just as i'd hoped, most of the snow that fell last night melted by this morning. i woke up after seeing an e-mail from spanish david. the last i heard from him 3 years ago he'd moved to london to edit an engineering magazine. now he and his wife have moved back to madrid and he's working for a telecommunication company using deep learning to analyze data. he wrote asking if my spare bedroom was available, as his wife knows a PhD candidate (a hong kong woman who grew up in the UK) looking to do some research at the harvard-smithsonian center for 3 months beginning in january.

i woke up with pain in the outer edge of my left foot. i can't put weight on it and flexing the foot would also cause it to hurt. i thought about visiting the doctor but i'll give it a few more days, hopefully it'll clear up. i can't think of what i did to damage that area (like rolling an ankle). maybe it's my old cuboid bone fracture recovery area combined with the cold, that sort of weird weather related bone aches.

my father came to pick me up so we could go turkey shopping after i suggested we get a bird now instead of waiting until next week. my sister's godmother tagged along as well. market basket was surprisingly busy in the early afternoon, folks already ramping up for their thanksgiving supply shopping. as in recent years, we got a fresh turkey. unfortunately the largest size i could find was 20.5 lbs. but we took it anyway. as for me, i got some milk and eggs for my flan recipe.

i was hoping to see some sun but the weather remained grey for the rest of the day. we only generated 2.33 kWh of electricity, the least amount this month. i watched the ballad of buster scruggs on netflix, the new coens brothers film. it's an anthology of short western stories, each one ending in a character's death. it's the sort of movie i wouldn't have liked in the past, but i can better appreciate more character driven storylines, even if some of the shorts seem a little random.

the period between 4:30pm to 6pm is like the bermuda triangle of consciousness for me. at 4pm i watch the early evening news, but from that point onwards to 6pm, there's nothing else to watch on tv. it's also when it gets dark and i'm felling particularly cold after spending a day in a lowly heated house. i find myself lying on the couch with the laptop on my stomach, and soon i struggle to stay awake and quickly fall asleep. i tried to fight it this time around, and was successful for the most part, but i did doze off for a few minutes.

early today i made an omelette and a coffee for lunch. for dinner i finished the last of my arugula salad. about an hour later i was hungry again and i made an italian sub. either some of the deli meats have gone bad or i should've washed the lettuce, because afterwards i felt a little weird in my digestive tracts. nothing that a trip to the bathroom couldn't fix.