my father stopped by and delivered baking dishes for my thanksgiving flan. my parents were at the cafe preparing some thanksgiving foods, including brining the defrosted turkey. in return, i loaded up the car with some thanksgiving drinks and also gave my father my folding plant stand to take back to our basement grow room. before leaving, my father told me that binbin was coming back to boston december 14th. not sure about the details (what type of visa? how long will they be back? everyone returning?) but it's weird to think we might see them again in 3 weeks time after they've been gone for over 2 years.

in the late morning i packed up my things and rode to the porter square star market, to pick up some keurig vanilla caramel creme green mountain coffee for my mother. she walked down to the mt.auburn star market yesterday looking for this flavor but they didn't carry it. after that i went to the nearby speedway to get some gasoline for the motorcycle. i then went to belmont.

there were some dramatic clouds in the sky so as soon as i arrived at my parents' place, i unpacked my drone and went into the backyard to take a survey. i flew over the fresh pond golf course and spotted some really nice red leafed trees against the green course grass. i flew for a while, and even ignored the low battery warning when i still had 7 minutes left of flight. i was on my way home when it gave me a critically low battery warning and started landing procedures. i was pretty anxious because i couldn't cancel the forced landing, but the drone was high enough that i had some time to navigate it back home while it slowly came down from the sky. i managed to land it safely. i never had that happen before, next time don't ignore the low battery warning, come home immediately.

i did a few backyard chores. some critter had dug up a deep hole in the center of the backyard lawn. i don't think it's a squirrel because they dig to bury, and this hole looked like the start of a burrow. i want to say rabbit, but we haven't seen rabbits in the backyard for months. regardless, too late to grow any new grass, i just patched up the hole with some dirt, worry about it come spring. i cleaned some of the windows: ever since my parents replaced them with vinyl windows, they never bothered to remove the sticker labels from the window panes. it looks pretty terrible but finally after all these years, someone (me) managed to go around and clean up the windows with a razor blade to scrape off the stickers. i added another weight to the squirrel buster bird feeder, to prevent bluejays from feeding. we never had blue jays before, but they've somehow learned that there's food in the feeder, so a bunch of them have been camped out in the backyard, taking turns grabbing a seed and eating it elsewhere. besides bluejays, today i also saw a lot of mourning doves, a few juncos, and a chickadee who waited until the bluejays left to come and get some seeds from the feeder. there was also a downy woodpecker feeding from the suet feeder.

i thought about fertilizing the lawn with a late fall season fertilizer, but the leaves haven't fallen off completely yet, i'll wait until next weekend. we'll also open up another bag of chicken manure to fertilize parts of the western perennial bed, the garlic chive garden, and RB0.

my parents came home later in the afternoon. my mother made me some rice porridge and eggy bread omelettes with pork floss.

later my father and i set up the folding plant stand in the basement grow room. a bunch of our rose cuttings have rotted; you know they've gone bad when the stem turns black. we moved all of them into the sunroom, so they can winterize in the cold temperature. hopefully this will also kill the mold that's been growing in the damp soil.

i set up the 2 eufy 2k indoor cams that arrived on saturday: one facing out into the street, the other the backyard. i already have a wyze camera pointing into the backyard, so the eufy isn't necessary, though it has better resolution. i'll check out the feed tomorrow to compare the difference.

around sunset a bit after 4pm i went out again to fly the drone from the backyard when i noticed some colors in the sky. it was difficult to get the proper exposure, either a colorful sunset but dark terrains, or an overexposed sky with a proper exposed landscape. i should use the bracketing feature next time. because it was getting dark, the drone warned me about flying at night. it's actually easier to spot the drone at night because it has lights, versus in the daytime when it can disappear in the sky. at one point i thought there was another drone in the sky before i realized it was just an airplane flying at cruising altitude (10k ft).

we had dinner early, around 5:30pm. i returned to cambridge by 7pm. it was in the mid-50's this morning but by evening the temperature had dropped into the lower 40's. i only wore a fleece jacket, which wasn't enough this morning, so it wasn't going to keep my warm now that the temperature had dropped even lower. fortunately there was an old gap-brand jacket left behind by one of the astrophysicists (LSH?) that was my size, and i wore that home instead. it's actually a pretty good jacket, better than the hoodie-windbreaker combo i normally wear during the winter. i have a puffy columbia interchange winter jacket that i almost never wear unless it's super cold, so it's been a while since i've had a normal winter jacket and not something i cobbled together through layering. i think this might be my new winter jacket.