asking if i could use my back entrance if they oiled the front steps within the next few days. i finally left by 9:40am. it was going to be a weird day, with early morning temperatures in the upper 30's, rising to the upper 60's by the afternoon. i dressed for cold knowing that i'd probably be in just a t-shirt later today.
i got to my parents' place a bit before 10am. my mother was just eating some breakfast. i brought my baofeng programming cable and used it with the chirp app to flash a bunch of frequency channels into the ruyage memory bank (up to 999). we left around 10:30am for a south boston baifu supply run. it was a quick stop, we were only there for half an hour. my mother made a list but left it at home, although we had a good idea what we needed to get. for some reason they sold various brands of asian knockoff spam. is there a big market for that stuff in chinese cooking?
we left by 11:30am. the entrance facing methadone mile was opened so we figured we could leave from that end, but as soon as we turned the corner, we were surrounded by a mob of homeless and drug users. a police officer came out and told us to go the other way.
next stop was the two asian supermarkets on the outskirts of chinatown. we tried going their in the past by going on connecting roads parallel to I-93 and the turnpike. we got lost one time, and barely made it another occasion. even though it's the quickest route, one wrong turn or driving in the wrong lane could send us onto route 93 or heading onto the turnpike. the easier but longer way was to just go down mass ave and take a right onto washington street. that took us 10 minutes through the south end.
first stop was ming's market. as there was no place to park, my father stayed in the car while my mother and i quickly went inside to grab a few things. most importantly was two cases of taiwanese soda, they're the rare place that carries them. we were there for less than 10 minutes before we left. from there we went to c-mart, where there was parking, so we all got off to do some more supply shopping. we stayed here a bit longer, about half an hour. because we got ground pork here, it saved us a trip to market basket.
we finally left by 12:40pm. 
we tried going back to cambridge via berkeley street onto storrow drive, but that final section of berkeley was under construction, so traffic was diverted onto beacon street heading into kenmore square. we took the connector near muddy river to get onto storrow drive and got back that way. that whole return trip took us half an hour.
we stopped at the cafe to drop off the supplies, before returning to belmont. my parents reheated the leftover hot pot from last night for lunch, adding some additional ingredients we got from chinatown earlier like tripe, fresh enoki mushrooms, and shrimp dumplings. i got a bottle of peppercorn oil, added it to my dipping sauce for a super intense flavor. peppercorn oil is our new favorite condiment. we only had a bit of leftover lamb, but plenty of beef. however it was store-bought shaved steak, and was shredded so much that the meat would disintegrate once in the hot pot. the only way to cook it was to hold the beef in a mesh spoon.
around 4pm i made a quick trip to home depot to return the unused drywall screws and get some 1-1/4" deck screws instead. i also got a tube of clear silicone (wasn't sure if i still had any left) and a bag of bone meal.
while my father was busy reconnecting all the rain barrels, i was filling the garden hose with water so they can soften and get rid of their kinks in the sun. i also took the opportunity to water the raised beds, i've yet to water them since planting all those seeds last tuesday. i added some bone meal to the garlic beds, helps them to grow bigger bulbs. i took some leftover window screens and replaced two of the screens on the front yard rain barrels. i recaulked a rain barrel that was leaking last season with some leftover clear silicone caulk i found in the garage (means i can return the tube that i bought). i was going to plant the spiderworts that've been soaking in water all winter, but ran out of time. looks like i need to come back tomorrow to do more gardening stuff, plus i didn't get a chance to water the grow room plants.
had some time to play around with the flashed ruyage. it reprograms without issues, but there are some bugs in the programming that hopefully will get resolved. like the channel name. chirp only allows 10 characters, but it looks like the radio can display up to 11. for some reason blank spaces after the channel name appear as solid blocks. on a few occasions we saw chinese characters appearing as the last character, some kind of encoding issue. it means the radio is capable of display chinese text, just the chirp app doesn't support it, and will remove any chinese characters it detects. in the mode setting there's no AM option, so airband channels can't properly receive, unless i reprogram them manually as AM. but there are some cool things with the ruyage uv58plus. the fact that i can see the channel name and frequency and tone/digital code all at the same time is really useful, even in dual band mode. i like how the frequency color changes from white to blue when receiving, and to red when transmitting. i'm going to try running the radtel RT-890 (same model as the ruyage) programming app off of a PC to see if i can program it to display chinese characters.
for dinner we had more hot pot, but only the broth (which is so oily you can't eat it) and some stray floating tofu or meatball or cabbage. my mother made a water spinach stirfry and a tofu hot pepper stirfry. i finally left by 8pm.
back at home, my upstairs neighbors had oiled the steps after all, and put tape on the entrance so we wouldn't accidentally walk on it. 
i came in through the rear entrance, and noticed the new bush they'd planted. would've been nice if they consulted me about it, it'd a shame if somebody didn't water it all summerlong and the bush were to die a premature death is all i'm saying.