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i went to belmont in the early afternoon to wait for my father to come back home so we can do some work prepping the garden areas. in the meantime, i managed to watch my backlog of recorded shows on the DVR: an episode of battle BC (the one about alexander the great vs. india) and a few episodes of freddy's nightmares. when my father finally got back, we went to home depot to pick up some supplies (we made a quick stop at a nearby coffee supply company to buy some filters). when we first started the garden many years ago, we edged the borders with some wooden beams and fence posts. unfortunately they were pressure treated, which prevented them from rotting for all these years, but they probably leeched some mercury into the soil. now that the borders needed to be repaired, we were looking for something more natural. we ended up buying some untreated beams, the only ones we could find in the store.

back in belmont, we dug out the old beams and replaced them with the new ones. what's surprising about the old wood were many just had rot on the side facing up; the sides facing down were so pristine that we even managed to recycle some of the old beams by just turning them over. i started to dig up the garden, pulling out the weeds and churning the dirt. i found a bunch of tiny onion bulbs; my father said they were wild onions but i think they're the remnants of some ornamental onions i planted back in 1990's. conditioning the dirt was a bit more work than i anticipated, and since we started working relatively late in the day, soon it was time for dinner. i'll continue with tilling early tomorrow, so i can start planting my seedlings and sow some seeds.

my father helped me repair the broken jack on my headphones. i was going to just buy a brand new pair, but realized i may be able to repair my broken ones by replacing the jack. so i went to radio shack yesterday afternoon and bought a replacement 1/8" stereo phone plug ($3.99 for a pair). i snipped off the old jack and snaked the bare wires through the new jack, but it didn't work. that's when i discovered i had to burn the insulation off of the wires first and once i did that, i managed to get stereo sound back in my headphones. i needed my father's help to solder the wires to the lead. we also coated everything in some epoxy-like glue to prevent the wires from detaching. i left the newly-repaired headphones in belmont to dry.

since i've lived in cambridge, i've gone through a lot of routers for whatever reason. originally i just had a simple linksys, but graduated to a wireless SMC. that one died on me after a few years, when the wired ports started to fail. i then inherited a belkin router from my uncle, which worked for a while, but the past few months i've been losing my wireless connection intermittently, and the only solution is to reset the router (i learned how to do it via the online admin interface). actually, i'd only lose my browser connection, while my instant message and e-mail still worked fine, so thought maybe it was some comcast bandwidth choking issue. but finally i had enough, so last night i switched to a d-link router that i got from my parents. it worked for a while before i lost the connection and had to reset the router and the cablemodem in order to get everything to work. so tonight i updated the firmware, and so far so good, i've got my fingers crossed. hopefully i won't have to replace yet another router.

i watched the new tonight show with conan o'brien. i was surprised to see andy richter, the david caruso of late night. max weinberg was there too, but for whatever reason they didn't show any other band members. it definitely feels like a changing of the guards, a shift to a younger late night demographic. i'm curious to see how the ratings will play out.