this morning i swept the sidewalk of locust leaves, brushing them onto the street as street cleaning tomorrow will clean everything up. after that i went back to the community garden. i snipped off a bunch of thai basil that i forgot to take with my yesterday. when i found them today they were already shriveled, but i'm hoping a soak in some water might reconstitute them.

while in the basement i looked for some exterior paint. there are some spots on the staircase that could use some patching up. i'm not 100% sure which one is the biege color, although the slate and red are very evident. the three colors of the house are cabot colors slate gray, colorbook woodstock tan, and colorbook apple spice.

i also noticed that the locust tree in front of the house has a few lingzhi mushrooms grow from the trunk. although it looks cool, this is a bad sign for the tree because it means there's tree rot. sooner or later the tree will die and the city will need to come and take it down.

it was a cold day, temperature never got beyond the 50's, with intermittent sun and clouds. i wore a dress shirt and my thick fleece jacket on top of that when i rode to belmont.

first thing i did when i arrived at my parents' place was replaced the RAM on my father's macbook pro (15" mid-2012). sometimes bad memories can cause a computer to start acting weird like it did last night. the computer originally came with 2x2GB RAM's, but i upgraded them to 2x4GB back in 2013, then once more to 2x8GB. i couldn't find the original 2x2GB memories but i had the 2x4GB. it seemed a bit more stable, and we could even close the lid and have the computer go to sleep and wake, but every once in a while it will crash and the computer with either not start and need a hard reboot or restart on its own. as long as the lid stays open, the computer is fine. we also noticed that pressing the area between the keyboard and trackpad will sometimes cause the computer screen to glitch and then crash. we did find a loose screw inside the machine, maybe putting it back might fix the problem. unfortunately i didn't have the special screwdriver for that particular screw.

so i went online looking for used macbook pros in case we can't fix this one. 2014 15" retina macbook pros can be had for $450 online. that's very similar to the macbook pro i currently use, a late 2013 model with 1TB hard drive that i bought back in july 2018 for $850. these 3rd generations of retina macbook pros are amongst the best macbook options, better than the 4th generation with touch bars which lack ports. my father said to hold off on getting a new used mac, as the current one still works, as long as we don't close the lid.

i cleaned up the wire shelves next to the basement sink to make room for all the plant related supplies from both the grow room and the sun room. the adjustable wall shelves in the grow room used to be the home for most of these items but now that we've converted them into grow shelves, the supplies needed a new home. i vacuumed the sunroom, the grow room, and the basement. my father also reconnected the deep cycle marine battery back to our on-demand backyard water pump.

i watered some of my bare batch lawn spots. i turned the compost and added some half-cured compost to the larger wisteria pots, while the smaller ones got some potting soil added. i collected some more aster and rudbeckia seeds.

i got my mother to watch midnight mass on netflix.

returning home after dinner, i followed the bright moon up in the sky that was casting a rainbow halo in the clouds. i wore my fleece hoodie with the down vest which kept me very warm (unlike last night). because of street cleaning, there was no nearby parking spots so i had to park 2 blocks away.

game 3 of the ALDS was tonight. i texted my taiwanese cousin eric but he was actually out golfing with some friends. red sox scored 6 in the 2nd inning (including another grand slam) and 3 in the 3rd inning to put themselves 9-0. astros managed to cut 1/3 from the lead when they scored 3 in the 4th inning, but that was the only time they'd score. boston ended up adding 3 more runs to win with a final score of 12-3. the game tomorrow night will be pivotal. red sox can either go up 3-1 in the series, or the astros can try to tie it and make it 2-2.