there's always a point at the end of spring when the weather gets just hot and humid enough for me to wish for winter again. even though today hit 88 degrees, i'm still not there yet. i think that's thanks to the hot yet dry weather. tomorrow we're getting hot and humid and i might finally meet my tolerance threshold.
i got in touch with seaflo again, asked them if they had any news about the status of our replacement series-42 pump. chris replied to my text a few minutes later, said he's look into it. turns out the warehouse was waiting for us to return the 33-series pump before shipping out the 42-series, not realizing chris okayed them to ship it out first. he apologized for the mistake and said they were shipping out the upgraded pump today. hopefully we can get it by this weekend.
i went out three times today, all to visit poke gyms like a pokemon fiend. i'm tempted to take a break from the game, but it does give me an excuse to go outside and take a short walk, or even a bike ride if i want to hit more pokestops. i went out right before lunch, when i noticed two gyms with vacant slots. i only made about 20+ coins before i was knocked out from both gyms. then once more at night, around 11pm, to put a pokemon in one of the nearby gyms. barely lasted 20 minutes before somebody kicked me out. finally, close to midnight, i went out again to tag a gym. night time is the best time because not many people are out playing so if i'm lucky i can go 8+ hours without getting kicked out and make my daily maximum of 50 coins.
for lunch i had a chicken salad bagel sandwich. i have just enough chicken salad for one last bagel tomorrow, but i may need to supplement it with some avocados. kevin surprised me by going out for a jog in the afternoon (3:30pm), when the temperature was at its highest. normally he'd be gone for 30 minutes exactly but this time he came back in just under 20 minutes, said it was just too hot, that he nearly had a heat stroke. besides, with the mask on, it was difficult to breathe, making it even harder to jog. this is of course a rookie mistake, the best time to go is either early or later in the day when the weather is cooler.
big news today was the launch of the spacex capsule to bring two NASA astronauts to the international space station. the launch was at 4:30pm, the astronauts were already waiting in the capsule hours before. all systems were go with the exception of the weather. it was simply too windy and too electrical stormy to risk a launch, so they finally postponed it with less than 30 minutes left until countdown. the next departure date will be saturday afternoon.
around noontime today my father noticed a thick layer of pollen on our solar panels so he sprayed some of them with water from a hose, hence the slight uptick in production around that time. normally a rain shower would clean the panels but we haven't seen rain a while. another clear blue sky day brings another 50kWh+ production of 50.61kWh, a smidge lower than yesterday. with just 4 more days left in may, we need to make more than 134kWh in order to beat the highest single month production record set in july 2018. can it be done? we'd need to average 34kWh of production for the next 4 days. it will be close! regardless, today we already beat the single month production for june and we'll most likely beat august as well. can we beat july though? another thing that happened today: automatic energy reporting worked without a hitch, after the hiccup nearly 2 months ago in early april. it reported 1254kWh, which equals to one SREC.
kevin shared some chicken and potato he made for dinner with me. a bit afterwards i reheated some leftover rib-chicken-corn.
for some reason we got moths in the house. not a surprise, given how much of kevin's food is just lying around. while searching for the source, i looked in my spice cupboard and found several empty bottles. this is the work of kevin, who finishes my spices, puts back the empty bottles, and then buys himself a new bottle without ever restocking my supply. when i told him he could use whatever spice he wanted, i didn't mean he could just finish them. it's pretty rude. i was so angry i brought out all the empty jars and set them out on the table for him to see. later though, i had second thoughts, and put them all back. he's only here for 2 more weeks, no point making a fuss about it. besides, a lot of those spices were old anyway, if he wanted to finish them, it just went i could get fresh ones. the only thing that did really bother me was he used up most of my sichuan peppercorns, the ones i bought special from a small village on the outskirts of changshou during a market day, the ones that i don't even have the heart to use. from a full jar he used up 80% of it. i suppose a percentage of his rent will also be used to restock my spice rack.