with my OPO phone still connected to my htc re camera last night, i set it up in the living room window to shoot a 10 hrs time-lapse movie of the sunrise as seen from the street. the battery on the re only lasts 1:30, so i rigged up a base and attached it to a portable battery pack. i was so afraid of losing the camera that i kept my connection to it the entire night while i slept.

in the morning i checked what i had. i used the phone to stop the camera from shooting. the problem of where i live is i can't get a clear view of the sky, so there was only a quick snippet of moving clouds during the sunrise.

wangyan texted me on qq this morning. last time we chatted, she said her 6" oppo phone was stolen from her jacket by a pickpocket. she ended up getting an iphone 5s as a replacement, despite downgrading to just a 4" display. she used audio text chatting and spoke to me only in english, as a sort of language practice. she sent me a photo of the view from her office.

i met lisa for lunch at the pho house on mass ave. this used to be a thai restaurant called tamarind house. it was my first visit since the change, but apparently lisa had been here a few times already. the closest vietnamese restaurant i go to is actually pho 'n rice on beacon street. i ordered a large pho with various cuts of mystery beef. it was okay, the noodles were stuck together though. lisa had the vietnamese crepe. the waiter made it a joke as to whether or not we wanted forks or chopsticks (this is profiling! he should've just given us the chopsticks, regardless if we wanted them or not). lisa was gracious enough to treat. by the time we left around 1:00, the place suddenly got really crowded.

i was to rendezvous with lisa back at her house. it'd been so long i'd forgotten the address, and even after she told me, i still got a little lost on my bike. i was here to help her assemble a standing desk (uplift 900). she'd already pieced together the heavy legs, and was about to drill the holes into the wooden desktop for the screws (the oak desktop she got separately). it took me a while to realize that the legs were actually automated. once we screwed on the legs, mounted the control box and connected all the wires, we turned over the table right side up. that's when it transformed from a low table top to something about 50" tall! a transformer table!

later lisa showed me all the renovation work she'd done in her house, from her lightly remodeled kitchen to her upstairs, which had been completely gutted with a new roof, skylight, and an amazingly gorgeous new bathroom good enough to live in.

back at home, naturally i couldn't reconnect my phone to the htc re camera again. i wanted to try and shoot a sunset time-lapse video. so instead i used my two smartphones. unfortunately there wasn't much of a sunset, and the sky just went from light to dark without much fanfare.

for dinner i finished the rest of my no-knead bread with a garlic-salt-olive oil dipping sauce. i ate while watching episodes of fargo. yangfan started chatting with me. she told me her job was okay, a little low paying, but stable. even though she thought the company was going to go bankrupt at one point, they're about to move to a new office space.

later i chatted with sunmeng. she went with her mother to a birthday luncheon of a family friend. the food wasn't all that good, despite the fact that they gifted the host with RMB$1000.

by some miracle i got the phone to reconnect with the re camera. i set up another time-lapse video to shoot the living room in the evening, but after 1:30 the camera ran out of battery and stopped filming. also a new version of the re camera app became available on google play. after i installed it i was hoping it fixed the connection problem but i couldn't reconnect to the camera again.