i went to bed last night at 1:30am and woke up at 9:30am, so i got a good 8 hours of sleep. i felt better than i did yesterday, no irritated throat, no light-headedness, no feeling of motion sickness. lihui did contact me on wechat, asked if i'd contracted covid before. i knew he'd been buying up cold medicine from his recent posts, and from his questioning i could already guess what happened to him: he caught the coronavirus. his symptom was a very bad fever, which was only now subsiding, even though he was still testing positive. he said most of the people he knew had already caught it (inlcuding his father and youngest brother) given the chinese government only just a few weeks stopped their draconian zero covid policy. elsewhere, another former coworker PMJ posted an angry rant on wechat: apparently her whole family caught it, and her symptoms are pretty bad, plus they have a newborn in the house. she also mentioned two relatives dying from the disease.

i made one last sync of my acurite temperature/humidity sensor before setting it out free outside to monitor the outdoor temperature. it updated fairly quickly, with the outdoor temperature reading 30°F while google weather told me it was 27°.

i was supposed to meet my family in harvard square for some japanese barbecue at gyu-kaku. but my sister sent me a text saying today is still technically a holiday so there was no lunch specials, just full price. gyu-kaku is good, but not that good that i'd be willing to pay full price, so i assumed we weren't going. so i was surprised when i called my mother who said we were still going, but i managed to get her to cancel. instead my father came to pick me up (both my bicycle and motorcycle were in belmont), and we went to market basket to get some supplies before dropping them off at the cafe then heading to belmont.

my mother was in the kitchen cooking up the package of bacon i'd brought over this weekend. my father made some fried eggs.

instead of gyu-kaku, my mother wanted to go to koreana for dinner, but after i complained that the food there wasn't that good, she cancelled that dinner plan as well and blamed me for ruining her pre-birthday lunch and dinner plans. she said my sister would go to shake shack and bring over some burgers for dinner, which i thought was a much better plan.

i pulled up a private affair on amazon prime for my mother and she spent the afternoon watching that while knitting in the living room.

i did nothing constructive besides ordering some new checks for my parents and going down to the basement in the late afternoon to water the plants in the grow room. some of the jasmines need some trimming, starting to grow vines when we don't want them to do any growing during the winter. later i brought up a bucket of Bti-infused water and watered the few upstairs plants (french lavender, osmanthus, pepper plant).

i'm starting to think i can set up my aeroponics chinese mustard green experiment in the sunroom. yes the room gets very cold, but when i took a temperature reading yesterday, i was surprised it was only 48°F when it seemed so much colder. mustard greens are a cold weather crop, and can thrive in temperature 40°F and above, and will even tolerate some light frost. i know mustard greens can survive the sunroom because we currently have 3 mustard green plants still growing there despite the cold (leftovers from my hydroponic kratky jar experiments). hopefully by next weekend i can get it set up. we don't have anymore space in the basement grow room, so if they can grow in the sunroom it'd be the perfect setup. chinese celery is also a cold weather crop, so that's something else we can grow.

my sister ended up not bringing any burgers, and when my mother called her a few times, she never answered. so my father ended up cooking a few things, some mung beans rice porridge, some reheated crab cake meatballs, and some reheated sausage slices. i told my mother we could have korean next weekend, a restaurant we've never been to but seems to have a lot of authentic korean broth dishes. after dinner my sister called but we'd already finished eating, said she didn't hear her phone (which is a paltry excuse).

i biked home afterwards, temperature around 30 degrees. not the most pleasant weather for biking, but not so bad that i didn't warm up after the first few minutes. uphills are the worst, as i panted loudly with every pedal push, afraid i might've scared some people out walking at night. could be worse, at least it was dry weather. once we get our first real snowstorm, my riding days will be over.

back at the house, i repositioned my humidifier so it was nearly above the warm air vent in my living room. i heard that's one of the best places for a humidifier, so the hot air can mix with the moist humidifier fog and circulate faster throughout the living room. i thought it'd annoy me to have the humidifier right next to me, but it wasn't bad at all. i didn't really change the indoor humidity too much, which seems to be stuck around 40%.

i renewed my cambridge parking permit, but apparently takes 5-7 weeks to process if you renew it online. that's why the old permits (2022) are still good until april. but why does it take so long to get a new permit? it's not pandemic related because cambridge has always been slow with things like this.