i woke up at 6am this morning to get an early start on all my predict 2 study tasks so i could be finished by noontime. the sun wasn't even up yet while i microwaved 3 vanilla-flavored muffins for breakfast and ate them in the living room. i had thought about going back to bed, but i figured my 4-hour post-breakfast fast stipulated that i remain awake during that time so i stayed in the living room, working on yesterday's blog posting.
at one point i coughed and noticed the light in kevin's room was on. moments later i heard him going to the bathroom then disappearing back into his room. i then received a text message from him: "Tony, I heard you cough these days. do you feel well?" for some reason that made me so angry i almost wanted to knock on his door and demand him to come out and ask me face-to-face like a man. what did he mean by that? has he been secretly monitoring my health, jumping on the slightest sign that i might be sick? and how is it i can't even cough in my own house? and was he somehow accusing me of being sick, of being dirty, when he's the one that's not even bathroom trained? instead of doing anything rash i let myself calm down. maybe he didn't mean anything by it, maybe he was genuinely concerned. i could either react with a sense of humor, or react with a sense of retribution.
i kept an eye on my sister's internet by periodically checking her security wyze cams: if they're down or too slow, chances are something was happening to her connection. but after the comcast activated modem reset last night, her network has kept running.
i stayed in the living room until 9am, before retreating to the bedroom to possibly sleep for an hour but never did. i got back up at 10am to eat my set lunch, which was a trio of similarly tasting vanilla muffins. kevin was making lunch around 11am and i confronted him about his text message. "have you been keeping an eye on my health?" i asked him. i told him next time ask me in person, not by early morning text. i said i occasionally cough when my throat is dry (though i felt indignant even having to answer to him), and not everything is coronavirus.
at 12pm my post-lunch fast was finally over and i couldn't wait to leave the house. i told kevin where i was going, partly so he wouldn't have an anxiety attack imagining all the coronavirus i was contracting, but also to show him how stupid it was where i need to report my whereabouts and whom i was meeting.
i went to my sister's place first to check on the internet. she wasn't there, but told me instructions to wash my hands first before i did anything else. the internet was still up. i sync'ed up the router to the asus app, so i could check it remotely if i had to. there were at least 18 devices using the internet: the router itself, 3 wyze cameras, 1 kindle fire, 2 ipads, 1 OBi200, 1 nintendo device, 5 android phones (MI9, MI8, redmi note 4, LG, oneplus7), 1 PC laptop, 1 macbook pro, 1 desktop PC, and a few others that defied categorization. i did a speed test: 108Mbps, never seen it that fast before.
i've seen these 'okame' cherry trees in bloom for about a week now, one of the first flowering trees of the early spring season. they're pretty distinctive in color, and have an upright canopy that also helps with the identification besides being one of the earliest flowering trees in the area. they're popular as sidewalk trees, and that's usually where i see them, although i've also seen a few in yards.
when i got to belmont, we searched for hailey since she wasn't in any of the bedrooms. my father thought maybe she went down into the basement but she was actually in the backyard, sunning herself, sleeping on the lawn. when asked if she wanted to come inside, she opted to remain outdoors. temperature was in the upper 30's lower 40's, a little brisk, but warmer in the bright sun.
my father's nanoVNA arrived yesterday (saturday) ahead of schedule from ebay (it wasn't supposed to get here until next week). it's a technical little gadget, and requires a some fiddling around to get it working. the screen is tiny - 2.8" for something that packs so much info. it's also a touchscreen (only registers presses, no swipes) but because of the tiny screen size, my father used a makeup sponge applicator pen to tap the screen. there are two SMA ports for testing - one for reflected, one for pass - though i'm not sure when to use which. my father wanted to see the SWR value and we thought we were looking at it but grew suspicious when the value never changed from 1.0 no matter what we did to the antenna. we thought maybe we were testing from the wrong input, but turns out we didn't turn on the right format. when the SWR was working, it was interesting to see where antennas were resonant. also interesting was the smith graph, which at its most basic looked like a series of inward spiralling curves. but testing the indoor car antenna gave us a deeply spiralled graph (like a spirogyra design), and testing the DIY 2M installed on the chimney gave us a dense spiky star pattern.
having only had tiny muffins for breakfast and lunch, i was craving some more substantial food. my mother ended cooking some bibigo mini chicken wontons (from costo). i ate 16 wontons, mixed with some spicy chinese sauce (not in the database), every ingredient logged into my predict 2 app.
it was a little excruciating being at my parents' place, surrounded by snacks, but unable to eat them because the hassle of having to log some taiwanese delicacy that's undefined in the predict 2 food database wasn't worth the effort. i did have some really sweet pineapple slices, but i first had to take out the portion i wanted to eat, weigh it, log it in the app, then wait for about 2 hours after the last time i ate, so the data wouldn't run into each other. having to log everything i eat to the minute detail makes me better appreciate regular eating, where i can eat whatever i want.
around 5pm my father and i were outside grilling the ribs my parents' had purchased from costco yesterday. they seemed to be out of the pre-seasoned ribs, so instead they marinated it themselves with some korean barbecue sauce. we also grilled a sea bass. even though temperature was just in the 30's, it felt especially chilly for me, having woke up so early today and having my food schedule all messed up. my father heard me complaining and insisted that he give me a ride home instead of having me ride the bike back.
logging dinner was a pain: the ribs were fairly easy, but the chinese coleslaw was a mess to figure out, i ended up just estimating the portions. i also didn't try any of the sea bass because i only wanted a small portion and once again it wasn't worth the hassle of trying to figure out my portion. can't wait for the predict 2 study to be over!
today was just a perfectly clear sunny day, and cold as well, which meant maximum solar efficiency. we ended up producing 48.89 kWh, a new 2020 production record, with a perfect bell curve graph. in a just a week we were able to make 3kWh more.
as promised, i got a ride back to cambridge. my father was afraid i might've contracted something and made me promise to call them tomorrow for a status update.
the evening was uneventful until i went to the bathroom and saw the paper towels around the toilet seat completely soaked. i knocked on kevin's door to show him the damage, he actually volunteered to clean it up this time, though i think i would've done a better job, and not wasted so many paper towels. hopefully by having to deep clean it once, he'll better appreciate the lengths i've had to go through to keep the bathroom not smelling like urine all the time.
because i had to wake up early tomorrow again (6am, replicating today's schedule), i went to bed by 9pm. but i didn't sleep until 11pm, watching the hunt on my phone. i enjoyed the film, made fun of both liberals and conservatives, fast-paced, i was never bored. why they picked hilary swank to be the big bad was an interesting choice, at age 45 she's still kept herself in excellent shape. never realize betty gilpin can be such a bad-ass, though her stint in GLOW probably gave her a lot of fight training. i wasn't the least bit sleepy afterwards but i really needed to be unconscious, so i pulled up an ebook on the spanish flu pandemic and after a few pages i was nodding off.