about an inch of snow fell overnight. i went out this morning to shovel the sidewalk. it was icy snow, hard, compact, but there was enough slush on the bottom that made it come up in chunks if you can get underneath it all. i managed to clean down to the bare sidewalk before coming back inside. a few minutes later i heard paul coming down the stairs. i think my upstairs neighbors were probably waiting for me to finish. for some reason paul started shoveling renee's sidewalk, then later cleaned the snow off their car.

the broken microwave hung heavily on my mind. how will i survive without one? how will i heat up my leftovers? but this was one of those first world problems. plenty of people across the world don't own a microwave and they seem to do fine. like the leftover beef pastries i got yesterday, i ended up warming them in the toaster oven before i had them for lunch. i ate while watching the latest episode of poker face (the one with the special effects artist).

with so much snow still on the ground, my original plan of biking to belmont to grab the tamperproof bit set would have to wait. going tomorrow would be better, wait for the all the snow and freezing rain to stop falling, so i could try tackling the snow-covered solar panels while i was there.

i kept busy by updating some old blog posts. i played around with my zoom mic connected to my dSLR to takes videos with better audio. i watered my houseplants. when i got hungry, i had some orange slices, or some leftover wings and italian sausages. in the afternoon i brought in the last of my trash cans. it was snowing again, this time in the form of snow needles.

for dinner, i decided to have the container of leftover lion's head meatballs with brown rice. i was going to eat it last night before the microwave died. but i figured i could reheat the food by steaming. originally i was going to use the tatung rice cooker, but it was too small to fit a reasonable sized plate. so instead i used my 6qt instant pot. i used a medium-sized shallow bowl to hold the food, balanced on top of a trivet. i added a cup of water to make the steam. unfortunately my instant pot duo (v3) didn't have a steam function. but i read online that's nothing more than 10 minutes of low pressure cooking. so that's what i set the instant pot to. the final result was better than i'd hoped, more so than simply warming up in the microwave. sure, it took a bit longer to heat (20+ minutes), but i may steam all my leftovers from now on.

i ate while watching the celtics-pacers game. there hasn't been any basketball all this week, not since the all-star break over the weeekend. celtics looked like they were going to win the game easily - especially with every player on active duty - but when i checked in on the game after halftime, i was shocked to see indiana with the lead. teams just play better when they face the celtics. pacers were shooting lights out. the game went into overtime, celtics won in the end.