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it was a blustery sunday morning as i bundled myself up and biked to belmont. temperature was only in the 30's but felt much colder due to the strong winds, powerful enough that it wasn't very fun cycling towards the breeze. but it was a clear day, blue sky and sun, so it wasn't all bad.

after lunch i drove my mother to the middlesex commons shopping center in burlington. i can't remember the last time i drove. back before we had all this snow, i'd occasionally take one of the cars back to cambridge if i knew i was returning to belmont the next day. but once the snow started (pretty much all of february into march), my parents put away one car in the garage and just drove the honda element.

we were taking some back roads; i tried to memorize as much as i could, then winged it the rest of the way. the car was nearly out of gas and we pulled up to a station right before we turned into the shopping mall. my mother asked for just $40 worth of gasoline, which was enough to completely fill the tank; the attendant had to manually pump it a few times to get it up to exactly $40 or 16 gallons. we went to joann fabrics so my mother could return an unopened package of knook needles. even before we got into the store we could tell the place was busy from how many cars in the parking lot. we had some 60% off coupons so my mother got some wool yarn and some buttons. we were going to go the dollar tree nearby but apparently it went out of business (they even took down the sign). we went to old navy where my mother returned a few more things. i ended up buying a pair of turquoise pants off of the clearance rank for just $6.

my sister was briefly home with hailey when we got back to the house. after she left, my mother and i ordered takeout from blue ribbon barbecue and went to go pick it up. by the time we got back my father was already home. they messed up our order, gave us 2 combo platters when we ordered the 2 and 3 combo and charged us an extra $2. missing were the burnt ends; we had to settle for only sausages and ribs.

i left around 7:30, with the crescent moon and venus shining brightly in the clear twilight sky. it was so pretty, i kept turning my back head to look at the view when i peddled home in the cold. with that today marks the most active day i've had in 40 days, according to google fit (1 hr 23 min of activity today; most active day was back on february 10 with 1 hr 43 min).

i had my early lupines underneath fluorescent lights today, which brought out some green. i still wasn't sure if they really were lupines (germination in just 7 days!) until i discovered 2 more pots with emerging seedlings. that sort of clinched the fact that these are genuine lupines. also, in one of the pots from yesterday, a second seedling is popping out too. i'm surprised the basils haven't germinated yet; they're usually very dependable. maybe the expired sweet bail seeds i used were indeed expired; that still leaves 10 thai basils that haven't germinated from new seeds.

the blog is up and running again, after a successful consolidation of my databases. that in itself probably didn't fix it, but by transferring those files, it must've done some sort of cache flushing so once again i'm up and running...until the next time...