapdragons, which are already into their second season).

my parents came home around 4:00 after a chinatown supply run. we had porkchop with rice for dinner, then i brought out one of the 4 condensed milk flan i made yesterday. verdict: very dense and much sweeter than my usual flan. it's so dense it feels more like eating cheesecake than flan. using condensed and evaporated milk is definitely not the way to go. it's also more expensive to go the artificial canned route instead of just getting a gallon of whole milk. so a milk-sugar-egg flan is definitely the better choice.

i returned to cambridge at the same time that drew came back from a grocery run and was in the process of restocking the fridge. we watched a few episodes of big bang theory followed by castle before he went to bed.