i got a chance to sleep in late a little bit this morning, didn't get out of bed until 10:20am. then i remembered i still had things to do. like going to star market to buy some pineapples on sale (97¢ each). and make some fresh squeezed orange juice for my mother (i used 8 navel oranges). i also remembered to pack up the strawberries i bought from haymarket on friday.

i left the house by 11:40am. i saw it yesterday, but harvard-smithsonian had finished spraying their lawn with new grass seed mix, made it look like a fresh dusting of snow. they do this every spring, so by the time graduation happens in june, all the lawns are immaculate. i also passed st.peter's parish, it's parking lot full because of easter sunday mass.

i had some salty soy bean sludge soup mixed with some pork floss. i also had some niangao but was weary of eating them because of the fish flavored trauma from my 2nd aunt. i also presented my mother with the freshly squeezed orange juice. i tried some, i found it too sweet, i like my orange juice slightly tart.

i sync'ed up the new xiaomi fitness band 6 to my mother's phone. i was trying to unpair her old band 4 which wasn't working anymore (dead screen). the battery had drained completely, so i put it in the charge cradle, and wouldn't you know it, the screen started working again. so turns out we didn't need to replace her mi band after all.

after lunch my mother and i went out for a walk. our original plan was to walk to cushing square, but my mother was afraid she might get diarrhea after drinking some senna tea, so we only made a short loop of 2 miles, to the middle school and back. there was something going on at the school, every car we saw was driven by an asian person. i wanted to investigate (chinese school? asian community activity?) but my mother wanted to return home. we saw some spring flowers: daffodils, hyacinths, squills, snow glories. we also noticed many tulip leaves have been eaten by rabbits, to the point that tulip sightings are very rare nowadays. death to the rabbits!

when we got back home, i readjusted the front lawn sprinkler. my father came out to spot. so when i set up the sprinkler last tuesday, it was very windy, which affected the spray pattern. there was barely any wind today, so i was able to re-adjust it. i lowered the spray volume, which made it lower in height, so the wind has less chance to blow away the falling droplets.

my father fixed his old DBJ-1 antenna. a while back he clipped the wire tip to try and improve the SWR performance, but ended up making it worse. we never fixed it until now, and when he removed the antenna from the pvc housing, he discovered the split coaxial wire had been severed. so he ended up soldering it back into place, plus soldering an extension wire to the end of the antenna, which he then clipped again. testing with the nanoVNA, it had an SWR of 1 on the 70cm range, but an SWR of around 1.5 on the 2m. that was testing using an SMA cable; the real test is to attach it via UHF connector and coaxial cable. i took the antenna outside and stood it up, while my father attached the other end to the TYT radio. the SWR improved, on 2m it got close to 1. instead of attaching it back onto the chimney (which was where the DBJ-1 antenna used to be), my father decided to store it away for future use.

i continued playing with the ruyage UV58Plus. we activated the frequency copying function, which only works on UHF and VHF frequencies. it's able to copy the transmit frequency of nearby radios, but also when we transmitted from our chimney mounted antenna. i updated my father's laptop to macos monterey, and installed the 64-bit compatible version of chirp. unfortunately we couldn't find the programming cable, so i'll have to see if i can find one at home. i learned that the ruyage can input 10 characters for the channel name. on the radtel RT-890 there's mention of inputting chinese characters but no instructions on how that's done. maybe through the programming software? but the ruyage instructions make no mention of this.

i raised the led strip lights for the aeroponic plants another 5 inches, since the mustard greens were growing dangerously close to the lights. let's see how the plants do by next weekend. they're getting so big, it may be time to end the experiment and call it a success. this tub can be reused again, but i think to either grow cilantro or celery, plants that don't grow so obscenely large. if i continue to grow mustard green aeroponically, i'd made a new tub, with only 6 holes instead of the current 12.

there was some yard work to be done, but i was too lazy to do them, postponing them until tomorrow. we need to connect the rain barrels, rake the lawn, apply crabgrass preventer, and continue pruning the maple tree.

for dinner we had hot pot. nothing fancy, my parents found some old lamb in the cafe freezer that needed to be used before it went back (there was already some freezer burn along the edges). my father forgot to bring home the meat slicer so he spent some time in the kitchen cutting the lamb by hand and even then he couldn't get it as thin as a slicing machine. so besides old lamb, we also had tofu and cabbage, that was pretty much it.

i returned home around 8pm. there was still a band of twilight glow on the horizon. i stopped by fresh pond to snap a quick photo.