it was yet another hot day, with my digital thermometer reading 90 degrees. i rode my bike to belmont, traveling as slow as possible to not break out in a sweat. even with a low impact ride, i got to my parents' house looking like somebody had splashed a bucket of water onto my back. after a quick shower and a change into some spare clothes i'd stashed away for just such an occasion, i turned on the AC, more for the dog than myself. unfortunately nobody can find the remote control so the unit runs on just one setting, just barely enough to keep the living room cool.

my father had time to sand the picnic table yesterday. the inspection stamp marks on the table top were gone, and there were only some faint stains on the benches. he even sanded the ends, and buffed off any sharp corners. it didn't seem like he protected it yet (the wood still felt raw), but the can of cabot australian timber oil already felt light and there were brushes lying around.

when he returned home i asked him about the picnic table. just as i suspected, he'd already applied the timber oil. the only problem was he didn't stir the can beforehand, so he ended finishing it with the top layer of floating inert oil. he was ready to redo another coat but with thunderstorms approaching, he decided to wait until tomorrow. we put a tarp over the table to keep it dry.

i continued working on my 2nd aunt's new used PC. for such elegantly designed interior components, the motherboard is mysteriously absent of a CPU fan connector. instead, the CPU fan is connected directly from the power supply, with no control over the fan speed. that's why every time i start up the computer, the BIOS would give me an inactive CPU fan error and wait for a key press. i finally managed to disable this screen by disabling keyboard reporting in the BIOS setup. after that was done, my father started loading up the series of chinese softwares to get her shows online. we also took apart an old machine somebody had given my father. it had a pentium II chip clocked at 300mhz, with 128MB of memory. it had two hard drives, a 30gb drive and a 1gb drive. it was also running a broken version of linux that wasn't able to get through the startup cycle.

sunday night is a little more boring now that breaking bad is over. waiting impatiently for the start of mad men next month, followed by the premiere of rubicon in august - all AMC shows. they're even developing a series about zombies, which i've never seen on television before. since i don't have HBO, i have to wait until late sunday/monday morning to snag episodes of treme and true blood from the internet.