the ride was okay. i wore my thick black leather boots, the ones i never wear but figured i should wear more often to break them in. the only part of my body that was cold were my hands. i regret not wearing the fleece mittens, even though i think they look ridiculous. i imagined my hands to be horribly frostbitten but they were fine.
with thanksgiving just a few days away, i was back in belmont to help clean up the house, our annual pre-thanksgiving tradition. most of the stuff belonged to my sister, which i put in the small guest bedroom (more like a large walk-in closet at this point). my mother and i also tried to organize the sun room, another room stacked with miscellaneous. the sun room also needed to be cleaned up because some contractors are supposedly scheduled to arrive next week to replace a few windows (i'll believe it when it actually happens, the windows were supposed to be fixed months ago). while rummaging through all the accumulated stuff, i found a bunch of metric combination wrenches, including a 9mm, the one size i've been missing from my bicycle toolkit (i've been using an adjustable wrench instead).
later i vacuumed around the house. a combination of dust and dog hair probably means it'll take more than one vacuuming to entirely clean up the place. i sprinkled some rug deodorizer not to perfume the carpet but to mask the foul smell coming out of the vacuum cleaner (that filter probably needs changing).
i watched the colts-patriots game in the late afternoon, the highlight of the weekend. new england got off to an early lead, and built a comfortable enough cushion that i began to relax. that was until the 4th quarter, when indianapolis mounted a comeback. the tension was unbearable until the final seconds, when the patriots made an interception against manning's final drive to end the game. even though we won, i'm not sure if i want to meet the colts again in the playoffs.
i had a fight with my sister in the early evening, after she had a fight with my mother. i told my sister she never takes responsibility for anything and always blame others for her problems. in anger, she complain-texted to a friend and stormed out of the house without saying where she was going. at last, some peace and quiet in the house!
my mother went to the cafe to pick up my father. they came back with some burger king. 
there seems to be a disparity between reality and photograph when it comes to burgers. a bk double stacker seems like a large sandwich but it's actually this tiny little thing. fortunately my parents bought with coupons so we still got a good deal. after dinner, i helped my father reattach the curtain rack to the window.
there seems to be a upswing of people driving without headlights, at least from my experience. last night i had a car behind me that had zero lights on. i actually turned around at a traffic light and glared at the driver, a middle-aged woman with a male passenger. did they not know their lights weren't, or maybe there was something wrong with the car? it actually made me anxious, because i couldn't really see them behind me unless i really looked. i was also worried they might bump into me, but i had faith in my rear tail lights. i wish i could say that was the only time it's happened, but it's happened before, and it happened again tonight, when a passing car drove by with its light off. i high-beamed the driver a few times but he seemed oblivious.
i was relieved to come back to an empty house. partly because i didn't have to deal with the awkwardness of hanging out with pau and katarina, but also because an empty house means nobody was at home cranking up my heat! my roommate's leaving for hawaii on friday so that means he won't be here for 2 weekends. once he gets back, he's here for 2 more weeks before returning to spain.