i slept until 11am this morning, a good full 8 hours (since 3am last night), which i haven't done in a while. at one point i heard my furnace firing up, comforted in the fact that my winter heating system was working just fine after the warm season hiatus. i had a slight headache, probably dehydration from not drinking enough water returning from new york city late last night. during my morning weigh-in i was 144 lbs, which is lighter than usual, which further confirmed my dehydration theory.

i planned on going over to my parents' place for lunch, but nobody was around so i stayed home instead, heating up some canned soup. i spent the early part of my day clearing up enough hard drive space so i could download my minnewaska photos. i actually had to use my 4TB hard drive for the very first time after purchasing it earlier this year, running out of space on my other backup drives. my 500gb crucial SSD drive arrived this afternoon as well (USPS sunday delivery), but it'll probably be a day or two before i can install it into my macbook pro.

the temperature was cold enough that today i finally switched from ice cold water to hot tea. i steeped a bag of yogi tahitian vanilla hazelnut.

i left for belmont in the afternoon, stopping at star market to pick up some asparagus ($2.99/bunch) and stocking up on some hearty campbell canned soup ($1/can). since there was street cleaning tomorrow and tuesday, i took the bicycle instead of the motorcycle since i didn't want to give up my parking spot, despite my legs being a little sore from the hiking. i had some pain in my thighs, and there was a tenderness in one of my heels that disappeared after i walked on it a little bit more. the air was brisk (in the 40's) but i quickly warmed up after a few minutes (later my mother and sister told me they saw some snowflakes while they were out). i attached the SJ4000 for another riding time lapse video. the lowest setting is 1 second per frame, which is still too fast. the good thing about the gopro is it can do 1/2 second per frame, which is much more reasonable.

i spent the rest of the afternoon thinning out my photos from yesterday, tossing any repeats or blurry images. just from saturday's outing i managed to take 1700 photos, whittled down to less than 1400. from that amount i managed to pick out 276 choice images.

i also got a chance to watch the action camera time lapse i took during the hike, registering at 13:16 minutes with a movie file size of 2.8GB. at a frame a second and 30 frames to a second, there's probably a nice algebra problem to figure out how many hours i actually recorded (answer: 6.63 hours equivalent). it's not a great video: despite being 1080p the quality doesn't really look like HD, the colors are sort of washed out, and most of the time it's hanging at an awkward angle from my backpack strap so the camera has a tendency to point upwards.

over the weekend there was a hard freeze advisory for the boston area. i was worried about the backyard garden, but was also optimistic that we'd somehow escape it. that was until i stepped out in the late afternoon and saw the extent of the freeze damage. eggplants, peppers, and cucamelons were all dead, their leaves wilted. the peppers seemed to be frozen, but the eggplant fruits still seemed to be okay. it gave me a chance to use the row cover fabric i bought a while back. my father helped me covered up raised bed 1, protecting the baby bokchoi and radish seedlings, which are naturally very cold hardy to begin with.

after dinner i biked back to cambridge. temperature was at 40°, but i wore my wool long underwear. it was another opportunity to ride the glow bike (which is what i now call my fuji bike). the gearing on that bike is busted so currently it only has one gear, but apparently that seems to be enough. because of it's lighter frame (no baskets!) and bigger wheels, it's a much faster bike and i find myself passing people more often, versus my usual cargo bike, which never passes anyone.

the main event this evening was the sunday night football game between the patriots and the colts at indianapolis. hyped as a grudge match, since it was the colts who alerted the NFL to the possibility that new england was deflating their footballs. colts scored first, and they seemed to be doing well during the first half, enough so that it warranted paying attention to the game, compared to typical patriots games where they have a big lead. the big break for new england came in the second half when the colts did some sort of weird shift formation, moving all their players to one side of the field, with just the ball snapper and dummy quarterback in the center. it confused the patriots at first, but in the end it seemed indianapolis was more confused, as new england quickly swallowed up the QB once the ball was hiked, turning it over to the patriots with excellent field position. 6 plays later they scored a touchdown, making it a two possession game, one that the colts weren't able to surmount.

i turned up the heat at 10pm, with just 2 hours left before the nest thermostat schedule automatically turned the house down to 59° for the night. i never got a chance to really experience my new insulated house with the heat, since soon after the contractors did the work i shut down the furnace for the season. plus this winter i have a whole new living room arrangement, so i'm curious to see how that will work out in combination with the insulation. the register filled the room with hot air pretty fast, quickly climbing to 68°. now that the couch isn't blocking the vent anymore, there seems to be better circulation. it actually seemed to be getting too hot, and i briefly thought about turning down the heat. even after well after midnight, when the heat was down to 59°, the house was still 66°, even around 2am, although my nose could feel a briskness to the air.