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after eating a single golden kiwi for lunch, i biked to market basket in the early afternoon to pick up some groceries for the week. it was a surprisingly pleasant day, warm and sunny with hardly any wind, a farcry from this morning when it was still cold and overcast. after dropping everything off back at the house, i went out again to visit michael at his shop to see if i could fix their crashing mac problem. the computer was frozen when i arrived, a black screen but the cursor was still visible and movable. after a reboot, i allowed OSX to update the system and erased a yahoo account that mysteriously self-created in OSX mail. finally, i backed up key files (outlook database and excel documents) onto the 128GB thumb drive that was previously used for time machine backup. now we just wait and see if the machine will crash again in the next few days.

i upgraded my parents' verizon FIOS cable package. not so much an upgrade as a continuation of the plan they have now. they still had 10 days left in their previous contract, but i wanted to make the switch while they were still here. a new 2-year agreement is $60/month. but the price is completely misleading as you also have to rent the cable boxes (2x $10/each) and the special gateway/router ($7/month) and after fees (why is there a local sports franchise fee?) the final cost is $102/month. still a better deal than the comcast package though.

we cooked a few barbecue items for dinner, including some blue cheese burgers and italian sausages. the burgers were good, a lot more flavorful than last night (where i probably used too much beef and not enough blue cheese). the best however were the sausages, cooked to perfection, juice on the inside, crispy on the outside, as if they were deep-fried.

cristina was home when i got back via motorcycle, in her room doing something on her laptop. later in the evening she made a spanish omelette using up half a dozen of my eggs. she has an improvisational cooking style, and many of the things she's made are sort of on the bland side, particularly in combination with her attempts ate eating healthy and vegetarian.

steve had his television blaring again upstairs. he either doesn't know how loud it is or simply doesn't care. hoping it's the former, i wrote him a gentle e-mail asking to him to turn down the volume. i hesitated in sending it, and only after about an hour of half of loud muffled tv sounds from upstairs did i finally fire off the message. unfortunately it seems like the latter, as he wrote me wrote back saying, "sorry, i won't turn down the volume, it's not even 9:30pm." later i discovered he wrote me two e-mails, the one before simply with, "jesus, tony." i've always known it, but recent evidence has pointed to the fact that my upstairs neighbor steve is a complete asshole. although in person it's hard to see, in our e-mail exchanges he often lacks a certain diplomacy. no wonder he got into a shouting match with neighbors on the private way who turned the parking spots adjacent to their homes into private parking. my only hope now is that steve dies quickly from some awful incurable disease so i can have new upstairs neighbors.