which was to clear the snow off of our solar panels. i finally got out of bed around 9:30am. it felt nice not having to take care of bean sprouts, which i'd been doing for the past few weeks with my mung bean experiments. i watched as a flatbed truck towed a yellow sports car a few houses down. it blocked the whole street, there was a convoy of vehicles waiting for the tow guy to finish, but he didn't seem to be in any hurry. to everyone's credit though, there was no honking or angry shouts, although i was tempted to open my window and tell the tow truck guy to hurry the hell up. my father called me at 10:30am, said he needed 15 minutes, as he seemed to have forgotten he needed to come pick me up.
from my house we went to the snow blower dealership, where they'd finally fixed our smaller toro snow blower. i helped my father load it into the back of the honda before finally arriving in belmont. while my father plowed the sidewalk, i was in the backyard making preparations to clean the snow from the solar panels.
first thing i did was send the drone into the air to survey the snow-covered solar panels. i could've just climbed a ladder, but using a drone also allowed me to check out the panels of our nearby neighbors, get a sense of who's making solar electricity and who's not. everyone seemed to be covered, with various degrees of natural exposure. by cleaning our panels, we'd ensure immediate production afterwards, while others had to wait for their snow to melt.
even though it was sunny, the temperature was still surprisingly cold in the 20's. a few minutes of exposed flesh on my hands holding the drone's remote controller was enough to cause them to hurt and i quickly landed so i could put on some gloves. judging from the snow amount in the backyard, we got way more than predicted, somewhere around 6 inches. fortunately it was the fluffy variety. i also set up the gopro camera, mounted to a fully extended light stand then tied to the top of a step ladder. i then used the remote control function of the gopro to view what i was shooting with the camera and adjust it for proper framing.
all in all, the snow clean up wasn't that bad. there was thin layer of ice at the very bottom, but then mostly soft powdery snow on top even if it was half a foot deep. after he finished plowing, my father came into the backyard and helped me clean the solar panels. i pulled the snow off from the main roof, and pushed the snow off from the sunroom.
when it was all done i sent the drone up in the air for another inspection. there were a few spots - like the top row of panels on the sunroom - that were iced up and hard to clean, but the sun would melt them over time. i started cleaning around 11:40am and was finished by 12:30pm.
my mother made some noodles with the leftover hot pot broth. later in the afternoon my father made some jiuniang porridge with sesame paste tangyuan. he used the jiuniang he'd made, which was a little bland, needed more seasoning for it to be sweeter and have a more concentrated fermented sweet rice flavor.
we found our old yosager cordless rechargeable shiatsu shoulder massager yesterday (it'd been hiding in my sister's old bedroom closet). we lost the original charging plug a while back, but luckily it uses 12VDC which is the same kind of plug we have for our infrared lights and led light strips, so i was able to charge it up with one of those plugs. it's got a weird design, it won't work when it's charging, only works as cordless. i tried it out briefly, like somebody repeatedly giving me vulcan neck pinches. i'm not sure what's so soothing about that kind of massage, even after i stopped using it, i could still feel phantom hands pinching the back of my neck.
in the late afternoon i got a little tired (maybe because i woke up so early) and went to take a brief nap in one of the bedrooms. when i woke up, my parents had grilled the jumbo shrimps and the fish heads. i thought they did it in the kitchen, but my father actually did out outside on the barbecue grill, so it wouldn't stink up the house.
right before dinner my sister called, said there was a water leak at the cafe coming from the coffee machine. my father left to take a look, ended up not returning until an hour later. the coffee machine was indeed broken, and had spilled water all over the counter, getting into the lower cabinets, and seeping into parts of the basement. when he came back, my mother and i were already eating some noodles. my father wasn't hungry so he didn't have any. i also finished the leftover nachos (not that good anymore) and had a 3rd slice of my birthday tiramisu cake.
afterwards my father gave me a ride back to cambridge.
after a shower, i settled in to watch the women's freeski slopestyle finale featuring eileen gu. she had a low-scoring underwhelming first run, fell in her second run, and narrowly missed getting another good medal by a fraction of a point in her third and final run, ending the event with only silver. i watched on CBC again via a canadian VPN server, because it was virtually commercial free. they were broadcasting the same event on NBC, but with so many commercials, it felt like i was actually watching commercials, not actually the olympics. thank god for our northern friends with their more earnest coverage.