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the chrome bypass paywall plug-in i installed nearly 2 weeks ago has been working great. being able to read the new york times or washington post or boston globe without having to worry about getting blocked by a paywall has been a godsend, like the early golden days of the internet, when everything was still free. i think if i had the disposable income i would definitely subscribe to NYT, i've missed in-depth news coverage, something i can't get by watching the news or reading the snippets on cnn.com or boston.com.

kevin was gone by the time i woke up at 9:30am. judging from the sounds, he probably left a bit before 9am, which prompted me to turn down the heat. i left for my parents' place around noontime. nobody was home, my parents went to the cafe to man the shop while my 2nd aunt went to a morning doctor's appointment. they came back while i was outside refilling the bird feeder.

i helped my parents sign up for the japan airline mileage program. the website was kind of hard to navigate, and you could see different people worked on different sections. the form was also slightly out-dated, because there was instructions for using it with the netscape browser (company went out of business in 2003). my parents were missing one of their ticket stubs (from boston to tokyo), but we were able to fill out the mileage anyway since it only asked for the date, flight number, and ticket number (which was the same per person both to and from destination).

my father and i went around the house taking photos with matthew's flir infrared phone camera. it led us to the grow room, where the yellow sticky traps had caught fungus gnats, but only a few. i think our 3rd soil drench from yesterday still won't entirely get rid of the gnats. this will probably be our 10-day routine from now on, and we simply have to learn to live with a small number of gnats. whatever the case, it's still better than what we had before, where haphazard watering with low-Bti-concentration water hardly made a dent in the gnat population. currently it's under control, we can now worry about things like aphids and lack of soil nutrients.

yesterday it was my mother who went to sleep early due to jetlag; today it was my father. he slept through dinner while my mother and i had some sauerkraut soup mixed with rice. my sister also came home to pick up her dog and had some sauerkraut soup as well before leaving.

i left soon afterwards, hoping to get back before kevin came home, but he was back by 6:30pm, at which point i turned up the heat for him. when i got to the house, most of the lights in the house were turned on, including the living room ceiling light which never gets turned on. kevin also forgot to lock the front door, i noticed it right away when i put in the key and it didn't turn the usual way (because it was already unlocked).

i started watching the hulu series reprisal. it's set in an anachronistic world where there are hillbilly gangs driving old timey roadsters and honky tonky clubs populated with show girls and burlesque dancers. it sort of reminds me of the CW series gotham mixed with 1984's streets of fire with a touch of 1983's the outsiders. it also has shades of sons of anarchy (which i've never seen), a drama about a criminal gang. at the same time, it's also a simple (and not quite so simple) tale of revenge, about a woman (played by abigail spencer) left for dead plotting to get back at the people who did her wrong.