after consulting the jones soda website last night and discovering they're also sold at stop & shop supermarkets, i rode to the mcgrath highway stop & shop to see if they carried any (there's another one by teele square which is closer but not as big). i searched everywhere, including the organic beverage aisle, and finally asked a woman who was stocking some groceries, who in turned disappeared to ask her manager. she came back with the bad news: they didn't carry any jones soda. i didn't leave empty-handed though: i signed up for a stop & shop card and bought 2 cases of seltzer. they bulged out of my saddlebags as i rode to the cafe. i was worried it might rain, as the weather conditions was conducive to sudden downpours. in fact, the sky looked rather ominous by the time i left, though i escaped escathed, a few stray rain drops at worst.

at the cafe i reported my findings. i then went to belmont to turn on the air conditioners, water the garden, and test the radio. there was no problems connecting the baofeng to the TYT cross-band repeater at the cafe. in fact, i could transmit on both 2m and 70cm and still reach the repeater, though 70cm-to-2m gave a clearer reception versus 2m-to-70cm which was only 30% clarity and the rest noise. testing with the chimney-mounted ground-plane antenna, on both bands it'd range from near 100% to 60-70% clarity with some static.

i stopped at the cafe one last time to drop off a smart plug so we could measure the power consumption of the new hisense chest freezer before finally returning home sometime after noontime. for lunch i ate some leftover fried chicken.

we tested the radio again between my house and the cafe. consistent with our testing from previous days, i can reach the TYT cross-band repeater best transmitting at 2m and rebroadcasting at 70cm. receiving at 70cm i get a lot of static, and transmitting at 70cm i have a hard time hitting the repeater. the final test would be when my father returned home later in the day.

i received some good news today: my logic board was returning, i'm assuming fixed, though the e-mail didn't mention the status. also not mentioned is whether or not they were able to reconnect the right speaker plug back onto the motherboard. i was excited to finally end this ordeal of not having a decent laptop, prepared to spend all of tomorrow just sitting at home waiting for the package to arrive. then i realized they're not sending it back via UPS, but rather USPS, and it wouldn't get here until saturday, so i have to wait 3 more agonizing days. without knowing if i still have a working laptop or not, that means i can't make any decisions in regards to buying a new used MBP.

i was going to market basket to get some groceries, but waited an hour for the sudden showers to stop before riding my bike.

in the early evening we tested the radio one final time. unlike the results from a few days ago, we were now able to reach other other just fine, my father transmitting at 70cm (me receiving at 2m), and me transmitting at 2m (my father receiving at 70cm). i could receive fine on both the baofeng and QYT using the DBJ-2 indoor-mounted antenna, but i could only transmit on the QYT (using low power); the baofeng transceiver just isn't powerful enough. in fact, transmission was working so well, my father could still hit the cafe repeater from belmont using just the stock antenna on his baofeng from the backyard. not sure why it worked now and not before, the only difference is the weather (it was rainy over the weekend), or maybe turning off and on the repeater somehow fixed some of the earlier bugs. but having the cross-band repeater working now means we don't have to buy an additional radio. the only thing we might look into is getting a cheap cross-band repeater, as the $200 TYT is just too good a radio to have it just be a dedicated repeater.

for dinner instead of making a chicken caesar salad as i originally planned, i heated up some leftover cheese pasta just to make some more room in the fridge. i spent the rest of the night intermittently turning on and off the loud yet cool air conditioner.

i almost put in a bid for a 2015 MBP 15" retina display 16GB/1TB selling on ebay. the starting bid was $600, but there were more than a dozen people watching. i waited until the final second, but the price was already close to $1000. the final bid was a little bit above a grand, which is still a steal for this laptop.