i had fried pancake for lunch, stuffed with pork floss. i also had some sweet oatmeal sprinkled with raisins.
temperature today would hit the 50's, so i started bringing out all the large potted plants from the basement (jasmines and one gardenia). i then sprayed them with neem oil and inspected each one for mealybugs, and in the case of the gardenia, spider mites. i then went into the grow room and watered the remaining plants, including all the pileas, the prayer plants, orchids, and thanksgiving cactuses. of the 4 remaining orchids in the grow room, one of them has started to form a flower stalk.
after i was done with the plants, my mother and i went to the waltham ocean state job lot. they recently expanded into the empty rite aid next store, and was still in the process of renovating. my mother was there to grab some more yarn, i was there to find replacement shower curtains. they had some, but i couldn't tell if they were frosted through the packaging, and it didn't say either, so i ended up not getting any. i did pick up some seeds though: a tomato, a nasturtium, an ornamental pea.
we left by 2pm. instead of going straight home, we stopped by sophia's greek pantry so we could pick up a few things. i was trying to do a 3-point turn when the car stopped working. it wouldn't reverse or go forward, and when i let go of the breaks, the car would slowly roll, 
almost hitting a hydrant. turns out for some reason the engine had turned off. i restarted the car and i was able to drive again, narrowly avoiding a disaster. in the store my mother got her salty yogurt drink, and i got a freshly-made mango greek yogurt smoothie. originally my mother was going to walk back home to get some exercise, but we waited in line so long to check out, plus the excitement of the car seizing up, that she just wanted to go home after that.
the mango yogurt drink was pretty good. not exactly a mango lassi, sweeter than sour. i would definitely get it again. my mother also got some raisins. juicier than the long green persian raisins we got last weekend, and very sweet.
entering the house i saw a quick flash in the kitchen cupboard. i knew immediately it meant a mouse had been captured in our electronic trap. i took it outside and buried it in the backyard, adding to all the other buried critters. their bodies decompose so completely, i've never dug up any skeletons.
we have 3 bags of chicken manure left but some animal had gotten into it (i'm thinking rats, only they would eat excrement). it was also a good excuse to add them into our gardens, something we should've done back in the fall. i did add them to raised bed 4 and 3, but the remaining beds haven't been fertilized yet. first step was till the raised beds. in rb2 i found a rabbit's nest. fortunately there were no rabbits inside. my father ended up helping me add the chicken manure, we used up two bags (actually 1-1/2 bags, as one of the bags had already been used). the last bag we'll use on the western bed, as well as some outdoor containers.
afterwards i moved all the outdoor plants back into the grow room.
around 4pm my father grilled a bag of frozen buffalo wings. the grill was super hot today, and we figured out it was because the temperature was warmer. when we barbecue in the winter, it's like starting a fire inside of a freezer; the grill has to fight the ambient temperature, and cools back down much quicker. today we grilled around 400-450°, which made for crispier chickens.
after finishing the wings, i went back down to the basement to water the remaining potted plants. we still have a long ways to go before they can be moved outside. i'm thinking no earlier than late april. of course with the weather being unnaturally warm these days, they could be out earlier than that. i also have to be careful because i applied some more systemic insecticide back in mid-february. they take 2 months to lose their effectiveness, so waiting until late april would be the safest time for the plants to go back outside.
for dinner, it was more tofu stirfry and mustard green stirfry. we also had some salted pork, not sure where they came from. i left around 7:30pm, temperature at 45°F. i brought home some plant trays as well as the canon LIDE400 scanner that arrived today.
canon hasn't updated their LIDE scanner in 4 years. i'm still a little confused as to whether or not the LIDE 400 is compatible with the latest version of macOS. of course i'm still running mojave (10.14.6), the last version of the OS that can run 32-bit applications.
i plugged the scanner into my mac and gave it a test run. i was happy to see they updated the USB port on the scanner to USB-C (compared to the USB-B it had on the older model), but the plug on the other end was still USB-A (though the blue color meant USB 3.0). it'd work fine on my mac, but newer macs only have USB-C ports, so it'd require an adapter.
i first tried the native apple image capture app, which recognized the scanner, a good sign. when i tried to scan something though, it seemed to be stuck. turns out image capture doesn't like it when i tried to scan at high resolution; at lower resolution it was able to scan fine, but without any frills, with manual cropping. i then downloaded canon's own scanning app, canon IJ scan utility lite. the app is bare-bones and not the most intuitive in terms of user interface. but it works, and i managed to scan at high resolution (4800dpi) without any problems. it even managed to crop and rotate the image for me.
as for my old canon LIDE70, that's due to be retired. it only works with an old canon scanning app (canoscan toolbox 5.0) that's just 32-bit. one day when i upgrade to the next higher macOS, i won't able to use that app anymore. i've also tried some third party scanning apps, but the LIDE70 is so old (circa 2007) it's not even recognized.