cambridge road crew put up "no parking" signs along my street for some tree pruning work tomorrow. i'm all for tree pruning but i don't think it's right giving people less than 24 hours notice to relocate their cars. if anyone gets their vehicle towed tomorrow morning, i think they have a legitimate complaint against the city.

i went with my father to the restaurant depot in the late morning for a cafe supply run. we first went to nearby costco to buy a new sprinkler head for the hose. next door, at home depot, i bought some replacement basil, as well as a few more cucumbers and some corn plants for the belmont garden. my sister then started calling, first me then my father. she was locked out of the house and blamed my father for not leaving the door unlocked (which seemed unwise since their house was burgled last year). in a random series of events, my mother didn't have her house key either. in this modern day and age, it's still possible for a family to lock themselves out of their home. my sister must've made half a dozen phone calls, and my mother was calling us as well, telling us to go back home (my sister also had to take the dog to see the vet, so there was a time deadline). we started heading back but a mile into our return my mother called to say we didn't have to anymore, that my sister could still go to the vet (hailey was already with her).

shopping at the restaurant depot is a strange experience. it's sort of like costco except it's all restaurant supplies. also the people who work there and the customers that shop there all seem very sketchy, like just a degree removed from being criminals. big burly guys with tattoos and chains, skanky girls texting while working the cash register, and everybody has an accent. everything was going well until we got to the car, when my father accidently dropped a gallon container of cumin (defective lid) and spilled a few cups of yellow powder all over the parking lot (it smelled like a curry explosion).

my father dropped me off at the community garden. i talked with another fellow gardener, who said all her basil had been eaten by slugs as well. i planted 7 more new basil seedlings, got my fingers crossed that at least a few of them will survive into maturity.

my new 1.5 terabyte internal SATA hard drive arrived this morning. when i went to go use it though, i realized i had the wrong power plug for the hard drive enclosure i got from my parents' place yesterday (the existing drive has a backup of all my photos, i leave it at my parents for safe keeping).

i went back to my old belkin router. the d-link router just doesn't seem to agree with my comcast cablemodem. it still goes down intermittently like my old belkin, but then i have to reset both my modem and router before i can regain internet access. at least when the belkin goes down, i can just reset it via the admin page. at this point i guess i'll just live with this minor annoyance, until verizon FIOS comes to cambridge.

finally, i decided to buy an eSATA expresscard for my macbook pro. i was doing a lot of online research and it took a while to find the right one. even though all new macs use SATA hard drives, eSATA (external) ports have yet to be standardized for OS X, so the technology (for the mac at least) is still very hit or miss. i really wanted a 2 port eSATA card so i could do hard drive to hard drive transfers, but the only that works with the MBP (a PPA Intl brand) has been discontinued. instead, i bought one from hong kong via ebay that sits flush inside the expresscard slot on the macbook. it costs only $14 including shipping and comes highly recommended on my mac forums.

i just had an english muffin with grape jam for breakfast (compared to my father, who apparently didn't eat anything when we went on our supply run, and feverishly clawed open a box of potato chips to get at a bag). in the late afternoon i heated up some frozen beef macaroni in the microwave for lunch. for dinner i had some more asian chicken noodle soup.