there's a small tract of wilderness that i can see from my backyard, a rare piece of cambridge land that's not developed. tall pine trees grow there above a carpet of needles. today's weather was warm enough that i had my backyard door opened. standing there, i looked to this little oasis of undisturbed nature and was surprised to see a skunk running around in the understory. in a split second i ran to the living room to grab my camera (quickly switching on the telephoto lens) and came back outside. the skunk was gone however. i knew a skunk or two live in my neighborhood, and i've even had one walk up to me in the middle of the night (skunk's have poor eyesight, it probably just didn't see me). the weird was skunks are noctural, so what's a skunk doing running around in the middle of the day? maybe the warm weather stirred it into activity, or maybe it had rabies. i did however get some squirrel photos, which are a dime a dozen.

what's wrong with my mushrooms? last week i was so happy to see all these nodules sprouting out, but this week all the tiny mushrooms seem to be shriveling up. i don't know if it's too much humidity or not enough. i also rotated the bag by 90 degrees, so both sides could have room to grow outwards - maybe it didn't like that. the bigger mushrooms are now growing vertical like columns instead of horizontal like shelves. growing mushrooms is not as easy as i originally thought!

it was nice to work without distractions today, to have only one project to deal with. my job for the next few days is to fix bugs, and progress is determined by how many i can fix a day. some of these are tough bugs, the remainders that were too difficult to fix initially but now with a gold master delivery next week, they have to be fixed. i rather be debugging than coding functionality though.

in the evening i went to the supermarket to get some ingredients and waited for jesse to show up in the evening. she brought some gerber daisies which i immediately put in some water. we were having a late dinner and i was making thai green curry. i used tofu instead of chicken since jesse's a vegetarian, and only half a can of curry paste instead of the entire can because jesse preferred the mild over the hot. we finally ate by 9pm, watching the latest episode of beauty and the geek. jesse ate everything but the eggplants, somebody with even less affinity than i do for those slimy purple vegetables. before she left we played a few rounds of i love katamari.