i wake up later when it's cold and it was definitely cold this morning. in fact, the past few nights i've had to unfurl my comforter, which has been rolled onto the side of my bed all summer. my roommate was already gone by the time i woke up at 10:00 (although he was already up when i went to go use the bathroom at 7:00). the temperature was 68°F, the first time in months the thermometer has reached the 60's inside the house.

i spent most of the day working on client R's project. although actionscripting still seems arcane, the more i do it the easier it gets. despite its flaws, fortunately it's a pretty robust language and there are many ways to do the same thing (from ugly to elegant).

i stopped working close to 3:00 to clean my aquariums and disassemble the guppy tank. the tetra tank has been infected with that slime algae; partly it's my fault for not changing out the water often enough, but this variety of algae is so aggressive that i'd need to change out the water every day for at least a week to put any dent in controlling it.

i took down the guppy tank to make way for the found dresser. there's nothing in that tank anyway except for a single female guppy and a slimy algae garden. i scooped out the guppy and added it to the tetra tank (shared with a tetra and the mythical cherry barb).

shutting down an aquarium first requires siphoning out as much water as possible. i managed to get 3 buckets' worth before the water level became too shallow. i scooped out as much wet gravel as i could into another bucket, and then rinsed the tank, pouring out the remaining bits of gravel. later i poured out the wet gravel onto 2 cafeteria trays outside to dry them out before final storage.

into the empty space formerly occupied by the fish tank and aquarium stand went the found dresser. although it may look sturdy, it's really not a good quality dresser, with the bottoms composed of thin plywood buckling from age. since the base isn't very sturdy, i can't really put anything heavy into the drawers for fear of the bottoms falling out.

so in the end, i didn't really claim that much more storage space with the addition of this found dresser. i still need to add an additional side table to keep my junk (bike tools, plastic storage containers). the one good thing is now i had a spot for my red ladybug light; combined with the pink walls, the kitchen looks like a reddish dark room once it gets dark.

drew came home around 6:00. too tired to make dinner after teaching 2 classes today, he spent the night finishing his personal supply of snacks. as for me, i had more leftover meat sauce spaghetti.

my ozeri precision ii scale (normally $26.95, on sale for only $16.17) arrived from amazon.com today in the late afternoon. heavier than i thought, and a bit bigger than my old scale which broke a few months ago. the first reading was off by 10 pounds until i realized it was just a calibration measurement. subsequent weight measurements (with or without clothes) were very precise, off by a fraction at most. it uses 4 AAA batteries (which came with the scale) and the display screen is very bright.

also in the package was my transcend TS-RDP8K memory card reader ($8.98). it reads the 3 most common formats: compact flash, secure digital (regular and mini), and memory stick. the mini SD isn't really necessary since i have a bunch of mini-SD-adapters. when i downloaded a bunch of photos using the reader, it seemed just as fast compared to my lexar firewire compact flash reader.