this week's breakfast: egg and prosciutto on english muffin. the rain finally stopped in the afternoon, giving me a window to ride to belmont without getting wet. nobody was home but the dog. i went out to the backyard to check up on the barbecue grill. did those mesquite chips smoke at all? unfolding the foil packet revealed mostly charred chips. but i didn't really see too much smoke yesterday. maybe i should've poked holes on the bottom as well and not only the top. did i even smell any mesquite flavor? i tried resoaking the chips and burning them again the grill; there was a faint odor but very little smoke left.

i've rarely seen flowers as productive as these seed-raised snapdragons. i read that deadheading them produces even more flowers, but new flower buds keep on growing on the old stems so i haven't been able to do any trimming (not that i need to apparently if they keep flowering like this).

other garden highlights:

my parents came home later in the afternoon. for dinner i had some zongzi my mother made. i brought home a bunch along with the rest of the barbecued corn.

the rain seemed to have mostly stopped, with a lot more blue sky than clouds. LJ was already back when i got home. i asked her if she got a loaner laptop today. she said they only had one she could use for 2 weeks. somebody was trying to find her a desktop machine for more long-term usage. i told her i needed to use my own desktop pc at some point. "well, i'll just stay later at the office then," she said. i asked her about her original (but crazy) idea of getting somebody back home to ship her spare laptop. she said it was prohibitively expensive, she might have to pay import taxes, and it couldn't be shipped with the battery since it's a potential fire hazard. i don't see how the fact that she doesn't have a computer is my problem; but it is, because if she doesn't have a computer of her own, she'll be asking to borrow mine all the time, which i'm reluctant to do, especially given her track record of destroying things.