i left the house around 10am. because i wanted to get back in an hour, i couldn't simply just walk down to the charles. so whenever possible, i jogged intermittently until i reached the river. i was listening to an aquarium podcast (there seems to be a podcast for everything interest), the topic was fertilizer.
i made good time and got back exactly an hour later at 11am. i took a quick shower before walking down to star market to pick up more boneless chicken thighs on sale (today was the last day). i then left for the cafe around 11:30am.
my parents were steaming vegetarian buns. there had already been two uber eats delivery order this morning. it got busy around noontime, but busiest around 1pm. we ran out of cucumbers (i'd just bought some on tuesday) so around 2pm i biked down to trader joe's to pick up some more. my mother was amazed by how fast it took me, just 15 minutes.
my mother made rice noodles with fish balls again for lunch.
i left around 3:45pm. i rode down to microcenter to buy some raspberry pi zeroes for alex. i haven't been to microcenter in ages (last time was back in june 2018, coincidentally enough, to also buy a raspberry pi zero w). a sales rep told me they no longer carry the rpi's on display (too much theft), but instead behind the desks at the checkout aisles. i asked the young man working the register, who left to get me a raspberry pi zero w. when i told him i needed 4, he went to go 4 but wasn't sure if there was a checkout limit. then his price gun wouldn't work, so his manager had to come and help. apparently there's a one rpi limit per customer. "if you ring it up a second time, it'll read $10,000," the manager said, not sure if he was serious. it came up as $10, not $5 as i originally thought (i paid $5 for mine originally, but 5 years ago). i bought it anyway, figuring one was better than nothing, and alex would reimburse me anyway, even though he asked for 4. turns out when i told him they were just $5 a piece, i was looking at the raspberry pi pico, which is an even tinier version of the raspberry pi. actually, it's more like an arduino, since it's just a microcontroller board, not an actual linux computer like the pi zero.
i left microcenter by 4:15pm, retracing the charles river until i got to harvard square. car traffic going to and coming back was crazy, but i effortlessly rode by all of them, getting home in just 15 minutes. i bumped into my moroccan mailman, and asked him if he had any friends or family affected by the recent earthquake near marrakech. he said he had some friends there, but they're all fine. the earthquake was literally felt by everyone in morocco. along with the more recent libyan flooding deaths, there seems to be something going on in north africa. my mailman told me that a friend of his said there was going to be an even bigger earthquake in the mediterranean area by next week, that will also affect spain.
i went out again, revisiting star market to get some more boneless chicken thighs on sale. i bought the last two packages.
i like sitting in front of my aquarium and staring into the tank, even though there's nothing going on other than tiny CO2 bubbles swirling everywhere. a lot of tiny bubbles get caught underneath the leaves of plants. without a CO2 indicator, i have no way of knowing if the CO2 is actually incorporating into the water. the other way to check is to take 2 pH measurements during the peak and valley of CO2 production. the fluctuation should be around 1 pH point, and as long as the KH value in the tank is between 1 and 10, that would mean 30ppm of CO2. i also learned how to make my own CO2 indicator solution, but i'd still need a glass CO2 checker first.
feeling thirsty, i made a watermelon smoothie. i first added my frozen cubed watermelon - enough to fit a 32 oz. container. i then added 2 large scoops of vanilla greek yogurt, and about a cup of sweetened almond milk. my blender had a hard time breaking apart the frozen watermelon (i should've added the frozen ingredient last), so i kept adding almond milk to "lubricate" the ingredients. eventually it did blend everything together, into a very fine and slushy consistency. i ended up making two glasses worth, i had to "drink" it all in one sitting otherwise it'd melt. it was still so thick i had to eat it with a spoon. it tasted like watermelon milk, if that makes any sense. if you were to try it blind, you might think it was a strawberry milk shake because of the pink color, until i told you what it is, and then you'd recognize the watermelon taste. it's definitely a little weird but interesting, and didn't taste bad at all.
i made dinner around 8pm, some more fresh ravioli, this time rana's italian sausage raviolis. it was good, but the individual raviolis were so big, they were hard to eat, and i was always afraid of it falling off the fork and splashing pasta sauce everywhere.
i continued watching more aquarium youtube videos. i learned about sponge filters, which is the filter of choice for people who have a lot of fish tanks. they're cheap, and they run off of an air pump. they only provide mechanical (sponge) and biological filtration (bacteria growing on the sponge), but i learned that most fish keepers don't use chemical filtration (activated charcoal) unless they're doing something, like removing impurities from the water. chemical filtration can actually remove some fertilizer, so the flourish liquid fertilizer i added might've been diluted.
i spent my final hours shopping temu for aquarium equipment. i got a CO2 checker (but no solution), some fine filter medium, silica gel packets, and a sponge cover for the extension tube of my hang-on-back (HOB) aquaclear 10 filter.