maybe i've always suspected but never bothered checking for sure because 1) i never noticed any smells and 2) the ramification was simply too gross to entertain, better to not know. but every morning i see a stack of toilet paper in the trash. i just assumed kevin was wiping up whatever pee mess he made, but turns out he was throwing his shit away instead of flushing it like a civilized person. how come i never noticed any smells though? maybe because kevin eats a primarily vegetarian diet, or my nose has gone noseblind from all the urine. regardless, it was my worst fear realized. never mind that he occasionally pees all over the floor (that hasn't happened in a while though, maybe he finally learned how to pee correctly); i simply can not have a roommate throw his shit in the trash like it's some third world country. i dreaded the conversation i would have with him later tonight.
i went to go return the pixel 3 phone this morning. i originally thought about putting it in a small box but it arrived in a large padded envelope, so i went to the dollar store in search of something similar (i couldn't reuse the original envelope because i'd torn it up). i found something similar but slightly smaller, though i was happy to learn that the phone box was just barely able to fit. i taped up the envelope (noticing that my packaging tape was much smaller than before, as if somebody had used it) and rode to the post office, carrying the package in my blue grocery tote bag. the cheapest it'd cost to ship to texas was $8.75 but i decided to add some insurance just in case ($4.70 for $260) and the final cost came out to $13.45.
when i returned home i realized i no longer had my tote bag; i'd bunched it up and stuffed it in my jacket pocket while at the post office, it must've fallen out. at first i was just going to forget about it, but i'm sentimental even when it comes to a dirty old grocery bag, so went back out and retraced my steps, hoping to see it. i made it all the way to the post office without seeing it. i didn't bother going inside and asking ("did anybody seem my beat up grocery bag?"), figured it'd fallen out in the road and somebody had picked it up already. it was a good bag, had it for many years, it wasn't mine to begin with, i found it one time on beacon street just outside the whole foods.
my mother called me to complain that the cafe wifi was down. however she was able to call me from the internet phone, which meant the internet was still working. the lights on the cablemodem was also normal, so it must've been the router. i asked her to unplug it but she didn't know what it looked like but fortunately my father came back from a supply run and was able to fix the wifi.
the sky grew dark and it'd be drizzling and fogging the rest of the afternoon, so i was stuck at home. i made an english muffin sandwich for lunch.
i started cleaning my aquarium around 4pm, only to have kevin come home soon afterwards, another early day for him. he often comes home early if he's running errands, like getting money from the bank, or grocery shopping. today it was visiting the porter square target to look for a neck warmer for his weekend ski trip (not a scarf, a neck warmer) and then get a haircut at floyd's 99 barbershop. he had to wait 20 minutes (surprised it was busy that time of day) and ended up getting a haircut and a hairwash, total cost $35 including tip.
while i was cleaning the tank, i casually asked him, "hey, do you throw away your toilet paper in the trash after you use the bathroom?" he said yes in a way that implied he didn't think it was anything wrong. i told him to flush his toilet paper in the future. he said he only did it because he saw i'd done it. i shook my head and told him the only time toilet paper is in the trash is because i had to wipe something down or i had to blow my nose, never because of shit.
today was the first time cleaning the aquarium with a magic sponge, which i cut into quarters to make it easier to use. i was cleaning the algae off of the glass, typically the most tedious and hardest part of fish tank maintenance. in the past i used an algae scouring pad, but it took a lot of elbow grease, and even though it was near impossible to remove all the algae unless i did it batches over the course of several days. but with the magic sponge, i had the aquarium sparkling clean in matter of minutes. the next time i clean i'll need to remove the driftwood and plants, they made a more thorough cleanup in the sink, too much thread algae.
kevin went out to get groceries around 6pm while i throw a frozen brick of lasagna in the oven. he came back laden with supplies, then spent the next 1-1/2 hours in the kitchen cooking. i didn't dare look, but trusted him that he wouldn't make a mess. saying all you want about his lack of bathroom etiquette, but his cooking is relatively tame, no stirfry, no frying, no stinky meats, a lot of stewing, a lot of microwave, either rice or pasta with vegetables, simple stuff.
while i was waiting for my lasagna to cook, i was busy scanning the stack of tax documents my father gave me yesterday. i think his accountant must have electronic copies, maybe he can ask for them next year. in the meantime, i scanned a set so we could have copies should we ever need to send them out electronically. i had to manually scan 114 pages using my old canon LiDE 70 scanner (circa 2006), something i've been meaning to upgrade since canon had long since stopped updating the software and it's not compatible with any modern scan drivers.
the new hampshire primary was tonight, polling stations closed at 8pm. bernie sanders won but only by a narrow margin, with pete buttigieg right behind him by less than 2 percentage points. amy klobuchar was at a near distant third. joe biden realized he was going to lose big and decided to cut his loses and get a head start in south carolina, abandoning his new hampshire supporters. out of all the candidates, i'm leaning towards buttigieg, more so after his close iowa victory, and even more after new hampshire. if sanders represents the hard liberal wing of the democratic party, buttigieg is the more moderate. if klobuchar didn't get a boost from performing well in the last debate, she wouldn't have funneled away moderate voters from buttigieg and he might've won new hampshire. even with all the votes going to other moderate candidates, buttigieg still narrowly beat sanders.