i squeezed some fresh orange juice for my mother before i left for belmont. i'd forgotten how much oranges i needed to squeeze a whole container's worth. i thought it was 5, the answer is at least 6 if not more. i tried a sip, fresh and sweet, nothing like what you'd buy in the store. i can't remember the last time i fresh squeezed orange juice. as far back as april 2018 maybe? so it's been a while.

i moved my muffin tray seedlings out onto the porch to get some natural sunlight, along with the umbrella plant.

my old roommate kevin contacted me out of the blue, asking if i wanted to go biking with him later in the afternoon. i don't like last minute invites, ask me at least a day in advance. i told maybe next time, then i asked him whether he got a vaccine appointment or not. he said his hospital sent him an invite that was good for 21 days. sensing that he didn't understand he got get vaccinated right away, i told him he didn't want to wait, that he could go ahead and make the appointment. it took him a while before he finally revealed the reason why he can't get a covid-19 vaccination: because he's getting an HPV vaccination in may. last i checked, there wasn't an HPV pandemic. so after he gets the HPV vaccine, he has to wait 2-3 more weeks before he can get the covid-19 vaccine.

my mother told me not to go out into the backyard before having lunch first, which was almost ready, some beef broth thin noodles. later my father showed me all the wild tomato seedlings he germinated, nearly 200 seedlings. we don't have the backyard space to grow that many tomatoes, he didn't think the seeds he saved last year would be so viable.

we didn't go out into the backyard until the late afternoon. the 7ft long u-posts arrived yesterday, my father set two up in the raised beds as test posts for his bamboo trellis idea. i knew since i left the house this morning that it was a warm day, temperature in the mid-70's. i should've worn shorts. we ended up mowing the lawn, my starting with the front lawn before my father mowed the back. we shredded the grass clippings back onto the lawn as green fertilizer, which i read is the preferred method of grass mowing. the key is to not wait until the grass grows too long, in that case you'll end up with dense mat of shredded grass on the lawn. this season because we fertilized both in the fall and early spring (we'd never done that before), and we recently received a good amount of rain. the lawn is a beautiful uniform green. the grass is so nice i'm almost afraid to walk on it.

after dinner i biked home. it was still warm enough to just wear a t-shirt. coming up the bend on huron avenue, a pink flowering tree on spark street caught my eye. i must've passed by this area a few thousand times but never noticed this tree until today. the flowers were cotton candy pink, and from a distance looked like azalea flowers, but it was definitely a tree, not a bush.

i pulled over to take a closer look and discovered it was a peach tree. peak peach blossoms was 1-2 weeks ago, but this one was putting on a show. it was flowering so late because the area is kind of shady. all the branches were actually old suckers that emerged from a large peach tree that was cut many years ago, all that's left a tree stump.

i spent the evening alternating between watching the courier (2021) and listening to the clash, which i recently rediscovered after realizing i heard most of their catalogue and recognized a bunch of songs in a wave of 80's nostalgia.