early this morning my father took suhan to the airport so he can catch his flight back to taiwan. by the time i got up to say good bye the car was already in ignition and leaving down the street, so i didn't get the chance. my sister ended up having to drive me to the house at 8:30am so i could meet up with the floor guys once again to see if i could get some work done. i got to the house and after 30 minutes of waiting i started to get that feeling that i was going to be stood up for the fourth time, so i called up jimmy and asked him if they were coming today. "yeah, we're in cambridge right now, we'll be right there, don't worry." so 30 more minutes later jimmy and his crew finally showed up, loading equipment into the house. so this was really going to happen! on this rainy and miserable thursday morning, tracking wet shoe prints into the house, i would finally be getting some sweet new floor action!

jimmy left a single man from his crew, a guy named sunny, while he and the rest of his team went off to another job. all day long i heard the whirl of the table saw, the pop of the pneumatic nail gun, the crash of wooden planks, and the smell of sawdust. while sunny was busy laying down new floorboards for the guest bedroom and it's corresponding sloped-roof walk-in closet, i had some wiring fun connecting the category 5 modular jack: orange-white, orange, green-white, blue, blue-white, green, brown-white, brown. when i was done wiring, the thing looked like some futuristic bug with colored wires sticking out like legs. i made sure it was working by attaching a connector to the other end of the line (using my father's new found crimping technique of pressing flatter connection leads) and seeing if it gets a single on the linksys router/switch.

i got sunny some lunch from zoe's across the street, braised beef strip while i had the spicy peanut chicken. i ate it on the floor (because all the furniture are in storage down in the basement) in front of my ibook connected to the cablemodem. surfing the web on hardwood floors is not the most comfortable position, especially today with the weather being so cold, i had to close all the windows in the living room. it took me a long time to eat my lunch and i could only eat half, putting the rest of it away in the hallway fridge. taking an opportunity to stretch my legs despite the cold weather, i walked to porter square with my umbrella and unemployment checks tucked away in my book, cashing them in at the fleet atm. back at the house, when i got bored of surfing the web on the floor, i perched on a wooden folding chair by the window and read my new book.

guest bedroom

master bedroom

throughout the day jimmy would call me on my cellphone to talk to sunny, i'd guess to ask him about how the floors were progressing. after he finished the guest bedroom, sunny moved on to the master bedroom. he stopped working at 5:30pm, with about 7/8 of the master bedroom completed, before jimmy showed up to give him a ride home. jimmy told me the game plan for tomorrow, finish up what's left of the floorboards (master bedroom but a small section in the guest bedroom closet) then start sanding the floors for the entire house, followed by a layer of sealant and a layer of polyurethane. saturday they'll come back to do the second and last coat of polyurethane, and by sunday afernoon i will have brand new floors.

and what is it about these workers? i turn my back on them for one second and they're topless! sometimes it's understandable, it is the summer, it can get hot in the house, especially if you're doing some kind of manual labor. but sunny? it was 60 degrees outside today, there was no need for him to get all topless on me. i also caught him taking a leaking in the bathroom with the door open when i went to the kitchen to get something. he was all, "oh" and i gave him the hand gesture that silently said, "it's quite alright, continue with what you're doing."

after dinner i went to the watertown home depot to buy some wooden thresholds for the doors. i looked for it everywhere but couldn't find them, finally i had to ask somebody and he showed where they're hidden. it's not called a threshold, a threshold is just a name of a location, the actual wooden board that goes in the threshold is called a saddle. at least i think that's what it's called. anyway, i got three saddles for $10/each, but turns out they're the wrong size, so i have to get new ones tomorrow morning before jimmy and the gang show up at 8:30 (now is that really 8:30 or actually 9:30 like it was today?).

finally, during the springtime my father rescued some tomato plants that had naturally sprouted from seeds produced last season. he was sort of proud of them because these were free tomato plants, we didn't have to do anything to get them. so he took good care of them, staked them, caged them, watered them, spaced them out, and finally they're now producing fruits but because they've been hybridized and aren't the pure specimens anymore, the tomatoes are all coming out weird. none of them are very big, they're all small and stunted and strangely shaped (egg-shaped, sausage-shaped, gourd-shaped). there was even one plant that didn't even flower even though it sprouted numerous buds. it's like a whole garden full of freakshow tomatoes, mutants everyone of them. if there's ever a reason never to grow tomatoes from seeds you raise yourself, this is it.

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