one of the disadvantages of living with other people is things have a way of moving around. living by myself, i don't have that problem. i know where everything is at all times. so of course it drives me crazy when i can't find something because there's no way that anything would disappear unless i had something to do with less. this morning i was looking for a pair of wool socks. i searched everywhere but just couldn't find them so i ended up wearing some regular socks instead. eventually i did find them, underneath a sofa chair in the living room (i must've kicked them off at some point and lost track of them).

it looks to be cold the rest of the week, and the forecast even calls for some snow thursday-friday. i still won't turn on my heat though because i heard there's going to be another warm stretch next week (60+ temperature). i had some leftover chicken tortilla soup for lunch before riding my bicycle to market basket (no helmet) to get some groceries. this was my first supermarket outing with the milk crate basket. it fits 2 full bags of groceries perfectly. i went to the cafe to drop off a few produce items. i took a shortcut through the harvard-smithsonian observatory campus which was a bad idea because the steep incline tired me out and i arrived feeling exhausted and sick. at least i got some exercise! that pain means it's working.

i parked my bicycle outside because i figured i might want to do some more riding later on (especially since it was a pretty good day although a wee bit brisk). i locked it up and took a photo so i could admire my bike locking skills. later on in the evening when i was looking at the photo, i noticed something: i did everything right including looping the security cable through the 2 wheels and then back to the u-lock, however, I FORGOT TO LOCK THE BIKE TO THE POST! i quickly looked outside the window and was relieved to see the bicycle was still there after 7 hours.

since i had so much success stripping the paint off of the porcelain insulator yesterday, i went ahead and painted some citristrip on the door lock trims for the bathroom and the guest bedroom. there's actually a lot of beautiful details on these old door locks but they've been covered up in 100+ years worth of paint. once i started scraping, i wasn't having a lot of luck getting rid of the paint. for one thing, i only wanted to strip the metal parts, not the doors themselves. i ended up just leaving everything as is, partially stripped and all.

i continued eating my leftover chicken tortilla soup for dinner while watching the world series. once it looked like the yankees were on their way to winning the series, i quickly changed the channel.

after giving it some thought, i figured i could clean the door locks a lot better if i could take them off the doors first. so i went back and started taking off the screws and prying off the back plates and the doorknobs. it took some doing but i managed to remove the entire mortise lock set from the guest bedroom door. now it'll be easier to clean the parts and i can get everything looking like new again. i even took apart the lock body to check out the levers and springs inside. nowadays everything is electronic so it's hard to see how things operate when you take something apart, but these old fashion gadgets with their mechanical components are fun to study because you can actually figure out how they work. i was glad to see that the locking mechanism is primitive enough that a simple skeleton key will work for all the locks. i'll go down to the locksmith tomorrow and see if i can find some replacement keys.