right on schedule, the heat kicked in at 8am this morning, to coincide with li waking up and preparing for work. for lunch i had a salmon cream cheese onion bagel. i checked the results of last night's election (they had some problems counting all the ballots because a few voting machines had corrupted memory cards), okamoto ended up losing with just 600 votes total. it was a longshot that she would win anyway, given her age (19), and the fact that she was going up against more experienced politicians with deeper pockets, better name recognition, and established supporters.

i spent the better part of the afternoon backing up photos onto my 8TB external drive. transferring nearly 700GB worth of photos, after more than 3 hours it was only half done. while that was going on, i lounged on the couch, studying the general ham radio license manual. i snacked on some comte le fort cheese my sister had bought a few days ago with some very stale table crackers. my father stopped by the late afternoon on his way to market basket then back home. he said my california aunt was going to taipei next week to keep my grandmother coming, so that means my mother can come back to boston for thanksgiving.

i left for a lecture in the early evening, "decoding maya hieroglyphs with 3D technology" with barbara fash. it was interesting, better than the beetles lecture a few days back, but for some reason i felt very tired and nearly fell asleep. i saw susan in the audience but she didn't see me. the lecture was about non-invasive methods of 3D digitizing the deteriorating hieroglyphic stairway in copan, honduras.

it was a cold night (temperature in the lower 40's), but probably more so because i'd been in the house all day. leaving the lecture it didn't feel all that bad, but that could also be because the lecture hall was comfortably warm (unlike my house, which was in heating limbo).

i made an italian sub for dinner, li coming home a few minutes after i got back. the heat had already kicked in for the evening beginning at 7pm.

my father tried contacting me with the 70cm ground plane antenna. sitting in my living room, at most i managed to hear some static; he couldn't hear me at all while i was transmitting with the stock antenna. later in the evening he called back again, to try the 2m ground plane antenna. that seemed worse, with even shorter bursts of static. standing by the living room window i could hear better, and i even managed to hear him once, but very faint (like 10% audio), and then couldn't hear him afterwards. when i stepped to the window of my front door however, i was able to receive him very well, 40-50% audio (the rest static). when i tried it from my back door window, i couldn't receive anything, not even static. once more, he couldn't receive me since my stock antenna doesn't have enough transmission power. the next stage is for him to build another 2m ground plane antenna for me to try from my place.