i was ready to head out this morning when i remembered i still had to adjust the gearing on my bicycle. so i brought it into the backyard, with my gloves and 5mm allen wrench and pliers. i tried moving it to 3rd gear (22T) on my rear cogs but the rear derailleur didn't want to cooperate so i left it in 2nd gear (24T). that gave me a gear ratio of 1.75:1, which is right about that sweet spot where i used to have my default gear setting.

i also cleaned the bike with alcohol, sniffing around, trying to find out where on the frame or seat that i might've gotten some lubricating grease on my jeans. i couldn't find it anywhere, but at the very least i don't have to worry about getting more stains.

the ride to belmont was uneventful. i was almost expecting the new gear adjustments to fail, but they worked fine. i still might move the chain onto the 3rd gear, i think i'd prefer the 1.9:1 gear ratio a little better. at 42/24T, it still felt like i wasn't getting enough power per stroke.

my mother made rice noodles for lunch. i was looking for some tianjin preserved vegetable but couldn't find any in the fridge. since we had corned beef last night for dinner, normally there'd be some corned beef leftovers for lunch, but there wasn't enough left to make a full reuben sandwich.

i sprayed some CRC electronic component cleaner inside the USB-C charge port of the moto G7 phone, hoping that might allow it to charge again. we tested it, the phone recognized we were trying to charge, but the capacity remained at 0% even after a few minutes. i brought my x-acto knife to open the phone but my father managed to do it using his milwaukee utility knife instead. inside everything looked normal. the battery looked brand new, no bulging. the USB-C charge connector also looked fine, nothing seemed to be wrong.

getting the phone opened was the hard part. my father thought we could easily remove the battery, but i told him we'd have to remove all the components first before we could get to the battery. just as a test, i connected the new battery to the phone, and tried turning it on (with the phone still partially disassembled). not only did it power on, but it also charged the new battery. that meant the old battery was bad.

before we moved onto the next step of taking the phone completely apart to remove the old battery, i reconnected the old battery just to see what would happen. so here was the big surprise: the phone managed to boot just fine, and it said the old battery had a charge of 86%, when previously it said 0%. what's going on? but mysteriously, after we took the phone apart, the old battery suddenly started working. the old battery was now charging too, like nothing happened. i know a few times while my father was opening the phone, he accidentally put the phone into text-only recovery mode. there was one time when i looked at the display and it said battery was fine. maybe by going into recovery mode it managed to fix the charging issue somehow?

regardless, with the old battery still working, it meant we didn't have to fully disassemble the moto G7 to install a new battery, saving us some work. i could also return the new battery since we didn't use it ($18). the only bad thing is once the moto phone was opened, it couldn't be sealed back shut, because it was actually glued together. lucky the phone case gripped the phone enough so it didn't matter that the screen wasn't actually attached to the rest of the phone.

in the afternoon my father and i went outside to prune the bushes in front of the house before digging up a section of the drought-damaged front lawn so we could reseed. using a combination of lopper, pruning shears, hedge shears, and employing the use of two different ladders, we managed to give most of the bushes a good trimming. it was my first time really using the fiskars hedge shears, which i bought back in july of last year. a lot easier to shape with the hedge shears. i also didn't realize i bought the extendable handle model (25-33"), but came in handy getting to those hard to reach places.

pruning was only half the job; the harder half (at least in terms of physical exertion) was digging up the lawn. it's the square patch in front of the living room window, measuring about 10x10ft. it suffered the most during last summer's drought, and by the time we decided to water it on a timer, it was already too late, most of the grass had died, leaving a thick layer of thatch that subsequent reseeding in the fall could no longer revive. so we decided last year that come spring, we'd dig up that section of lawn and start over.

both my father and i used hoes to dig up the thick layer of dead grass. my father focused on the corner where there used to be exposed tree roots from the large maple tree that grew from the sidewalk before it got diseased and the town chopped it down. the tree roots made the lawn uneven, and was impossible to mow without scalping the lawn. he dug up as much dead roots as possible. i was using the hoe with the larger head, but the handle broke a few years back, so it was shorter, forcing me to hoe in an uncomfortable hunched over position.

i also managed to sever a buried cable underground. i ran into the house as soon as it happened, to see if the internet was done. fortunately we're on verizon FIOS, and the technician who did the wiring for that must've buried the fiberoptic cable much deeper. what i did hit was the coaxial for comcast cable, which fortunately we were no longer using. that must've been installed in the early 90's, when belmont finally got cable tv. i was surprised the cable was only buried about an inch deep, probably back when safety/performance standards were much lower.

my father was all bundled up, while i kept removing my layers: first the jacket, then the pullover, until i was just in my t-shirt. temperature was still in the mid-40's, but it felt warmer in the sun, especially while we were working. we finally finished by 4:30pm.

my father wanted to grill some chicken wings but it was getting close to dinner, so we decided to postpone it until tomorrow. my father demonstrated the nanoVNA, which he found a youtube video where someone explained in detail how to calibrate the device and how to use it to measure the SWR of antennas. back when we first got the nanoVNA (march 2020), we could hardly find any resources teaching us how to use it, but now there's a bunch of how-to videos on youtube, teaching you to do just about anything with the device.

my mother made some stirfries for dinner, tofu with garlic chives, long horn green peppers with salted pork. i finally left by 7:45pm, getting back to cambridge around 8pm.

i wore those oil-stained jeans again, the ones that i washed last night. all day long i could still smell that faint petroleum odor. these are going to be my work pants from now on, the dirtier they get, the more chances i'll have to wash them, and hopefully the smell will eventually just go away.

my arms hurt from all the digging i did today. hopefully a good night's sleep will get rid of some of the pain.