sandy was gone when i woke up. it snowed a bit last night, but everything was supposed to be washed away by the rain. so i was surprised to see some slushy snow coating the sidewalk. i went out to clear off the snow and realized i forgot to put my bike away in the basement yesterday. back inside, i vacuumed some crumbs off of the sofa cushion and ended up discovering more crumbs in the soft cracks and ended up vacuuming the rest of the house.

although there was some snow on the ground, everything was quickly melting. snowmelt was noisily rushing down the storm drains and trickling from the gutters. it was a good opportunity to see where we have leaks.

seeing the low production value on the solaredge app, i knew that the solar panels were covered in snow. sure, given how warm it was today, maybe most of it will melt on its own, but since i had the time, i decided to take the bus into belmont to clean off the panels.

dressed in my rubber boots, i trampled through numerous puddles on my way to harvard square to grab the bus. in my bag i brought 3 of my blueberry muffins.

much of the snow on the main roof panels had slid off. snow on the sunroom panels were also dropping off but a pile of snow at the bottom kept the snow from coming off completely. it was easy to slide off the snow with the roof rake, taking all but 20 minutes to do the sunroom and both sides of the main roof.

i had lunch in belmont, warmed up one of my blueberry muffins in the microwave (1 minute) along with a cup of instant korean noodles. i left my parents' place by 1pm, catching the 73 back to harvard square. nobody had cleaned the bus stop so it was just a mess of trampled snow. a woman came out to wait for the bus 15 ft away a minute before it arrived. the bus driver pulled the bus directly in front of her, causing me to trample back across the slush in order to get onboard.

i saw my neighbor jen outside shoveling her sidewalk and went out to help out, clearing the icy patch in front of renee's house as well. while i was at it i also dug a new channel for the snowmelt to flow into the storm drain, swirling the dirty melted snow with the shovel. the street looked like a battle zone, peppered with deep pot holes. eventually the city will come out and patch up the holes with asphalt, but those are just bandaids; what the street really need is to be stripped and repaved with something better than whatever they paved it with now, that gets torn up after every winter.

production today was hampered by the snow until i completely cleaned off the panels by 12:30pm. by then, half the day's production was already over, so we ended up just making 17.89kWh, not bad given the circumstances. had the solar panels been cleared since sunrise, we probably would've made 30kWh+. one thing i noticed is how much more production we made in the late afternoon, that the trend line seems to be 500Wh more than the production from less than 2 weeks ago.

sandy came home by 5:30pm. i had a quiche for dinner and a bowl of italian dressing salad.