my sister was already having hot pot for lunch by the time i biked to belmont, her dog sitting patiently nearby hoping to get some scraps. my mother was still out on her walk. as soon as i arrived, hailey started barking, insisting that we give her a treat. i ignored her and had some hot pot of my own for lunch.
in the afternoon i went to fly the drone for a bit from the backyard. it was a good day: sunny, temperature in the upper 30's, little wind. i decided to visit 2 places. first stop was a house i've coined "the garbage house" because the owner razed the existing house and built a tenant style house instead, possibly hoping to rent out individual rooms when the property is actually zoned for single family residential. i've investigated this house before and the owner is a chinese woman who resides in new york city, i think it's one of those chinese investment properties. the design is terrible, mismatched windows, a garage door that opens directly to their next door neighbor, not even sure how it passed the building commission. no neighbors complained because it's right on the belmont-cambridge border with the fresh pond golf course as its backyard, so it only had 2 neighbors who obviously didn't know what was going on to object in time.
the drone was doing fine (full signal strength) before i lost connection. this happens fairly regularly, i'm not sure if it's a drone issue or an app issue. the drone seems fine, will stay in place in the air, as my phone freezes up. after a minute or two the app usually crashes as i quickly log back into the dji fly app to reconnect to the drone. though the drone seems fine afterwards, the data gets messed up in the flight data center, but thankfully it still remembers its original launch gps coordinate because i was able to issue a return-to-home command.
the second place i wanted to visit was nearby belmont acres farm. i've always known there's a farm close by, but in all the times i've lived in belmont, i've never actually visited this farm before. i flew over the farm and that's when my radio signal dropped to 40-60% with 15 minutes left of juice. not wanting to push my launch, i flew the drone home. i took an ambitious route, circling around to burbank elementary school first before making a beeline back home. the total distance i flew today was over a mile, which is only the 3rd time i've flown this far, usually i just go up and circle the block before returning home.
for dinner we had more leftover hot pot. i ran the air purifier while we ate, hoping to get rid of some of the bad smells. my parents also made another scallion bread. because the dough didn't seem to be rising, i finally got my parents to proof the dough in the instant pot. 8qt size is large enough to fit the whole bowl filled with dough. it took about 30 minutes or so before the dough had risen enough to make into a bread.
returning home, i saw my neighbor's solar panels lit up by the shining moon, like their roof was glowing. i snapped a few photos. after using the bathroom, i showered and settled in for a night of retroactive blog entry refilling. still working on august, nearly done. after that i just have june and july and i'll be all caught up. once that's complete, i can start refilling all the blank entries from my china stays.