t
o
n
y
a
n
g
'
s
 
w
e
b
l
o
g


kevin left by around 9am this morning. the kitchen lights were on, the front door was unlocked, and the toilet smelled of urine, a trifecta of annoyances. at least he left for work at a reasonable hour, leaving me the house for a few hours.

my webhost upgraded all the php servers to 7.2. up until now i'd been using 5.6, and they warned me months ago that my code could potentially break. sure enough, this blog wasn't loading. the admin page were still fine, there was just something wrong on the index side. i opened up the code and did a bit of debugging before i found out what it was. i have a bunch of conditions on my main page that diverts you to a different location if it detects certain conditions. those are all legacy code stuff, more than 15 years old at least, i just commented them all out and my blog was working again.

after some scrambled eggs and kielbasa for lunch i biked down to the cafe to set up the xiaomi mi band 4 for my aunt. after i sync'ed it to her phone, it took some time to update the firmware, before it was finally ready to wear. because my aunt's phone is set to chinese language, i noticed the mi band 4 was also in chinese as well. i changed the face to the same as mine, my aunt liked the colors and more displayed data. she was pleasantly surprised it had weather and could receive notifications, like phone calls and texts (i called her to test, my name showed up on her mi band). i took her mi band 2: it still works, just the screen is really dim. once you've experienced the mi band 4, there's no going back. before i left my aunt gave me a red envelope stuffed with cash for new year.

i rode to belmont where i waited until the evening to pick up my parents from the airport. i bumped into jack on huron avenue, taking his daily walk. he told me he and bruce were going on a cruise trip to the arctic in april.

in belmont i turned up the heat, deactivated some lamp timers, and plugged in the heated toilet seat. my sister came home with hailey. she made some dinner but because she prepared them so early, they were guaranteed to be cold by the time my parents came back. my sister left by 5pm to nanny some kids for a few hours. i kept remotely checking the router's client list back at home and saw that kevin was already back by 5pm, so i turned on the heat. the original arrival time for my parents was 5:10pm, but there was an hour long delay in tokyo for flight JL8, so the plane wouldn't arrive until 6pm. after feeding hailey her dinner at 5:30pm, i anxiously got in the car and drove down to logan airport.

there was traffic in cambridge getting onto the turnpike, but the traffic flow on the turnpike inbound was pretty steady. as we approached boston, past fenway, there was a bit of a slow moving jam. entering the ted williams tunnel there was another jam, as several lanes of entering cars merged in from the right. typically i get to logan via the sumner tunnel, so this was new to me. i also memorized directions to get to the cell phone lot, though the few signs that i saw definitely helped. the lot wasn't too crowded, there was plenty of parking. my father finally called me at 6:26pm to tell me they were already waiting on the curb outside terminal E.

usually i go all the way around the entire airport just to get to terminal E, but that terminal is right next to the cell phone lot, and i've done it once in the past, where there's a shortcut that takes me directly to that terminal. i looked it up beforehand and memorized the route, it's definitely a shortcut because i didn't see anyone else taking it. in a few minutes i was outside the terminal and i flashed the lights when i saw my parents. we loaded all their luggage into the back of the car as my father drove us back to belmont.

we finally got back by 7:20pm. hailey came out to the door to greet my parents. since my sister wouldn't be back until after 8pm, we decided to eat without her. it didn't matter much anyway since all the food was cold but my mother warmed up the rice before we ate. it wasn't very good, i just had some cold eggplant with my rice porridge. i'd also brought along some meatball sub ingredients, i think that would've made a better meal.

later when my sister returned, my parents began to unpack their suitcases: 2 large and 2 small, all heavy enough that i'm surprised they didn't get fined for exceeding the weight limit. a lot of that weight was all the food they brought back, some for my sister, some for me, and a lot for my aunt who tasked me mother to get her the special taiwanese confections she wanted. my sister left before i did, i finally left by 9:30pm, riding my bike back to cambridge.

i didn't get home until almost 10pm. even though i turned up the heat to 68°F, because kevin didn't come into the living room, the nest thermostat thought nobody was home and turned off the heat. by the time i got back, the room temperature had dropped to 63°F. kevin was home in his bedroom. he came out later to ask me if i ever had problems buying stuff from ebay, because he tried to buy a $3 item and ebay gave him a warning that said he exceded his buy limit, an error i'd never seen before. maybe because he was a chinese national they thought it was a fake account and put it on temporary hold. kevin also asked if he could the rent through paypal. i said it might be okay but i wasn't sure if there was a fee. i told him i still prefer cash. we were catching up on the latest coronavirus news, he told me he went to the porter square CVS today and got his flu shot.