i biked to the cafe by 10:30am, bringing with me the two cases of diet coke i bought from market basket yesterday afternoon. we mistakenly made an extra serving of dan dan noodles which i had for lunch, along with some charsiu burnt ends and some black tea. in the afternoon during a lull, i went over to my sister's place and fixed her webcam so it wouldn't tilt against the blinds but putting a coil of rubber wire around the joint. across the street painters were putting up a new mural on the daycare center. a car that'd parked on the cross-walk and blocking a hydrant was towed by a police, who stayed on site for nearly half an hour, waiting for the flatbed truck to come by and remove the car.

we were nearly out of linguine pasta so i biked to the fresh pond trader joe's to get some. they were all out, but i did leave with 10 packages of frozen edamame beans and some incan corn snacks (for myself). i told my parents i wouldn't mind going to market basket to check out their pasta noodle selection, but they said not to bother, that they'd go early tomorrow morning instead. i stayed at the cafe until 4pm before returning home.

i stopped by the community garden to water my plot. something seems to be eating my long beans and i'm beginning to think its birds, because the leaves look tattered in such a way that doesn't look like insect damage, only along the outer edges.

returning home, i passed by a house that was throwing out a bunch of pots. those i picked up immediately, but what was more valuable were the milk crates they came in. there were a total of 3 - all filled with junk - i took one of them. after dropping off the pots at the house, i returned to the garden and put the milk crate underneath one of my eggplant grow bags. i did this with the thinking that if the grow bags were elevated somehow, i'd get less slug/snail damage. when i left the garden, i picked up a second milk crate while i'll to the garden tomorrow.

i ordered another 45-gallon medium-sized garbage bin from the city through their online material request form. we were supposed to get two originally, but steve convinced me into getting just one in order to save space. but i didn't realize how small they'd be, and we originally had 2 30-gallon trash bins, so just having a single 45-gallon bin was a downgrade. cambridge would also only pick up trash in these bins starting next week. i figured even if we don't use the second bin, it's still good to have a backup in case we do need it one day. besides, they're small enough they don't take up too much space.

a few things i'd ordered arrived today. first the 5TB WD external hard drive ($70). i bought it off of ebay as certified refurbished, i'm only using it to store movies and shows, so reliability is not critical, which is why i'm willing to risk getting a "used" drive (even though it does come with a 2 year warranty through ebay). in the past i always formatted these drives as exFAT so they'd be both windows and mac compatible; but i haven't touch a PC in ages, and exFAT does weird things on the mac like not updating folder dates, so i decided to format it in apple's HFS+, which is their older file system (replaced by APFS a few years ago).

my replacement macbook pro battery arrived as well. i'd just replaced it 1-1/2 years ago, and already the replacement battery is giving me "service battery" warnings. the battery only has 321 cycles, but the original design capacity of 8440mAh has already dropped down to 5083mAh, a reduction of 40%. running off the battery alone, i can get 1-1/2 hours of juice. the way i use my computer is probably to blame in some part, like how i have 40 tabs opened on my chrome browser. but still, only 60% of the original capacity? that can't be right. i originally bought my replacement battery from ninjabatt, but decided to try a different brand, so i went with techowl. i need to find a good time where i can replace the battery.

for dinner i made two hot dogs with all the toppings: ketchup, mustard, relish, diced onions. the only thing i didn't have was sauerkraut, even though i had a jar of it in my cupboard. i ate them both in under a minute, like my own hot dog eating contest. i had some mandarin oranges afterwards.