despite the beautiful weather (bruce, if i wasn't working, making the $$$, we'd be naturing today!), i was home all day long, coding my mini-project. i stop briefly in the afternoon to have some lunch, 
some imported smelly tofu ramen from taiwan. my pc was misbehaving, wouldn't play any of the wmv videos through the xtra, and eventually the sound card ended up failing as well. by the end of the work day i'd agreed to visit the client's office tomorrow, where they had a more well-behaved pc waiting for me to use, as well as the latest version of director. the company's sort of far and i have to wake up at 7:30am (boohoo, right?), but i get to ride my motorcycle for an hour (hopefully the weather will be nice).
renata showed up at 5pm. she had a gift for me from china, a colorful apron designed with hill tribe people patterns. 
i gave renata her belated birthday present, one of those magic eggs from taiwan where you water it and a bean grows out with the words "happy birthday" laser-etched on one of the leaves (actually the cotyledon). we waited a bit, she checked her e-mail, took some phone calls from her friend trayce, and browsed some of my online southeast asia photos, before we left to have dinner with her friends anne and her husband john. we stopped off briefly at the porter square T station so we could pick up some flowers as a gift.
we arrived at their place and they took us to a sichuan restaurant called chilli [sic] garden in medford square. the food was okay but we could've kicked it up a few notches in the heat department (it is sichuan food after all). the waitress actually talked us out of ordering a particular fish dish because she said it was really hot (when they tell you something is "really hot" in a sichuan restaurant, they're probably serious). anne and john took turns asking renata about her 4 months spent in china. after dinner we drove back to cambridge. some good byes were exchanged, and then renata and i left.
"do you want to get a slushie?" renata asked me as we pulled away in her car. "did you read my mind?" i answered. driving across cambridge, she said she got some weird vibes from me 2 weeks ago when i first came home, so was afraid to get in touch with me. and i'll admit that, yeah, weird vibes were sent. since lollicup is no longer in havard square, there was no reason to go that far to get drinks. instead we got some from the bubble ice tea cafe on mass ave. i've been there before and wasn't too impressed, and they didn't change my mind tonight; the thai ice tea slushie that i ordered tasted nothing like thai ice tea. renata drove me home and went back to the other side of the river, apprehensive about tomorrow, her last day of kindergarten. i got back just in time to watch game 7 of the NBA finals. as of now, i still don't know who's going to win.