something weird happened today. my neighbor has a large oak tree with branches that mostly hang onto my property. because of all the acorns, i get a lot of squirrels in my backyard. a while back i bought this gardening toy that looks like a ceramic worm. sticking it in a potted plant, it's supposed to let you know when to water by how dark or light the worm gets. one day it just disappeared, and i never gave it very much thought (i thought maybe it disintergrated). today, during one of my breaks, i was looking out into the backyard and saw a trio of squirrels playing. one of them was sitting on a fence post and was holding something that looked like a large string bean. i thought it was strange but soon forgot about it. an hour later, when i went out back to bring in some pots, i saw something on the wooden bench: my ceramic worm! now i have no idea how it just magically showed up, but the evidence seems to be squirrel-related. my theory is probably one of the squirrels dug it up a long time ago thinking it's a tuber and then ran away with it, only to drop it when it realized it wasn't edible. and then today by complete dumb luck, another squirrel must've found the ceramic worm, and it too made the same mistake thinking that it found food, and then just dropped it off right on my back porch.
a bunch of books from buy.com arrived today. anytime i get any sort of package in the mail, that just makes my day. i wish i could subscribe to a service where every day of the year (other than sunday and holidays), they mail a surprise to me, so every day i can look forward to receiving something exciting and new in the mail. also my order of wondervases arrived as well, the amazing vase that you can reshape and reuse. unfortunately i didn't have anything to put in them, i'll try to get some flowers tomorrow.
in the evening my sister drove me to the galleria mall so i could run inside real quick and buy a cable for the ipod julie helped me fix wednesday night. the mall was crazy, a heavy congestion of people traffic (although not as bad as the tokyo train station during rush hour, that is crazy x100). there were long lines in every store and i was afraid i'd have a long wait to check out. i found the cable but it was usb-only; since they didn't have anything else, i didn't have a choice. waiting in line, an apple store employee asked me if i was paying with credit card for a single item. i said yes, and he took me out of line and rung me up with this pda gadget he was holding in his hand. i asked him if they had any dual usb-firewire cables, and he brought me further back into the store, and they had a whole shelf of exactly what i was looking for. i paid and quickly left; i was probably in the mall no more than 10 minutes.
returning to my place, we arrived at the same time as my parents who were bringing over dinner. after we finished eating they all left. i went out to the supermarket briefly to get some ingredients for making flan and rainbow jello, two desserts i'm planning to make for christmas dinner on sunday. after watching a bit of television, i went ahead and made a dozen flan. what's new this time around was i used the automatic hand mixer to beat the mixture (better consistency) and i used a strainer to further refine the blend. the flan came out looking good, now i'll let it sit for 2 days before serving.