even though it's going to rain tonight, i went down to the community garden anyway to water the plants since i haven't been there since sunday and it's been dry since then. i saw someone with a large camera rig taking photos and when he came by my plot i asked him about his setup. his name was michael and he was there taking photos of insects. he was using a canon mirrorless R6 with an RF100mm F2.8L USM macro lens and a yongnuo brand 2-headed macro light. i learned that the R6 actually has built-in image-stabilizing. he showed me a photo of a long-horn bee, which i'd never heard before but apparently that's a thing now. he also gave me a business card.

i've given up on the matcha latte lunch as a weight loss solution. my weight has fluctuated back up to wintertime level. besides, just having some milk for lunch is a terrible idea as i found myself not so much hungry later in the afternoon but just more tired. having said that, i made myself a smoothie for lunch, hoping that a boost of banana potassium will give back my energy. later in the afternoon i baked some readymade soft pretzels in the toaster oven, ate them with some mustard. i also tried some lesser evil popcorn, a new brand i'd never heard of before. i got a watermelon hibiscus flavor, which is a combination i never would've dreamed of. there's a watermelon sweetness and a tartness from the hibiscus, a very weird combo.

i continue to remove wet insulation from inside my bathroom wall in order to speed up the drying time. i thought about getting a used dehumidifier from my parents, but i think a fan blowing directly into the gaping hole in my bathroom can work just as fast if not faster. i also whipped up an equal part paste of baking soda + salt + vinegar as a way to remove the grown patina from the copper pipes. i tried a little bit last night, it seemed to sort of work (i think it had more to do with the baking soda scrub), so i made some more and went down to the basement to see if i can clean off some of the pipe corrosion. when i went outside to bring in the trash, i noticed the wall beneath my bathroom had some strange stains. does it have anything to do with the leaking pipe? maybe, hopefully it's nothing.

i spent a good part of the day trying to set up the online ordering portal for the cafe. there's a free version that 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, and a paid version ($144/annual) that's the same amount but allows more customization. i could also try to roll my own, but the amount of time it'd take and the complexity makes using a readymade solution a lot easier, despite the additional costs.

between 4-6pm is a dangerous time for me, that's usually when i get sleepy. same thing happened today, lounging on the couch, i feel asleep around 6pm and woke up at 7:30pm.

i made a peppered ham sandwich for dinner, washed down with some pink lemonade, while watching the red sox-tigers game. boston ended up winning, breaking a 5-game losing streak. now the red sox is 1 game behind the rays.

it started raining in the evening. i'm tired of all this wetness, i'd love to have a stretch of dry weather.

at midnight i tried finding a live stream of the olympics men basketball semifinals between the US and australia. earlier i signed up for a peacock account hoping to see the game live. all streams are free with the exception of olympics basketball, which you need to pay in order to watch. i then used a toronto VPN to log into canada's TSN, but when the time came, i couldn't find the game anywhere. finally i searched online until i found a place that carried the game, surprising on canadian TSN. the stream was okay but every 15 minutes or so it'd freeze and i'd have to reload the page. the US looked like it might lose, down by 15 points going into halftime. but they locked it down in the second half, and won the game by 19 points.