i went to cash a check this morning at the ATM on the corner of beacon and kirkland street. i was annoyed to see there weren't any envelopes, which meant i had to go to a different ATM to deposit my check. in the meantime i took out some money from my account. that's when i noticed the new feature on the machine, a special check slot that didn't require a special envelope. i fed in my check, the machine scanned and displayed it on the screen, and even printed out a miniature copy on the receipt. how i do love new technology!

i went to the library to return a book that i'd renewed twice already (it'd been in my possession for 9 weeks) and then took out some new ones. i then went to market basket to pick up the ingredients for tonight's dinner, before dropping off some books and groceries at the cafe, where i picked up some lunch.

the 1000gb SATA drive finally arrived today. it's my first time working with an SATA drive and the installation was a snap. no dip switches to set, not even a power plug to connect (apparently power is supplied through the SATA connector). it went into the external usb/firewire/eSATA enclosure, the one that looks like a miniature mac pro machine. i connected it to my laptop via firewire, took a few seconds to format the drive (DOS compatible, if i ever want to use it on a PC), then viola, it showed up on my desktop, all 930gb. i then initiated the transfer of 500gb worth of digital photos from my old external drive onto this new one. it took more than an hour for the computer to just catalog more than a quarter of a million images, before it gave me an estimate of 17 hours before it was done transferring. fearing that i'd burn out the drives, i connected a USB fan to keep things cool.

julie came over in the evening, where i was making peanut sauce chicken pita with alfalfa sprouts, radish slices, shredded carrot, and chopped scallions. it was so insanely healthy that my heart nearly exploded from the sudden exposure to non-processed food. tonight's lineup features drama (season finale of project runway), politics (3rd presidential debate), and sports (the 5th NLCS game, dodgers facing elimination versus the phillies). we watched project runway, tuning into the debate during the commercial breaks. fabric folds export leanne won. i was rooting for kenley (despite the fact that she was a drama queen incapable of taking criticism, her retrogirl look made her endearing). actually, to be honest, this was a pretty weak season.

as for the debate, the split screen is the closest we'll ever come to having the two candidates actually fight each other. it was painful watching mccain grimace and fast-blink and dart his eyes and twitch whenever obama talked. does he have some form of palsy? why can't he just sit still and act normal? i do not want a weirdo to be the next POTUS. i'm curious to see how the next 19 days will play out, since mccain was obviously ineffectual against obama in tonight's debate.

later my roommate was checking out one of the books i got today, imperial capitals of china. i told him i'd take him to see an american library one of these days, and then demonstrated how i could reserve any book he could think of, even ones that weren't available at the local library. he was pretty amazed, so we spent the next 2 hours surfing both the online library catalog and amazon.com for books about central asia. i ended up buying a used book for him about a k family fleeing soviet oppression.