11 more days

there is a hidden world available only to people who bike, an olfactory wonderland often missed by folks traveling in cars. the fragrance of flowering plants leave invisible bands of intoxicating scents in the warm summer air. lilacs, honeysuckles, roses, hydrangeas - i could lead a tour of the city based on smell alone. recently there's been a really strong fragrance that i've never noticed before, a distinctive flower odor with a touch of clove that tickles the back of the throat. locating a source of said aroma, i stopped the bike by the side of the road and followed my nose to the smell. turns out it was a flowering linden tree (aka lime tree aka basswood) putting out this natural perfume. the clusters of small yellow flowers aren't very ostentatious but oh the fragrance!

it's been a struggle to get motivated for project N. with less than 2 weeks to go, i'm just not in the mood to work anymore. i just want to savor my last few days here in town before i leave, and those plans don't include coding, especially on projects that will require me to put in extra hours to finish. by the time i mustered enough strength to start working, i ran into a bunch of hardware issues regarding the multi-head video card. once i debugged the problem i was no longer in the mood to work anymore.

i went to market basket to lay my hands on some cheap groceries. i went to the cafe briefly to drop off some supplies before returning home. in the evening i showed ang tao how to make spaghetti with meat sauce. after he finished dinner, he went back to the lab for a few more hours of work before coming back in the middle of the night. i thought the fact that he work through the weekend was pretty hardcore, but this tops the cake. i'm just hoping he's going into the office to get some good AC and surf the web instead of actually working.

i discovered tonight that ang tao doesn't know the rules of baseball. he watched a little bit of tonight's red sox game (more like a catastrophic failure) and asked if we get points for throwing the ball. when i tried explaining the rules to him though, i didn't know how to do it without making baseball sound like the dumbest game in the world: grown men hitting balls with sticks and running around tagging bean bags. there's also so much counting: 9 innings (top and bottom), 4 balls, 3 strikes, 3 outs, 4 bases - compared to a simple game like soccer (1+1=2 addition), baseball is like calculus. and a note about tonight's game: a tampa bay player stole home from 3rd base. how embarassing is that? red sox better get their act together.