i was thinking about visiting mt.auburn cemetery today to check up on some cherry blossoms but i went to their website and learned they closed since march 30th. actually, they're closed until 4pm, then afterwards there's a 2 hour window primarily for families to visit graves. so much for tree learning in times of coronavirus quarantine.
kevin came out of his room to ask me if i had a body temperature thermometer. i knew he bought one months ago (along with some other medical equipment, like a blood pressure cuff), but he wanted to try my infra-red thermometer. though cool and convenient, i've since discovered it's not very accurate, reads a few degrees lower than actual temperature. i did show him my forehead/ear thermometer, the one i got for free from my 2nd aunt. it was also today that i realized how pale and pudgy kevin was starting to look, having spent his 4th week sequestered in the house, afraid to go outside other than a weekly supermarket trip. he needed his body temperature in order to send a report to the chinese embassy, which is gathering a list of chinese graduate students in the US, which would be used to create an evacuation roster should the US descend into chaos and china needs to save its students. once again, i could either see the humor in it, or take offense to it. he also asked if i knew if any of my neighbors had coronavirus, and wondered if there was an online database where he could look up this info. i told him because of privacy concerns, that kind of info is not made public, and the best i could do was hear it from neighborhood gossip, but i haven't spoken with any neighbors for a while. he said in china that info would be public, since it's a safety concern and people have to be told when a neighbor has the virus.
for lunch i had a chicken salad bagel sandwich. i was still deciding what i was going to be doing the rest of the afternoon when a phone call from comcast decided for me. 
it was one of their repairmen calling to let me know they were working in my sister's backyard. i went over just to see what was going on. i found the repairman, who told me he checked the wire and didn't see any squirrel damage, but he was replacing the splitter and said the connections were lose. he also stapled the wire to the house instead of just hanging over the awning. strangely enough, since i reactivated the modem on saturday, the internet hasn't gone down once. he also tested the signal, said it was strong. so who knows what went wrong. maybe it was a simple issue of just too many comcast customers using the internet all at once.
afterwards i went to my parents' place again. there were some gardening things i forgot to do yesterday, and with a few days of rain starting tomorrow, today was the best day to do them, including fertilizing the garlic patches with nitrogen-rich blood meal, switching the bird feeder baffles to prevent squirrels from getting to the suet feeder, and moving my tender tomato seedlings so they're not so close to the grow light and risk getting "sun" scorched. some of the swelling kv plum flower buds i noticed yesterday have blossomed; it appears the flowers are opening from the bottom of the tree first.
my parents had been out earlier, visiting a few relatives (my aunt and uncle in arlington, my 2nd aunt in cambridge), delivery either food or face masks. they stopped at the cafe to pick up some more supplies before returning home. i left belmont by 2:45pm with a bag of taiwanese confections my 2nd aunt picked up for me.
returning home i stopped a few times to photograph some more cherry blossoms. there's a pair in front of a concord avenue apartment building that's really spectacular, but i don't know the variety of either one.
because it was so warm out today (65°F), i opened all the windows when i got back home.
for dinner i ate the leftover fried rice and italian sausage my mother gave me last night.
