my father came to pick me up around 10:30am because it was a rainy day. i brought the monkshood i picked up from yesterday's plant swap. on the ride to belmont we were spotting kwanzan cherries and crabapples everywhere. it's still a bit early for Malus but a few trees in sunny spots have started to blossom and it's definitely easier to pick them out from a crowd of trees even if they haven't fully flowered yet.

for lunch i had a bowl of chicken noodles along with some garlic chive omelette.

while researching shortwave radios that also have SSB, i found a youtube video with a link to a wide-band webSDR. it's like having an online shortwave radio with the best part being all the stations are labeled. it's pretty amazing watching the waterfall of signals, and pointing to a strong signal to listen. a lot of voice of america, a lot of china radio international, and some religious channels. being the first day of ramadan, there was a quran broadcast (maybe it's there all the time). there were programs from all over the world - russia, japan, vietnam, germany, albania, turkey, korea. the strangest thing we heard was a china radio station that was in esperanto. the program ended with a chinese-esperanto language lesson.

the webSDR also allowed SSB (single side band) and CW (morse code). in the 20m and 40m, we heard CQ chatter. operators from england (M6KCI), serbia (YU1XA, blagomir "CQ CQ CQ yankee united 1 x-ray america"), italy (IY5EL), and spain (AM70U). because the webSDR antenna is located in netherlands, it made sense that it'd receive more european broadcasts. IY5EL was marking international marconi day with his transmissions (although i thought marconi day was the end of april). most of the time we could hear the operator but not the person he was talking to. for some reason they were making a lot of contacts from japan. a few more great things about the webSDR: ability to make personal bookmarks and save snippets of audio. with something like this, you really don't need a real shortwave radio anymore. plus all the bookmarks, something you'd never have with a real radio. something i didn't realize was broadcasts change every hour. multiple stations might live on a single frequency, changing depending on the time of day and condition of the ionosphere.

my father made kungpao chicken again for dinner. this time he used all the sauces and remembered to add the peanuts. he also some pepper flakes to make it spicier. he couldn't believe all this food from trader joe's for around $3. afterwards i got a ride back to cambridge where i brought my rosemary plant.

this week's episode: jaime and brienne do it, melisandre and another dragon dies, jon snow tells his siblings his true lineage after making them swear not to tell anyone, so naturally sansa tells tyrion who tells varys who then plots to assassinate daenerys'. also ghost the dire wolf gets sent away to the north, and jon snow leaves without even petting his wolf (no cgi budget for human-wolf interaction).