i woke up at 9am to do some more cleaning around the house before my chinese astrophysicist roommate arrives at noon. i figured it'd take some time to get through customs and get his luggage so he probably wouldn't get here until 1:30pm. i threw out the trash which contained some spoiled chicken. i also tossed the two old carpets from the guest bedroom, with their backing that's turned to dust. finally, i removed all the summer clothes from the storage bins in the guest bedroom closet (mostly shorts) and exchanged them with my winter clothes (mostly sweaters).

the silicone caulk i added late last night seemed to be holding on much better than the acrylic-latex caulk i applied the day before. for one thing, it was truly waterproof, and the caulk didn't dissolve like the previous application, but instead the water would simply bead off. the white caulk looks good on the part of the faucet above the white porcelain basin, but it's a bit jarring on the faucet itself between two chrome finished parts. it's not worth doing anything about it now, but i will remove the white caulk at some point and apply a ring of clear silicone caulk instead. the important thing is it works and everything is waterproof again.

around 11am i went down to the community garden to water my plants. i did one last round of cleaning when i got home, took a shower, and finally ate a pastry for lunch around 12:30pm.

GC finally showed up around 1:30pm. he arrived with a tiny suitcase and a backpack. i began to suspect that maybe he wasn't flying in from china. i searched his name online about a week ago, realized he was a post-doc at a university in alabama. while i assumed he was flying in from china, could he have actually flown in from alabama instead? when i asked him about it, he confirmed that he'd been in alabama for half a year already, with the entirety of his pos-doc program to last a total of 2 years. also he paid me almost as soon as he arrived, unlike some other roommates, where i needed to remind them.

i gave him a quick tour of the house and issued him an MBTA charlie card and a map of cambridge. i also gave him a house key. we chatted until 3:30pm. the last time i had a chinese roommate was crazy mary more than a year ago in early 2016. with chinese roommates, i can wax nostalgically about my own experiences in china. afterwards i taught him how to open and lock the front door, and i took him to star market to get some groceries. i warned him not to get too much, since i'd take him some other day to market basket, where groceries are much cheaper. GC kept wanting to find some fish but fortunately there wasn't a lot of choices.

i finally left for my parents' place around 4pm. it was too hot for me but my father was outside in the backyard digging up the large clump of underground bamboo rhizomes. he managed to clear away that whole clump. now we have just some small areas of escaping bamboo to dig up and then finally chop down those two dead and diseased plum trees.

yesterday we ate taipei gourmet leftovers for dinner; tonight, we were eating some of the fresh ingredients we bought from good fortune supermarket (好运来 超级市场), including chicken gizzards, garlic scapes, chinese bacon (腊肉), and tripe.

i returned home around 8pm. GC already had dinner, made some eggs with tomatoes and cooked some rice with my rice cooker. we chatted some more in the kitchen before he retired to his room around 10pm. he didn't go to asleep until close to midnight.