it was pouring rain by the time i got picked up. we stopped off at the cafe to drop of supplies before we drove my sister's godmother to waverley square for a haircut appointment. coming back, we saw red-leaf flowering plums everywhere, an ornamental tree we never really noticed before.
for lunch my father made almond pastries and bought some market basket sandwich wraps. i replaced the rear wiper of the honda with a replacement that had arrived a few days ago. my father noticed that his macbook pro was making a strange noise and listening to it i recognized it as a hard drive click. as you recall, there are two drives inside that laptop, a 500GB SSD drive, and a 500GB platter drive. the platter drive might be close to dying, so i backed up all the files, which wasn't much, just 40GB, to the SSD drive. we now have to decide whether to replace the platter drive with another SSD drive, or put back the original DVD-ROM drive. we also bought a 150A watt meter ($8.55) and a dozen electrical barrier terminal blocks ($1.43) from ebay, for my father's ongoing DIY solar battery charging project.
as it was still raining outside, there was nothing to do but stay indoors, though i did go out into the backyard occasionally whenever there was a lull in the storm to survey emerging plants. our kwanzan has started to blossom, though at this point more leaves than flowers. the blooms look rather wrinkly, perhaps just an effect of having just emerged from flower buds, and will hopefully fill out in the coming days.
later in the afternoon i did some weeding, pulled out as much creeping bellflowers as i could, digging out their tubers whenever possible. it will be many more years before they're completely eradicated from the backyard.
while i was outside weeding my father was already making dinner. i came back inside when the weather changed and started to rain again. we ate early, finished before 6pm. getting a ride back to cambridge, i noticed so many flowering cherry trees i photographed over the past week have already lost most of their blossoms from the rain and especially the strong winds. sakura are ephemeral, and the lesson learned here is document them as quickly as possible, since a single passing storm can quickly reduce them to nothingness.
i came home with my honeywell enviracaire air purifier that i found on the street many years ago. it's so dusty in the house, i wanted some way to treat it. the thing i remember about the purifier is it turns the room a little cold because of the internal air circulating fans. it wasn't too bad and i set it on low so the noise was very minimal.
i actually watched the end of the red sox game against the tampa bay devil rays. i was surprised they had a taiwanese player on their roster, tzu-wei lin. beating the division leader puts boston in the second to last spot in the standing. i haven't watched baseball in a while, not since the playoffs, and even longer before that. despite being rather boring, baseball does have its moments. i look forward to seeing more games throughout the season. i'm also watching the basketball playoffs, celtics are just another victory away from advancing to the conference semi-finals.