after eating that final piece of bacon i saved up, i left by late morning. temperature was in the 30's, cold enough to wear a pair of thermal underwear for the first time this season. i also tried a trick i learned about online to frequent my glasses from fogging up: wash them with dish soap and shake them dry instead of wiping to preserve the anti-fogging layer. i traveled by bicycle, as there was still too much snow on the ground to go safely on motorcycle, even though everything seemed to be melting today. the dish soap trick seemed to have worked, my glasses didn't fog up.

my parents went to get some acupuncture in framingham early this morning. coming back, they stopped by a chick-fil-a to get some chicken sandwiches. unfortunately they were there too early and could only buy breakfast items.

but the first thing i did when i arrived in belmont wasn't to eat lunch, but rather to go into the backyard with my father and remove the snow off of the solar panels. most of the snow on the panels on the main roof had slid off on their own. only the snow on the sun roof panels needed cleaning. while my father removed the snow from the front of the sunroom standing on a platform ladder, i climbed an extension ladder and removed the snow from the side. it helped that it was such a sunny day; what ever little snow we left behind would most likely all melt by the end of the day.

speaking of melting, i could hear the sounds of snowmelt trickling into our rain barrels. there was simply too much warm water inside to keep them from forming ice last night. it would take several consecutive days of all-day freezing temperatures for those to freeze, and it's still too early in the season for that to happen. my lotus plants were as fortunately. there was an ice disc about half an inch thick in all the lotus barrels. i removed the ice in these large ice circles.

one of the barrels was directly below the slope of the sun room and had a lot of snow dumped on it while my father cleaned the solar panels. i thought it was the end of that lotus plant but i was able to dig out the snow with a garden trowel and later added back some water with some captured snowmelt coming from a rain barrel overflow hose. i also took down the bird feeder, i'm going to wait until it gets really cold before i put some the seeds.

only then, around 12:40pm, was i finally able to have some chick-fil-a. i've had them a few times, no know what the big attraction is. maybe it's because whenever i've had it it's always been hours after they were first purchased and i eat it cold. maybe they taste better when warm, fresh from the store. my sister came home briefly with hailey, who was hanging around the dining table trying to get a handout.

after finishing with the chick-fil-a, i moved on to some braised duck feet my godmother had made for my mother. my mother had ate most of them already, saved 3 for me. i had it with some bubbling rose kombucha i got for my mother a while back but forgot about it in the fridge. it was actually pretty good, i poured half for my mother and she liked it as well. i was surprised by the pink color, couldn't tell from the brown glass bottle. it also wasn't as sour as past kombucha i've had. it was infused with rose petals, hawthorn berries, and mangosteen. the only flavor i could taste was a hint of rose, but worth buying again.

i got a chance to try the vivosun hydroponics grow room glasses. they're big enough to fit over my glasses but there's a little gap; the frames i have now are a little big, i think with a smaller frame these glasses would fit completely over them. i wore them when i went down into the basement, i already knew they were working because i couldn't see the typical blurple glow from the grow room, but instead it was a whitish yellow glow. how exactly it worked i couldn't explain, but it was like a magic trick. not only does it block out harmful UV rays, but it also seems to cancel out the magenta wavelengths, as if we were using normal white lights instead of red/blue led lights. i know it was removing the blurples hues because when i took a photo of the grow room on my phone, it looked fine with the glasses (green leaves) but when i took them off the photo was magenta.

i put up 14 yellow sticky traps onto various grow room plants. this is our first time of defense, it will alert us when we have any signs of insect pests. i'm not so worried about the fungus gnats as i am about the others: aphids, mealybugs, spider mites. but i'm ready. the weather is supposed to warm up later next week; i might move some of these plants outside so i can spray them down with insecticidal soap or neem oil as a preventative before bringing them back in.

after dinner i returned home. i washed my glasses with dish soap before leaving, but it didn't work as well this time around, and my glasses fogged up. also my bike seat was wet from this morning and there was a layer of frost on the seat, which i covered up with a plastic bag. today was halloween and i was surprised to see a few trick-or-treaters walking the streets. a lot of neighbors had simply put candy outside for children to take, no interaction, socially distant. my parents' next door neighbors had strung a string across two trees and hung little bags of candy from them. i saw a young teenage girl in a full-body white rabbit suit jump out of a station wagon that her mother was driving picking up candy from the various houses. because my glasses were fogged up, i couldn't really see the costumed children as i made my way home, i could only hear the sounds of children in the dark.

it was dark upstairs when i got back, did steve and paul go out again? i'm still not even sure if it was them who was here yesterday. i'm starting to feel that maybe it was a houseguest instead, which is fine by me if they decide to stay in the island a few more days.

besides being halloween, there was also a blue moon tonight (second full moon of the month). and daylight saving time was ending, so we move our clocks back one hour, so i get an extra hour of sleep! but sunset will be around 4:30pm tomorrow.