i finally went down to my community garden in the late morning to clean up my plot after having not visited for more than a month. most gardeners still had lavish gardens filled with different plants while mine looked like it was already ready to be dismantled. i cut down all the spent garlic chive and goldenrod flowers. i chopped down all the lemon balm, it seemed to be pretty invasive and i never had any real use for it. i uprooted my tomatoes and eggplants, not sure what to do about the grow bags. leave them in the garden or dump out the dirt and start fresh next season? the only positive thing in the garden were the monkshood that had blossomed. they probably flowered weeks ago, purple petals littering the ground around the plants, but still plenty of flowers on the stalks.

i returned home and had lunch, salmon bagel sandwich. i rode the motorcycle to belmont in the early afternoon to check up on the house and do some yard work. this past weekend the temperature in the house had dropped down to 59°F, but now it had risen to around 65°F. i opened some shades to allow some sunlight and opened the door to the sunroom which was quite warm (in the 80's). the solar-charged batteries in the sunroom were all at maximum capacity: 35Ah battery (connected to 50W panel) read 13.9V, 11.2Ah motorcycle battery (connected to the 20W panel) read 14V, and the backup battery (connected to the 1.5W panel) read 12.8V. in the basement the duralast 85Ah battery (connected to the 100W panel) read 13.8V.

i checked the status of the basement grow room. the soil of a few plants looked dry so i watered them. i turned off the led grow lights temporarily and turned on the fluorescent lights so i could see better. i noticed a few things: a few of the gardenia leaves looked to have caterpillar damage. i didn't see any worms but definitely something to look out for. i didn't think anything ate those leathery leaves but i was wrong. some of the jasmines have started to grow these long tendrils, which probably needs to be snipped off. goes to show that left on its, a jasmine has a tendency to climb. i also noticed some of the leaves have a bumpy appearance instead of smooth, not sure what's causing that. i filled up the water bucket with rain water from outside.

my sister called me, wanted to know if i wanted to pick up the honda element parked at binbin's house today. binbin told me via wechat on friday that their housing association will upgrade all the garage doors. because of that, the garage has to be empty. for some reason my father thought it'd be a great idea to leave one of our cars in their garage and park binbin's SUV in our driveway (binbin's car doesn't fit their tiny garage). but now i have to get it out before the installers come on wednesday. the original plan was to go tomorrow morning, but my sister was reluctant to wake up so early. i told my sister we were sticking to the plan but i changed my mind soon afterwards. since i was free anyway, might as well do it now. i was hesitant at first, before i realized i should store my motorcycle in the garage for the time being, so i didn't have to take care of two vehicles, and could then drive the car back to cambridge.

my sister arrived while i was raking leaves in the front yard. she came back from winchester, which meant had we planned it better, she could've dropped me off at binbin's place earlier and i could've gotten the car, instead of now returning to winchester/burlington again. after raking 3 containers of dead leaves, i moved all the cars out of the driveway and put my motorcycle in the garage. i got a change to test drive binbin's SUV, which is more tank than car, and seemed to be nothing but blind spots. after moving the cars back onto the driveway, my sister drove me to burlington.

binbin's house has a keypad entry. she wrote the pin number on a sheet for my father but it was nowhere in the house. my sister said she remembered what it was, but wasn't 100% sure. she did tell me that my father took a photo of the info sheet, so i logged into his google photo account and found the info. besides moving the car out of the garage, we also moved the two trash bins into the house to give the garage door installers more room to work. we continued to empty out their fridge, my sister taking some frozen foods while i grabbed a jar of korean citron honey tea.

i left by 3:30pm, returning home via route 3. it might've been faster on the interstate, but the back wheels of the honda element made a distressing grinding noise on turns so i thought it was safer to stick to the local roads. midway through my trip i realized the car was almost out of gas. i finally got home by 4pm. because there was street cleaning this morning, there was plenty of open parking spots.

i continued processing the 6000 head of the charles photos. it took all night, but i managed to toss out about 1000 photos (too blurry). of the remaining 5000 photos, i picked 865 as the best and slowly uploaded them to my google photos account.

i tried the korean honey citron drink. it looked like a large jar of marmalade, i spooned about a tablespoon worth of it into a mug and added some hot water. i was afraid it'd be too diluted but it was actually the perfect level of sweetness. there were slices of citron but i think ginger as well. it's pretty good, a nice drink for cold days.

i coincided the reheating of my final leftover chicken lentil soup dinner with the start of the monday night football game between the patriots and the jets. previously winless new york was coming off of their victory over the dallas cowboys and jets quarterback sam darnold was named the AFC's offensive player of the week, so there was a lot of momentum that maybe they were the team to beat the undefeated patriots. but all of that was just a pipe dream, as new england demolished the jets to a tune of 33-0. the patriots' offensive wasn't even playing that well, a dominant first half left scoreless in the start of the second half with the exception of a safety. pats would score one more touchdown but it's the defense that really shines. new england has yet to have a game that really showcase the full potential of the offense. granted, tom brady had a lot of weapons at the start of the season, but through attrition has lost most of them.