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i spent the day in belmont doing various tasks:

  • measuring my bike seat post diameter so i know what size replacement to order (27.2mm).
  • moving out the jasmines and gardenia so they can get some real sunshine and spraying them with neem oil before moving them back in the basement to water.
  • my father mowed the lawn. since i fertilized, the grass has been growing like crazy and needed a trim. he set it on mulch mode because we don't want to bag the clippings with fertilizer and crabgrass preventer. it won't be until mid-summer that we begin saving the clippings for the compost bin.
  • checked on the bunnies. they're all wide awake but still not out of the nest yet. they're starting to overgrow the nest and the fur covering was all scattered, like maybe the mother rabbit is persuading the babies to leave.
  • i cleared the southern bed of overgrown spiderworts and lawn grass and creeping bellflowers. this is where we'll grow our long beans.
  • i fertilized our flowering trees with osmocote slow-release fertilizer pellets. it's actually a fairly balanced fertilizer: 15-9-12. i sprinkled about 7 tbsp underneath the kwanzan cherry, and a few tbsp under the cherry plum, hawthorn, and japanese maple.

but the biggest project of the day was recaulking the bathtub. this was something my mother requested before she left for taiwan, and since she's coming back tomorrow night, i figured today would be a good day to do it. i tried a new technique where i used blue masking tape to make sure i get clean caulking lines. but before i got to the caulking, i first had to remove the old caulk, which took a long time. armed with a razor blade and a metal barbecue skewer, i slowly got rid of the old caulk. i then cleaned the bathtub and the bathroom wall tiles, and allowed it to dry before masking with the bathtub with blue tape and caulking. i had a tube of siliconized caulk that i wasn't sure if it was enough to do the bathtub, but i only used up a third of the tube. verdict? using blue mask tape seemed like it'd be a good idea, but all it did was ended up "feathering" the edges of the caulk, and i still had to use my finger to smooth it out again after i removed the tape. so it's just easier to do it the old fashion way, without the tape. maybe the caulk i used was old, and perhaps with fresher caulk (i.e. less dry) there wouldn't be any feathering issues.

in the early afternoon i had to stop whatever i was doing when i received an e-mail from united airline. my mother's flight from taipei to san francisco was delayed yet again, after it was delayed from 9:50am to 2:30pm yesterday and forced me to call united to reschedule her connecting flight from san francisco to boston. the new delay was now 4:20pm, which meant her connecting flight which i changed last night would needed to be changed again. her new connecting flight out of san francisco is now 4:10pm, which means she won't get back to boston until almost 1am. to add insult to injury, 2 hours later i got another e-mail from united, letting me they were yet another delay, and now the taipei flight doesn't leave until 4:45pm. fortunately my mother still has enough time in san francisco to make her boston flight, so i didn't need to change her schedule a 3rd time.

because we made the changes in the afternoon, it was still in the middle of the night taiwan time, so we waited until it was morning in taiwan (evening here in boston) before contacting my mother to let her know about the additional delays. while my father was chatting with my mother, i drove to the nearby burger king to get some takeout. we got the family special (3 whoppers, 3 cheese burgers, 3 small fries $13) but for some reason it was taking them a long time to make the order. i think it's because there was a long drive-through line, and i was ordering inside the restaurant, so i had a lower priority.

after i finished my whopper, i returned home so i could catch game 4 between the celtics and bucks. when i stashed my bike in the alleyway, i removed the seat post so i could measure the length. i think it's 350mm, but i later i ordered a shorter 27.2 x 300mm seat post because i always felt the one that i currently have is too high.

as for the game, celtics weren't doing too well, but kept the game close, which reminded me of one their nets victory with the exact same scenario. bucks began to pull away in the 3rd quarter, so i was surprised when boston went on a run to actually take the lead. milwaukee seemed to run out of steam, and boston just gutted it out for the victory. al horford was on fire, dunking on giannis after the greek freak dunked on horford then got a technical for taunting. jayson tatum had another bad night, but he kept on shooting and missing until he started making them again in the 4th quarter. celtics won on a night when they didn't have robert williams, who was out due to knee soreness (the same knee he had an operation on just a 1-1/2 month ago).