after some granola with yogurt for breakfast/lunch, i left for boston around 11:20am. the big news was the longfellow bridge was finally opened yesterday, on the very last day they could do and still keep their promise of a may opening (after so many delays). the news said the bridge had been under construction for 5 years (HALF A DECADE), but it felt longer than that, more like 10 years. of course cyclists online have already been complaining about the bridge, that the bike lanes aren't well protected, that the only thing separately bikes from cars are flexible bollards that are too far inside the bike lane itself, and that the lanes themselves are too narrow for cyclists to pass without riding into car traffic. i thought the boston-bound lane was fine, although i do miss riding on the pedestrian sidewalk and stopping to take a quick snapshot of boston.
haymarket was nothing exciting. originally i was supposed to come with my mother and 2nd aunt, but my aunt backed out, and my mother didn't want to come because she predicted they wouldn't have anymore golden nugget oranges. sure enough, she was right. no new produce, besides some vendors selling cherries at $4/lbs. i ended buying: 3 boxes of strawberries ($3), 3 boxes of of blueberries ($2), 2 bunches of asparagus ($3), 8 blood oranges ($2), 2 lbs. of lychees ($4), and a box of cherry tomatoes ($1). my mother also asked for some pineapples, but there were only a few sellers, one selling them at $3 a piece (though big pineapples), another 2 for $5; i decided to get them at market basket, where i think there's a sale this week. i brought a small bath towel so i could layer the rear bike basket to provide some cushioning so the berries don't get bashed too badly when i ride back home.
i biked back to cambridge via the longfellow bridge. while there are two lanes of car traffic and a narrow bike lane going inbound, outbound it's only a single lane of car traffic, though both the sidewalk and the bike lane are much wider. it seems kind of dangerous to only have only lane of car traffic on a busy bridge (bottleneck), makes me claustrophobic just thinking about it. i don't know why they didn't keep it all the size as before. this way, nobody is happy, not drivers, not cyclists. even pedestrians might not like the idea of so much sidewalk space on the bad side of the bridge (facing the museum of science) when the sidewalk should've been widened on the good side (facing boston). the amount of time they had to work, they could've built a new bridge, with wider lanes for all, and not try to retrofit 21st century traffic patterns onto a 100+ year old bridge.
i made it to the cafe by 12:45pm. by then it'd started to rain, a light sprinkle but fat raindrops. my father wasn't there, out for a walk, despite the rain (he's asked my mother who told him it wouldn't rain). my mother was not happy with the strawberries, said they weren't sweet enough, and a few berries were rotten (i think they were just bruised from the transport). we tried the lychees, they were okay, but had a slightly sour taste on top of the sweetness. also the lychees we get in the US are of a particular variety where the pits are so big there's hardly any lychee meat at all. the lychees i had back in chongqing, they were not only juicy and sweet, but the pits are so tiny i almost forget i'm eating lychees.
i returned home by 1pm, where i stayed just long enough to write up a new shopping list before heading out to market basket. it was still sprinkling but the sky was a weird combination of dark and light that it could stop raining at any moment. i bought some more italian sausages, as well as some pineapples. coming back, i stopped to read the tags on the new beacon street bike lane trees: higan cherry 'autumnalis', amur maackia, persian parrotia, red maple, japanese zelkova, and of course kwanzan flowering cherry. there were actually still a bunch of unplanted trees in root balls sitting on the sidewalk, each one at least 10-15ft tall. having done some recent tree buying and planting of our own, i was excited to see all these different varieties of trees. i'm actually more excited about the new trees than the bike lane!
i spent the rest of the day watching old episodes of the expanse (starting with season 1) streaming through amazon prime. hot only was it a hot day it was also very humid, and even though it felt stuffy inside the house, i didn't dare open any windows to allow the hot air inside. i look forward to next week, where the temperature will be in the 60's daytime and 50's at nights.
it was a grey but bright day, intermittently darkening in the afternoon with a few sprinkle clouds. under these conditions, on this very first day of june, we produced 28.64 kWh of electricity. not sure how june will perform, but being that it contains the longest days of the year, if anything june should be one of the best solar months.
i fell asleep on the couch in the early evening, from 5:30pm to 7pm. i only got up to close the blinds before my automatic living room lights turned on. for dinner i cooked up the remaining 10 frozen chinese dumplings (10 not 9, i miscounted) along with half a bag of salad. i had a craving for some thousand island dressing but i found out i didn't have any in the fridge, so had to go with honey balsamic. i also ate half a box of strawberries.