asian supermarkets are so packed with foreign products that i always find something new whenever i visit. besides the myriad of funny english translations (whether intentional or mistranslated, always good for a cheap laugh) today i discovered powdered ube AKA filipino purple yam. i've seen strangely colored food before, but this apparently was all natural. what does it taste like? just like sweet potato maybe? my dream is to one day prepare a meal where i have a different colored food for every hue in the rainbow. some colors are easy: green, red, orange, yellow. but what's purple? what's blue? it'd be simple to just use food coloring, but that's a cheat. i want it to be all natural. weird colored food fascinates me.

after doing some grocery shopping with my father in chinatown (second day in row, picking up some ingredients for chinese hot pot this weekend), i got a ride to the cafe where i had a late lunch/early dinner before driving myself back home in the honda element. my mother came by later, was supposed to go shopping with my sister but wasn't feeling well so she got dropped off enroute at my place and drove the car home.

i finally went ahead and built that LED growlight board with all those red and blue LED christmas lights i bought a while back. first it involved measuring out distance between the lights and drawing a grid on a white poster board. i then scored the poster board with crosses, one every 1.5 inch. i made 105 for the number of blue LED lights i had. in between these punched holes for the 50 red LED lights. i then started pushing the lights through the holes, first the blues then reds. my fingers took a beating and i ended up getting a blister on my thumb.

the final product looks impressive. now comes the stage where i sacrifice one of my seedlings and see if it'll grow underneath just the LED lights alone. despite what i've seen online, i get the feeling it's not going to work. but the winter season is long and there's still plenty more days of experimenting before i can start growing outside again.

since i wasn't particularly hungry, i had a leftover piece of birthday cake for dinner before falling asleep on the couch. i woke up just before midnight to take some photos of my plants (for personal documentation) before taking a bath. one of the things i like do in the bathtub is practice holding my breath, but i can never be sure when i might require that skill. i don't have very good lung capacity because i can only hold my breath underwater for less than 30 seconds. i'm hoping one day i can hold my breath for several minutes. afterwards i was watching in treatment on my computer when i got hungry and had some instant ramen in a cup for a late night snack.