the bottom of my paint tray

my second week of painting found my father and i making another visit to the watertown home depot to get more paint: oil-based primer and finish for the windows as well as a flat white latex ceiling paint (behr brand). in total our latest run cost us about $120 so the grand total once we finish painting the entire house will be a few hundred dollars.

today's project was putting on the first (and possibly final) coat on the ceiling. with my father helping things went a lot quicker; he worked the edges of the ceiling with a brush while i manned the roller. the television was turned on to the live broadcast of general petraeus' testimony before congress. it took us a total of about 2 hours to finish the ceiling. afterwards i followed my father to the cafe to grab some quick lunch before i headed home.

at the garden i discovered some my sunflowers had blossomed. only the terminal buds though, none of the secondaries have flowered yet. i almost didn't see it because they tower over me now, so i was surprised when i looked up and saw flowers. even better, they were all different, and leaning more towards the auburn colors rather than the generic yellow you commonly find on sunflowers. the flowers themselves aren't very big, about the size of a salad dish.

i made another search for the tobacco hornworm just in case i missed it last time, but with no further evidence of anymore tomato damage, i'm pretty sure it's gone.

even though the weather looked like it might rain today (i felt drops at times while riding around), i know from personal experience never to trust new england weather so i decided to water my plants.

with the overcasted weather the morning glory flowers stay open much longer than they normally do. i've always known that the blue flowers curl up and turn magenta once they finish flowering, but i've never actually seen it happen before. today i actually caught a few flowers in mid-transition.

the tomatoes are really starting to kick in now. it takes just a few days before new red tomatoes are ready for picking. i already have more than a dozen full-sized tomatoes at home that i don't know what to do with. i could turn them all into tomato sauce but the thought of mashing them up seems wasteful to me. the ironic thing is i'm not even that big a fan of tomatoes. they're not my favorite vegetable, i find them to be too acidic, and normally when i eat i will unconsciously avoid the tomatoes.

elsewhere in the community garden as a whole, a myriad of flowers continue to bloom. it makes me nervous walking around the garden with a camera because there's a school nearby and now that all the students are back in class, i don't want anybody getting the wrong idea.

leaving the garden (with 4 more tomatoes in my bag), i saw somebody had thrown away a perfectly good tomato. i have enough tomatoes of my own that i didn't even bother picking it up.

mail arrived bearing gifts: a 512mb DIMM chip for my desktop mac and yet another insect field guide. i cracked open my computer and pulled out the legacy 64mb memory, replacing it with the new one (for a combined total of about 1.5gb of memory). i wonder if it was even necessary for me to upgrade that machine since it's getting long in the tooth. for the price i paid ($50), i could've gotten some more memory for my macbook pro. i'm still waiting for apple to come out with a desktop machine that's more expandable than the imac or the mini but cheaper than the mac pro.

i've had the national wildlife federation field guide to insects and spiders of north america on my amazon wish list ever since i first found out about it. i've just been reluctant to order it because i didn't need another bug identification book. but i've read some reviews, and the last field guide i bought (kaufman) was such a disappointment, i figured the NWF guide would be a good replacement. having browsed through it now, i can say that the NWF guide is much better. it actually has a pretty good section of moths, something i haven't really seen in other guides (moths are sort of the neglected members of the insect world, identification can be difficult plus many are nocturnal). i'd go as far and say that the NWF guide is probably one of the better guides out there, but the bible of entomological field guide has yet to be published.

for dinner i made some homemade chicken broth from the rotisserie chicken carcass (remember that old thing?) and had some rice noodle soup for dinner. the red sox lost again tonight, but it was a serious pitching duel, with the final score being 1-0 with schilling taking a loss. the yankees are now back to 5 games behind. the red sox yankees series this weekend is going to be intense. although i'm pretty certain the sox are going to the playoffs, whether they get to it by beating the yankees is still something the magic 8 ball can't see clearly.