it's great to have a roommate with a fixed schedule. when i wake up in the morning, cristina is gone. i don't even hear her as she's getting ready for work. compared her to some recent past roommates: mary had a weird schedule, sometimes would be at home working, or come home in the early afternoons, i never knew when i'd see her; ana was simply lazy and sometimes wouldn't go to class, and once her classes were over she was here all the time during that final month.

i watched as a quartet of newly-moved-in coeds hauled a cache of street furniture back to their apartment. one girl didn't seem to be doing anything, but she had the important but unsung job of documenting their adventure on the phone.

i plunged the bathtub today, after noticing it was draining a bit slow the past few days. i cleared it up last month, and even used a chemical cleaner. i hope this doesn't become a routine, but even if it does, my plunger game is strong and i got the drain quickly gurgling again like normal.

i finally finished reading ted chiang's short story "story of your life" after being excited about the arrival trailer, which is a film based on the story. the premise of the story is highly interesting but the story itself is sort of meh. why the movie studios thought it'd be a good idea to turn it into a movie has me confused. i'm still curious to see the film, but i can't imagine it'd do well at the box office, as the subject matter is rather dense, and the human story is sort of melodramatic.

it was crowded in the garden, as joel was there, as well as the woman who has the plot in front of mine. i don't like her very much (i never remember her name and i don't even recognize her when i do see her), she doesn't make very use of her garden even though it's one of the best plots there is. most of the things she grows are perennials, and she neglected them for weeks on end.

the hot weather is like steroids for the eggplants. they don't grow very tall, nor produce a lot of leaves, but i think they save all their energies for making eggplants, and i can't wait to harvest them, as i already see several flowers. the larkspurs have also started to blossom again; i think they weren't really dead to begin with (even though they produced so many seeds), all they needed was a steady drink of water to come back to life (at least some of the plants; others are actually dead). the garlic chives will soon flower as well, which will gave the bees something else to eat during the late summer early fall.

i've been meaning to take out my old coolpix 4500 for the longest time, but i always forgot to look for it. even when i did find it, it's been out of service for so long, all the batteries were dead, so i had to wait impatiently for one of them to charge enough so i could use it. what got me thinking about my old camera was seeing all these amazing cloud formations for the past few weeks. i'm the kind of person who stops to take a cloud photo whenever i seething cool in the sky. and what cooler way to photograph clouds than with the infra red fisheye attachment?

i charged up the battery for half an hour, which was enough juice for me to use the camera for a little while at least. i had my coolpix during a time when i didn't know the harmful effects of DEET so all the markings on the buttons had long since been smudged off. so the first few minutes was just me trying to reacquaint myself with the controls. how do i enter shutter mode? how do i set the ISO? how do i put the camera in fisheye setting? and finally, making sure i set the date and time. for some reason i had some problems focusing so many of the photos were blurry. i also shot in HI mode initially, which saved the photos as TIFF files, which took a few seconds to save, and not worth the time (shooting in FINE mode is good enough).

i bicycled to belmont, stopping a few times to snap some infrared fisheye photos, but not taking any detours to catch pokemons.