i found karen working in the living room this morning. i gave her some space, went to go use the bathroom, took a shower, then made breakfast: yogurt with granola, fruit smoothie, and cooked up some frozen edamame that's been in the freezer.

i finally took karen to haymarket today. she originally wanted to go later, in the early afternoon, but i told her it was better if we went early as it was supposed to rain later. actually, it did rain this morning, but from the doppler radar forecast i could tell we had a few hours window of semi-dry but overcast weather.

we biked, but right from the start we ran into problems as her chain fell off again. we had to wheel it back to the house so i could finally get the chain into the sprocket. it had fallen off in such a way that it was outside the front derailleur, not even sure how it did that. later i found out that the chain on her bike would slip off whenever she pedaled backwards. solution: don't pedal backwards.

as for my own bike, i noticed a rickety sound coming from the bottom bracket. it might need to be replaced, i vaguely remember doing it once before, not sure if it was to this bike or the old bianchi (it was for the bianchi back in 2009). i should have some special tools for the job. i'll need to investigate further next week and isolate the problem so can i fix it. even better, if i wait for a real nice warm spring day next month, i could completely strip down my bike and give it a thorough cleaning.

i was a little worried about karen because she's a slow biker. she can bike faster, but 1) she's only ever biked for fun, and 2) she's not very confident biking in city streets. so i made sure to tell her in advance if we're about to reach a tricky intersection or need to perform a fancy lane change. i think she did better than that time i took her to longwood, hopefully she gets better as she continues to ride to work.

we arrived without incident. i first took her to boston public market, figured as a nutritionist she'd be interested in seeing some higher end local food. next we went to haymarket, which was the exact opposite in the form of a cheap outdoor produce market. karen seemed to like it, was surprised by how big it was, and said she'd definitely take her visiting friends her. she bought a few vegetables and fruits, including tomatoes, bananas, onions, and some pears. as for me, i got a large box of strawberries ($2), a large box of blueberries ($2), a bag of honeycrisp apples for $1.50, 2 ripe avocados ($1), $2 worth of long hot peppers, and a bundle of thin asparagus ($1, inspiring karen to get some as well).

on our way back it began to mist up a little bit, but at least it wasn't raining. the good thing was there didn't seem to be too many cars out today, so we made it back without any problems.

i left soon afterwards for belmont, around 2:20pm. i took the opportunity to pogo from the bike, keeping my streaks alive. i ended up taking twice as long as i normally would, riding with one hand, keeping the other ready to capture critters. i ended up with enough captures to evolve a few pokemons. i finally got the gold kanto medal, with 100 registered creatures.

you'll remember back when my parents first arrived in taiwan, they told me that the xiaomi redmi note 3 phone suddenly stopped charging so wouldn't work. they even took it to a repair shop and the technician told them they couldn't fix it, and the only way was to send it back to china for a factory repair. so imagine my surprise when i plugged in the xiaomi only to see it suddenly charging without a problem. 2 hours later the battery was at 100% and the phone worked as normal. so may my father used a bad usb cable.

after dinner i biked back to cambridge. temperature was in the upper 30's and i wasn't wearing my thermal underwear but it didn't feel that cold. it'd rain a little bit earlier, so my bike seat and foam handlebars were still wet. i parked the bike outside. karen wasn't home, went out to dinner with her friend paula.