the bombshell of the day: jesse announced she'd be moving to san francisco by the end of august. i'm actually kind of envious that she can just get uproot and resettle somewhere else. i've spent pretty much all my life in boston, from growing up, to going to school, to finally being a productive member of society. i've always wondered what it'd be like to live and work in another city though. sometimes you need to move away to truly figure out where's home. we sat by the front window so jesse could soak up as much of cambridge as possible before she leaves. she showed me her new iphone, as well as a slideshow of furniture for sale. she gave me her old nikon coolpix 880 digital camera, something she found while cleaning out her stuff for the big move, figured i'd have some better uses for it. later we checked out adobeon across the street before going our separate ways.
four consecutive days of rain kept me away from the garden until today. nobody was there but me, trampling through the undergrowth in my bagged aircast, pulling a length of rubber hose until it reached my garden. a hot day, i saw the black dirt steaming again after i watered, so i sprayed a second time just to cool things off.
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the chicken wire is getting awfully crowded now, but still no cypress vine flowers yet. i did spot a spent wild morning glory bud, and an unopened nasturtium flower.
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i have some early vegetables but most of them are either crooked or rotten. kinked cucumbers, bent salsa peppers, and a moldy green tomato. had to remove the tomato, no point leaving it on the vine to ripen only to throw it away later. i'm not discouraged though: i'm sure in a few weeks i'm going to look back on all these failures and laugh as i roll around in prettier vegetables.
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the zinnias in my garden neighbor's raised bed are amazing. i have two of my own but they've yet to bloom (or even produce flower buds at this point). zinnias come in all sorts of colors and they attract all kinds of flying insects. if only they were fragrant, they'd be the perfect flowers.
i bumped into ed on my way home. he was putting barbed wire stickers on his bicycle. "that looks good, huh?" he said. i told him about my own bicycle, how my previous roommate latched the kryptonite lock onto the frame then lost the key. he gave me some suggestions on how to break off the lock. just then one of his tenants showed up, a professional bicycle racer no less, dressed in his racing outfit. he was returning from a short ride with his friend, woburn and back, just a meager 36 miles. "you could try some freon, then hammer the lock," he added.
i went over to my parents for dinner. my mother was in the backyard with hailey, doing some weeding. 
i noticed the carpet of garlic mustard along the perimeter of the yard, an invasive plant. later it was my father in the backyard, mowing the lawn, while my mother went back inside to watch some korean soap opera over the internet. 
the lawn is so weedy at this point that it'd be a lot easier just reseeding the whole plot, but with a dog in the house, that'll never happen. my sister took hailey out to a dog park. when she got back it was time for dinner (noodles).
when i got back home my new 500gb hard drive was waiting for me in a box on my doorstep. it's an IDE drive, which is the kind my old computers use, 
but i see the writing on the wall, and nowadays all large drives are SATA, so big IDE's are getting harder to come by (and a bit more expensive as well). i fitted the drive into an external enclosure, formatted it for MS-DOS, and then initiated a firewire-to-firewire transfer of 400gb worth of photos to backup. estimated time of completion: 10 hours.
swingtown moves to friday nights now. hope the new time slot doesn't hurt its ratings. it's a great show and deserves to be watched by more people! tonight's episode featured scavenger hunt, adult magazines, girl-next-door crush, neighborhood cougar, hot for teacher, suspected husband stealing, and smooching with a coworker.