li didn't go to work this morning, an unusual deviation in his consistent schedule for the past 3 months. i was up early for some reason, a little nervous that lucas hadn't contacted me since i wrote him an e-mail to get an update on the solar installation. i heard what i thought was clinking sounds coming from the kitchen and was waiting for it to stop, hoping li would've left for work before i got up. when i finally left my bedroom the kitchen was empty but the guest bedroom door was closed. i checked the front door and sure enough li's keys were still there which meant he was still home. those noises i heard earlier were coming from a nearby construction.

li didn't wake up until 9:30am, gave me a sheepish look, before using the bathroom while steaming some breakfast on the stovetop which partially fogged up the living room windows. i thought for sure he was leaving but he went back to his bedroom and closed the door and i didn't hear anything else afterwards.

li working from home presents a slight problem, as it means i'd need to turn up the heat all day, when normally i have the heat set low during the daytime hours, only turning on the heat if it's especially cold.

lucas didn't respond to my e-mail yesterday so i called him back this morning. he knew right away it was me, and he knew what i wanted to ask him. he said he was still waiting for his project manager to give the word, that a potential install could be this week, could be next week, but he had nothing definite. he said usually he get s 2-3 days advanced warning. i asked if the install would be pushed into next year, he said definitely not. i asked him not to forget about us, he said he won't. not much i can do, but a weekly check-in seems like a good idea, just to remind him.

my father stopped by in the late morning to bring over my mother's medical records from taiwan, to see if i can open the 2 CD-ROM's. they were in DICOM format, and it took me a while to find an application to open them on the mac. escape medical viewer opened the image files but ran in demo mode and put watermarks over the scans. osiris was able to open the files as well, but it too ran in demo mode, and although it didn't resort to watermarks for exported jpeg files, the output were of low resolution. i finally got horus to work after it didn't work initially, it's open-source and i eventually exported the scans.

li did eventually leave for work around 12:30pm after having lunch first in the living room, slurping his ridged luffa gourd (丝瓜) noodles, splattering juices all over the coffee table. after he left i turned down the heat and went to use the bathroom before taking a shower. i didn't eat much for lunch, just some salami slices. i was going to have them with cheese but i discovered the cheese were moldy so i tossed it.

in the afternoon i went to michael's in search of frosted plastic sheets for my DIY lowel ego project. i'm not even sure what the material is called, nor if michael's would carry it. they didn't, but instead of leaving empty-handed, i sent my mother some yarn photos and left with a skein of new chameleon yarn with a 50% off coupon ($3.99).

i raked the backyard of oak leaves when i got back home, ended up filling 2 paper bag worth of yard debris. it was kind of cold, temperature in the lower 40's, but i still took off my jacket because it was too bulky to work in.

for dinner i heated up some leftover pasta meat sauce and boiled half a box of leftover rotini. li came home some time after 8pm, out of breath from biking in the cold weather. tomorrow's forecast looks to be temperature in the upper 50's.