the book i reserved finally arrived at the cambridge library yesterday. the library notified me this morning even though i already knew from checking online. robert moses: master builder of new york city, a graphic novel by french artist and writer pierre christin and olivier balez. this copy came from the newton library. i rode down to the cambridge library this morning to retrieve it. when i came back i cleaned up the mess of acorn shells littering the backyard. this year is a mast year, must be all the hot and humid weather we've had. by the time i finished i was sneezing from all the ragweed pollen i inhaled, going back inside and taking a few sniffs from the medicated nasal spray. it was early enough to still have breakfast as i made a goat cheese omelette with some ready made bacon strips.

i went to my sister's place to watch over hailey while she's gone doing personal chef duty. it wasn't all that necessary as my sister had already let hailey out in the backyard to poop, so the only thing her dog do all day was to sleep. i was there to set up her new 2TB hard drive for automated wireless time machine backup in conjunction with the asus RT-AC68U router. this router being so expensive, one of the features it has is the ability for its network hard drive to function as a time machine backup. it didn't work when i tried setting up initially, until i discovered that the hard drive itself has to have the same UNIX path name, in this case sda2 (instead of "time machine" which was what i renamed the hard drive). i also partitioned the drive, 1TB for time machine, the second TB for a media server i'll set up at some other point. once i got the name correct, it started backing up over the wifi, which night last overnight, as the first backup is always the longest.

i left by 2pm. i tried coaxing hailey to go outside and use the bathroom again but she wouldn't budge.

even though we had a good deal of clouds by the afternoon, it wasn't entirely overcast, and we already generated a lot of electricity from the morning. the production for today - 31.11 kWh - was better than i'd expected. all we need tomorrow is 24 kWh and we will hit the 1 MWh mark.

i didn't start making dinner until after 8pm. it was either another reuben sandwich or some frozen spinach & cheese raviolis; i went with the italian choice. i ate while watching the 4th and last patriots' pre-season game, which was basically practice for their third-string quarterback.

my father called me close to midnight, their cruise ship norwegian dawn about a dozen miles east of the town of orleans off of the cape, well within reception distance (25 miles) of any cell phone towers. in fact, my father said he could see the flash of light houses but not much else. he called to confirm they will disembark tomorrow at 8:30am.

i thought it was my imagination but while doing a major backup of files on my macbook pro i noticed that even though i erased GB's worth of data, the available storage space never changed. it was almost like it was somehow still storing all my trashed files. i went online looking for answers and discovered the culprit: time machine! i've only recently started using apple's time machine backup now that i have a surplus of storage space. but one thing time machine does is it stores snapshots of the hard drive locally which can take up a lot of space. the solution is to let time machine make a backup, and it will erase all the old local snapshots. i ended up freeing 130GB worth of space. i still haven't backed up my most recent photos yet (since july), that will free up a good chunk of space as well.