in the meantime, when i finally got out of bed, i made another half dozen blueberry muffins. this time i used the cake flour my mother gave me. i think i ruined the batter though because i was using old frozen blueberries that seemed to have thawed and refroze, so that there were a lot of ice crystals. when i finally added what was supposed to be 2 cups of blueberries, it contained a lot of ice that melted which then made the batter two wet. the final muffins were very much like my normal muffins except they looked a little different, a more uniform bottom crust. the wet batter also dissolved the sparkling sugar topping.
while waiting for the muffins to finish baking, i worked on fixing the flat on my front tire. i pried off the tire from the rim and pulled out the inner tube. i dunked the tube in the bathtub filled with some cold water to check for leaks. it didn't take long to find, the stream of bubbles coming out from a tiny hole was obvious.
after drying off the inner tube and marking the location of the hole, i went back to the tire and matched the location to see where it'd punctured. sure enough, there was something embedded in the rubber tire. originally i thought it was a piece of metal but it was actually a shard of glass. originally i was going to replace the inner tube with a new one, but when i checked my bike supply box i discovered the spare inner tube had been previously patched as well.
so in the ended i decided to keep on using the old tube. i sanded the tube surface, applied some rubber cement, and stuck on a piece of rubber patch. i then slightly inflated the tube and put it back in the tire before remounting the tire onto the rim. i inflated the tire to full then kept an eye on it to see if it'd deflate. it held up well, meaning the patch was successful.
i think that piece of glass had been in the tire for a while, but only punctured the inner tube a very small amount. only enough to deflate the tire after months of riding, but the puncture started to get bigger until by this point it'd go flat soon after i pumped the tire.
the muffins were finally ready by around noontime. i called my father telling him i was dropping by the cafe so we could install the temperature sensor. i packaged up my muffins in an insulated bag and went into the backyard with my newly fixed tire and put it back on the bike.
my father and i went over to the apartment where we found kevin making lunch. the apartment was very warm, which made us confused as to why kevin was complaining about how cold it was in the house. the nest thermostat was set to 20°C and the temperature in the hallway was already at 19.5°C (i'm using celsius because that the unit the thermostat is set at since kevin doesn't understand fahrenheit). this is normal, compared to this past weekend when we checked the thermostat temperature remotely and it only registered 16.5°C, dropping down to 16°C, even though we cranked the temperature up to 22°C. maybe because it was so cold this past weekend, the furnace couldn't make enough heat.
whatever the case, i paired the nest remote temperature sensor to the nest thermostat, a simple matter of scanning the QR code in the back of the cover. the sensor itself is pretty small, about the diameter of an egg yolk. it uses bluetooth to communicate with the thermostat, and has a range of 50ft. when we looked at the temperature in the app, it showed two temperature: the hallway and the bedroom. we selected the bedroom as temperature monitor; the thermostat would turn on or off depending on the bedroom temperature, not the hallway temperature.
kevin seemed pretty savvy with controlling the nest thermostat. he told us he usually sets it at 20°C, which is enough to warm his bedroom. but the thing to remember is previously the thermostat was taking the temperature in the hallway, which is the coldest part of the house, farthest away from any baseboard radiators. when the hallway reaches 20°C, the bedrooms are even warmer. by how much we don't know, since up until today we didn't have any room sensors, but my guess is anywhere between 22-24°C. but now that there's a room sensor, the temperature will never "overrun" and if the thermostat is set to 20°C, it will stop heating once the bedroom reaches 20°C. that means kevin is going to feel colder from now on as he adjusted to the new temperature control.
we also checked the pipe heating cable. just to review, the pipe for the upstairs bathroom runs along the outer wall of the house. this is poor design because when the temperature gets too cold, the pipes (inside the walls) are liable to freeze and burst open. in order to prevent this, my father has installed a heating cable around the pipe. it hasn't been turned on all winter and my father couldn't even be sure if it's working, since the contractors who worked on the house closed up the ceiling, leaving just a hole with the cable end sticking out. but we ran an extension cable to the heating cable, using a remote smart plug to see if it was drawing power. the power draw was zero, but this wasn't unusual because we measured the inside temperature of the hole and it was still 58°F; the heating cable won't turn on until the temperature drops below 38°F.
while my father returned to the cafe, i went to my sister's place to replace the memory card on her front door facing wyze cam. i noticed since last month that it wasn't recording to the memory card anymore. when i tried to remotely format the card, 
it failed. so i ordered a few cheap 64GB micro memory cards (micro center brand but still U3 rated with speed of 95/30 MB/s), formatted them as FAT32, and swapped out the bad card. it started working right away.
back at the cafe, my sister casually told us that she found the window of the small bedroom in the upstairs apartment open. kevin must've of done this, i suddenly remember him doing the same thing when he lived at my place, that he had to air out his room daily because of some misguided thinking that fresh air helps to combat the coronavirus. it's one thing to do it during the summer, it's another to do it during the winter, especially when you're not even paying for the heat. he must've opened the window and forgot about it. that could also be why he was complaining about the cold. and that's most certainly the reason why the nest thermostat could barely get above 16°C: the outdoor temperature this weekend was in the 10-20°F, and here was this moron who left a window open left and couldn't figure out why it was cold in the house.
so we didn't really need a remote temperature sensor. the way the upstairs heating was working was fine to begin with, unless you decide to open a window on the coldest days of the season. but the sensor will allow us to better monitor the temperature in the apartment, and if we ever see a large temperature different between the thermostat and the remote sensor, we'll know it's because kevin decided to open winters again in the middle of winter.
i finally returned home by 1:45pm, had a muffin for lunch. originally i thought about going to market basket, but i forgot with an impending snowstorm due to arrive in the evening, the supermarket would be too crazy. better to go tomorrow. actually, i still have plenty of stuff to eat in the house, i don't really need to go. i definitely have plenty of lunch ingredients, and plenty of frozen items for dinner. i may still go after all, to get some muffin making ingredients.
my spectracide immunox fungicide arrived today. i won't be able to use it on the grapevines until spring, but i should make a note of it on my calendar, figuring out a spraying schedule so i don't accidentally forget.
once it got dark it started to snow. it was actually sunny earlier today, temperature in the upper 30's. by the afternoon the sky had clouded over. i only realized it was snowing when i looked out the window out of curiosity and saw everything already covered in a thin layer of white. the temperature had dropped to 33°F by then.
for dinner i reheated the last 3 leftover beef buns my parents gave me last week. i cut them in half so they wouldn't squirt oil while i was eating. later in the evening i threw out the trash. by some miracle my upstairs neighbors had already moved out the trash bin; they do this about once or twice a year, while they just assume i'll do it the other 50 weeks in a year. still later i went out again to shovel the sidewalk when it looked like the snow had stopped. there was probably about an inch worth of snow, and those on the road had already melted from the salt.
depending on the weather condition, i may go to belmont to clear the snow off of the solar panels. not that they'll be generating much electricity tomorrow, as it looks to be still cloudy for the entire day, but it'll also give me an excuse to go out and fly the drone.