at least the contractors had the courtesy of waiting until 9:00 before they began banging upstairs. by 9:40 it was so loud the whole house shook and i was sure pieces of my ceiling would be crumbling down. besides redoing the floors of his kitchen (above my bedroom ceiling), steve was also replacing a few windows, putting in a secondary door above his front staircase, and installing a stove hood and accompanying wall vent.

with 3 weeks left before i leave the country, i'm making it my personal mission to do some trip-related errands every day. today i called my health insurance to make sure they switched me from celticare to neighbor health plan (i need to make the switch because MGH doesn't accept celticare anymore). i did it online twice, but there's no way to verify if was successful or not, so i decided to call them and talk to a real person. turns out i was actually signed up for both, but they managed to clear it up. i also called to see if i could get some reimbursement on my new glasses. they definitely don't make it easy to make a claim.

i started to clean out my bedroom because i've been meaning to rearrange some of the furnitures. i was originally going to do this back in april before i broke my collarbone and then couldn't use my left arm anymore. now that i'm relatively healed up, it was time to move some stuff around.

it was a hot and humid day. the forecast was for torrential downpours between the hours of 3:00 and 7:00. i bicycled to belmont, panting the whole way. despite the heat, summertime is prime biking weather, and i'm going to miss it when i'm gone. maybe there's a gym on the industrial campus where i'll be staying in china, i could spend the next 2 months getting jacked. but they already have a name for that in china: it's called manual labor, i hear it's a good way to gain muscles.

when the rain finally came, it brought with it some cooler weather. we opened the windows to let the cool breeze circulate, but not too much otherwise rain would blow inside the house. my bike was parked outside but i put a plastic bag over the seat which made it okay (don't mind the rust on the chains).

after dinner i was waiting for the weather to clear up so i could make a break back to cambridge. the transition into clear weather was abrupt, as i suddenly noticed there was sunshine. when i peeked out the window i saw the most magnificent rainbow. we don't often see rainbows here. because maybe there are so many buildings around to get a good view of the sky, maybe i'm usually indoors when it rains. but there it was, a half circle of colors. not only that, but it was a double rainbow too. we went out to the front of the house to get a better look, and up and down the street, people were also outside admiring the rainbow.

riding home i just had to stop to take some more photos of the rainbow. usually rainbows don't last very long but this one had real staying power. everywhere i looked, people were taking photos of the sky with their cellphone, and even a few cars pulled over to document what was happening. one of those drivers came up to me holding an iphone in her hands. "say no more, you want me to take your photo with the rainbow," i told her. actually, she wanted my photos because i had the bigger camera, and handed me her card so i could mail some to her.

these rainbows were actually hard to capture. what i really needed was my wide-angle lens, which i left back at home. therefore i could only get a partial rainbow, now the whole arc. it was also close to sunset, so although the sky was bright, the ground was already sort of dark. and you really need a circular polarizing filter to really bring out the colors (fortunately all my lenses are CP equipped).

i stripped out of my sweat-soaked clothes and took a quick shower when i got back. in my hasty departure i forgot to take my tablet pc. even though i've only had it for a few days, it felt strange not having it now. i had the hockey game on the tv, but while waiting for the bruins to score, i was in my bedroom continuing to empty out the bookcase and the dresser.

before i could rearrange my furniture, i first had to clean the decade worth of dust and cobwebs behind them. it wasn't that bad, at least there wasn't any mold or dead critters. i'm so used to the old layout of my room, the new layout seems weird and wrong somehow.

happily, the bruins ended up winning tonight on a score of 2-0, taking the series to 2-1. i ended the evening buying some sleeves for the sero tablets, a case for my fuji W3 camera, and a 32GB microSDHC card (since i co-opted the one from my panasonic ZS20 to use on the tablet).