after a brief hiatus, today thursday felt like a monday - but the kind of monday where i don't have to wake up early and can sleep late. it felt good to sleep in my own bed again - i am not a fan of camping out and sleeping on the ground. after surfing the web a bit (catching up on my celebrity gossip and keeping abreast of the latest internet zeitgeist) making some hot dogs for lunch, i walked down to porter square to pick up my usb pen drives from radio shack (they're currently on sale, $30 for a 4GB sandisk micro). coming back, i made a detour to the garden to do some watering.

my tomatoes are still green although that one centrally located plant is now so huge it has no discernible shape other than a large tomato blob. it's so big that it's long since outgrown its cage. i need to return tomorrow with the strings to hold up a few more heavy branches. the peppers are flowering now, even though they're still stunted. i think pepper plants are naturally low to the ground - they don't get anywhere as big as tomatoes. that's something to keep in mind next season when i rearrange my plants.

i also watered some of my neighbors' gardens. i like watering so much, i'm willing to volunteer my time and water the whole community gardening area if they will just pay for some stilts so i can get some good height/coverage.

my parents came over with my grandmother to see some camping photos and order pizza for dinner. i ordered online from papa john's on nearby somerville avenue. i don't think their pizza is that great; i think i'll stick with the local topspeed pizza from now on. while we waited, my father helped me to finally install the air conditioner in the living room. i actually think having an AC makes me feel hotter, only because it makes me less tolerant of the heat and humidity versus if i just used a fan and sort of made the best of the overall lukewarminess. and it's only a matter of time before fall arrives and i'll have to take down the AC once more, but i hear the weather for tomorrow calls for even more heat and humidity, so it's nice to have some salvation.

i discovered my parents have also been experiencing a mysterious bitter aftertaste every time we eat something after coming back from vermont yesterday. i really though it was just me. could it have been all those wild blueberries we ate? or maybe the hickory-smoked barbecue ribs we had in brattleboro? perhaps we breathed in too much of that campfire smoke? who knows but hopefully it'll go away soon.

later in the evening i got a ride back to belmont to retrieve my motorcycle. it felt liberating to ride with my bag. it was also definitely warm enough to not need a jacket, the sort of perfect weather for riding a motorcycle at night. i took the long way home via harvard square.

so my sansa express finally arrived (i got it yesterday, my neighbor was keeping it safe while i was away). i loaded it up today with about 200+ songs, just a simple matter of dragging and dropping onto the usb-mounted drive in OS X. i'm surprised how small it is. i've seen photos and videos but i still could never tell (you know, with relative hand sizes and all) but it's actually just about the size of a pack of wrigley chewing gum. even though you can't watch a movie or view photos, the OLED display is big enough to show all the important info. design-wise, it's cool enough that i can't stop playing around with it. navigation takes some getting used to, but i think it's similar to the ipod system of hierarchy, and i can display my music either by artist, album, or song title. and when i'm sick of my own music, i can always listen to the radio, whether it's the oldies station or NPR. i can't wait to take it out running, which won't be until next week (i'm still recuperating from all that hiking i did up in vermont).