i was conscious of the fact with so many memorial day parades happening all over town, i didn't want to get caught during a procession. i knew belmont's memorial would be happening at the town cemetery by 11:45am, so i made it to my parents' place before then. 
it was another nice day, clear blue sky, not so hot like yesterday, temperature comfortably in the 70's. i took the motorcycle, this time with the harness-mounted action camera placed above my backpack chest strap. this gave me some better footage, the one i took yesterday with the camera mounted lower on my chest was mostly motorcycle with a bit of scenery.
besides the asparagus and a package of sweet peppers, i also brought some cilantro that was starting to go bad and some raw apple chicken sausages i got almost a week ago. we cooked them over the grill which tastes much better than anything you can do in the kitchen. my mother said the sausages tasted sweet and reminded her of taiwanese sausages, just not as salty.
in the early afternoon we paid a visit to my grand uncle's grave at the cambridge cemetery. my sister brought up the idea since today was memorial day, even though it's really to remember the soldiers who've passed away, and my grand uncle was never in the military. we ended up taking a long detour to the cemetery when we came across the watertown memorial day parade which closed off access to mt.auburn street. my sister arrived separately, and even brought her dog before we told her dogs weren't allowed in the cemetery. she brought some silk flowers to put in the vases as well as a wreath to hang on the fencing.
afterwards i went with my parents to the mt.auburn star market. this used to be our supermarket and i remember coming here with my grandparents as a kid. next door was a drug store that had one of those comic book carousel which introduced me to the world of marvel comics when i was 10 years old. we almost never shop here anymore, only if we have a food emergency or to pick up something on sale. i can't remember when they renovated the store, but not only does it feel bigger but the selection is amazing. it's a great place to browse and discover unusual food items you've never seen before. for me, that was all the boutique soft drinks that i'd never heard of.
after dropping my mother back at the house, my father and i went to the watertown home depot. we were returning some circuit breakers that didn't fit in the upstairs apartment electric box and looking for a replacement outdoor water valve & pipe after the one at the cafe broke from a burst pipe over the winter. we also got a bernzomatic basic torch kit ($20) which came with a trigger-start torch and a 14 oz. container of propane. we also got some replacement circuit breakers (20A) that would fit in the box. afterwards we checked out their garden department. we were looking for junipers, thinking we could harvest the berries and make our own gin, but nothing really stood out. they had some bougainvilleas for sale ($22/pot), one of my favorite tropical plants, always reminds me of my time at the khao yai national park in thailand and seeing patches of magenta flowers on chongqing rooftop gardens.
the contractors have finally finished with our neighbor's house because they took away the sidewalk portapotty a few days ago. also we've been seeing their family more and more, exploring their new house. there are still some stuff that needs to be done, like stump grinding the large maple tree they cut down, landscaping the yard which currently looks like a WWI battle zone full of huge dirt piles and trenches, pave the driveway (currently just a layer of gravel), and put in the sidewalk. my father thinks they're just going to leave everything as is, since they already spent a lot of money on the construction alone. he already saw the owner trying to reduce the tree stump with an axe (to do it right you need special equipment).
i planted some seeds: in the front half of RB3 (the part that only gets partial sun due to shading from the maple tree) i planted sweet basil, cilantro, dill, and cumin, starting a little herb garden; to all the raised bed trellises i added some cucumber seeds, i was dismayed to see that the one last healthy hyacinth bean plant had been snipped in half; a row of bottle gourds by the basement entrance; and along the southern fence i planted a combination of morning glories and moonflowers. first i had to dig out the wisteria root, which was surprisingly extensive. along the way i also unearthed another bamboo rhizome branch.
some strange things happened with our solar production today. we actually plotted above 7kW - 7.39kW to be exact - and even charted at 7.88kW, almost hitting 8kW. from the graph we should've made at least 50kWh today, but by day's end we only produced 48.51 kWh, more than 2kWh shy of may's single day production record. that validates something i've known for a while, that the chart is inaccurate because it only takes data readings every 15 minutes. i think there might be a way to get better granular data using the solaredge API (like every 5 minutes), i've been meaning to look into that.
i returned home a bit before 8pm. after a quick shower, i settled in to watch game 1 of the stanley cup. bruins were down 0-2 early in the game, but managed to tie it and then win it with 4-2.
