GC decided not to go into the office today. that confirms my suspicion, which is he actually doesn't have a lot of work while he's here. it's not the first time i've had a chinese astrophysicist stay at my place who's only really here for show and not to actually work. GC goes to work late, comes home early, and i never see him doing anything astrophysicist related, either watching a video game video or reading his sima qian history book on his laptop. and that was when his boss was still in town. now that his boss is gone, he's completely unsupervised and the wheels have started to come off. i'm just surprised he didn't start slacking off earlier, waiting until his penultimate day here in cambridge to do so. i don't really care except he insists on setting up in the kitchen with all the lights on even though it's the middle of the day. i just have to keep on reminding myself that he'll be gone by saturday morning.

the weather for the month of august has been total crap. today was supposed to be a nice sunny day, but the sky was overcast until 11:30am. solar production wise, it's been pretty awful. i knew we had a few rainy days and a few cloudy days, but so far this month we've only had 5 days where the solar production was 40+ kWh. compared that to july, where we had 23 days over 40+ kWh, and even a few 50+ kWh days. but nobody can control the weather.

i went on an hourlong errand run in the early afternoon. first to rite aid, to pick up the monthly prescriptions i phoned in this morning, requiring nearly 50 key presses to make my order. there was an older couple ahead of me in line who were taking forever because they kept entering the wrong phone number on the keypad; fortunately another pharmacist saw what was happening and opened up a second register. as fall and winter approaches, the pharmacy is once again pushing for people to get their flu shot, which should be covered by most health insurance.

next i went to market basket. there are 4 ways i can get to MB, the cargo bike being the most convenient and most frequently used. second method is walking, which only happens in the dead of winter, when the roads are too snowy and icy to ride the bike. third, every once in a while i'll take the motorcycle, but usually in conjunction with some other errand (like today). finally, there's the car. usually it's when i hitch a ride with my father on a supply run. even rarer are the occasions when i drive there myself, which only happens if my parents aren't around and i need to get enough supplies for the cafe that i can't just use the bike.

finally i went to the cafe to drop off my panasonic lumix camera. i coordinated with my parents to see what time we should meet tomorrow. the original plan was they'd come and pick me up after closing the cafe early and together we'd drive down to the black falcon terminal for their norwegian cruise departure to bermuda. but the new plan now is for me to go to their place and wait for them to come home. this way they don't have to bring all their luggage beforehand, and can have some time to prepare any last minute items. afterwards i'll return the car and come back to cambridge.

somehow i was hoping GC would be gone when i got back but he was still at home. i chatted with him, he told me he can work just as well from home as from the office, but since he no longer has an office anyway (he's been spending the past 2 weeks in the library), there's really no point in going in. i told him if he was interested in korean barbecue tomorrow, the best time would be around lunchtime, but he said we could go their for dinner instead, since i'd have to leave tomorrow afternoon to take my parents to their cruise. after he made a late lunch, he took a nap around 3pm. that was sort of a reprieve, since it meant i didn't have to see him every time i went into the kitchen. he woke up around 4:30pm. then around 5pm he left to go play badminton one last time with some of the other chinese astrophysicists. he left his MBP on in his room attached to my secondary LCD monitor which i let him borrow.

i made another reuben sandwich for dinner after getting some more corned beef from market basket earlier. i've been eating reubens all week long, and surprisingly haven't reached my limit yet. i was out of canned sauerkraut but had plenty of my homemade sauerkraut from this past spring. i also added a sliced pickle on the side for authenticity, washed down with a bottle of hard cider i found in the fridge.

i've come to realize that my upstairs neighbors the jackson are surprisingly quiet. while matt goes to work, sara just stays at home. but even so, i hardly hear any noises, with the exception of when she was out on her upstairs backyard porch talking on the phone. the key is they don't seem to be television people. the previous tenants - though they were exceptional nice and considerate - did watch a lot of tv and i came to expect a few hours of television noises from the upstairs living room every night. but this new couple are very quiet, and i wonder what they do for fun if not watch television, maybe read?

i finally watched it (2017). i almost wanted to view it as a coming of age story instead of the horror it's billed as. just a group of childhood friends on their summer vacation (a point that was brought up a few times), riding bikes, swimming in the quarry, exploring a haunted house, avoiding bullies, adding a few new members into their "loser club," including the chubby new kid and the pretty girl the whole town has apparently slut-shamed. midway through i suddenly realized this was actually part 1 of a 2 part movie, the sequel taking place in the future when the kids are all grown up and must return to derry to kill it again.

GC didn't come home until 10pm. after badminton (they finished at 8pm), he had dinner with his fellow researchers, one final farewell meal. he came in the living room and i played an old retrospective episode of breaking bad streaming from netflix, "one minute."