it was going to snow today. but i checked a few forecasts this morning, and all of them said at most an inch of snow, maybe even nothing along the coast. in any case, it wouldn't start until the evening. my father called asking if i needed i ride, but i was confident i'd be able to ride home. in fact, i was sort of looking forward to seeing some flurries, maybe get a cool winter motorcycle riding time lapse video in the process.

i left my place around 11:20am. i made a quick stop at my sister's place to drop off the 90 degrees right angle HDMI adapter so she can use her new roku stick with her old HDTV. she was still asleep, her house so dark i nearly tripped over hailey who was sleeping in the hallway area. i left the adapter on a table and left.

i had some pan-fried chinese dumplings for lunch.

i helped my mother log into her allbirds account on the imac. she sent my california aunt a gift pair of shoes but they don't fit her so she wanted to return them so my mother was coordinating with her on the phone to receive the free fedex shipping label.

i made a video clip of all the times those neighborhood boys prank rang my parents' doorbell and posted it onto the local next door forum. i've never posted before, and i almost never check, even though i get their daily newsletters. don't know if it'll make a difference, but makes me feel a little better that we at least did something to try and figure out who those boys are.

my parents left for the cafe around 2pm. there was some kind of local business event happening in the late afternoon. they weren't selling any food, just some handicrafts. my mother gave me specific instructions to start cooking the rice at 5pm.

while my mother was gone, it gave me a chance to update the system on her imac to high sierra, so it'll stop showing her a warning on the chrome browser every time she used it alerting her to the fact that sierra wouldn't be supported anymore. i managed to download the high sierra installer directly into the machine without having to create a bootable drive and installed it that way.

i was surprised when i saw some snow on the backyard lawn around 4pm. it wasn't supposed to snow until the evening, and even though, it wasn't supposed to stick. this was a bad sign, but for the time being, it didn't look like too much. maybe i'll still be able to ride home.

i totally forgot about the rice and only remembered it around 5:30pm. i quickly put the rice with water into the rice cooker. i then went to go use the bathroom when i heard my parents returning from the cafe (they must've closed early).

first thing my parents said to me was i wouldn't be able to ride home, the roads were too slippery. but i didn't believe them, so i put on my jacket and went outside to test the motorcycle. it was covered in snow, which is something i don't usually see, because normally the bike would be in storage before the first snowstorm. i cleared off the snow with a towel then took a short ride down the block and back. it was so cold it made powdery snow, which was very slippery. i'd have more luck riding in the slush, at least i'd have some traction. with the powdery snow, i was essentially just gliding on top of the snow. i tested my brakes and was able to stop, but just barely. as much as i wanted to ride home, road conditions were simply just too dangerous. i opted to get a ride back home.

my mother cooked the asparagus i brought home with some mushrooms and smoked peppers, along with another stirfry of salted pork with tofu and long horn hot peppers. my father also pan-fried some salted fish but they weren't nearly as salty or dry enough so i only had a few bites.

after dinner i replaced the cracked glass screen protector on my father's moto 7 phone. it'd been cracked for more than a year, my father didn't seem too bothered about it, but i noticed more cracking, and i found the replacement screens last week when i replaced the screen on my old pixel 3XL, so i had it handy.

my father and i went outside to move the cars out of the driveway so i could store the motorcycle inside the garage. good thing he cleaned it up a bit last weekend, otherwise there would've been no way it could've fit. after that he gave me a ride home. the side roads were still snow covered, but the snow on the main roads had mostly melted from the traffic. much of the streets were glistening with melted snow, but with the temperature in the mid-20's, it was bound to freeze, creating dangerous black ice. there was no way i could've made it back to cambridge on my motorcycle in one piece and not become a statistic.

my rubberized wall outlet triple tap arrived today. i took the white one and left the grey and orange in belmont. on my doorstep was something else i ordered, a small 256GB samsung thumb drive that i bought almost a month ago ($25), and was only now finally arriving. it's a bit taller than the 128GB sandisk mini thumb drives i currently use, but i've noticed a transfer speed slowdown on my sandisk, so hoping this samsung one will perform better.

i've finally decided to trade-in the google pixel 6. it was bound to happen, since i needed to do it to get the $480 credit for the pixel 7. but i was keeping it on hand just to make sure the pixel 7 was working correctly. now that i'm fairly sure the camera glitch has been fixed, i can finally send the trade-in. google sent me a box a few days ago, with instructions on how to reuse it to send them the old phone. the only thing they asked me to do was factory reset the phone, and some people online said to film myself doing it in case google decides to contest the condition of the phone. it was supposed to be something easy but for some reason i couldn't reset the phone from system settings. i ended up having to do it manually, through the phone's buttons, into recovery mode. but i finally managed to factory reset the pixel 6, and tomorrow morning i'm going to drop it off at the post office (if the roads aren't too bad).

i finally opened up a can of tykisk peber frances gave me back in october. i've of course had it before, but it's been a while. at first it tasted like regular hard candy - a slightly salty licorice - but once i reached the inside, that ammonium chloride really hit me. i guess the american equivalent would be sour patch kids - candy that shouldn't taste good but does because the flavor is so weird.

one last thing i did tonight was renew my mother's driver license. she'd been bugging me about it for weeks, because she heard you could renew online and not have to wait at the RMV. when i finally got around to doing it a few days ago, it needed some kind of corroborating document (like a passport) which i didn't have. when i tried to do it today, their database was shut down because of something happening in hawaii. but finally tonight i was able to go online and get it done. it's not the realID license (which does require an RMV appointment), but my mother doesn't need a realID anyway.

before going to bed, i took some photos of the snowscape outside. it gave me a chance to use the night sight feature of the pixel 7 phone camera, turn a night scene into a day scene.