while my father was remaking a post for our hops bines, i refilled that rabbit burrow with leftover potting soil before sprinkling some new grass seeds. i'm not sure if the grass will germinate, because i applied crabgrass preventer, which works by preventing all grass seeds from sprouting. but because it's newly added soil, i'm hoping this will be the exception.
my father hammered a 5ft length of metal piping into the ground for the hops pole. unlike last season when we kept all the bull shoots, i cut them off this year. i sprinkled the area with slow-release fertilizer pellets before refilling the hole with leftover potting soil.
while inspecting the bamboos, i noticed new shoots emerging next to the grape vines. this meant i'd have to dig out the underground rhizomes. it's tough and dirty work, but it's also kind of fulfilling at the same time, when you manage to dig up a length of underground bamboo shoots. i was trying to lift out the bamboo clumps with a spade but managed to crack the handle. a garden fork worked better, but i managed to bend some of the tines. i still need to dig a moat around the bamboos to keep them from escaping, but i didn't have enough time today. i'll do it next weekend.
my mother kept calling us to come in to eat but we were too busy to pay her any attention. she brought out a bag of frozen buffalo wings for my father to grill. while they were on the barbecue, my father set up our on-demand pump for the rain barrels. all the rain barrels were filled to capacity. but he connected the pump so it was pulling water from a 20 gallon barrel i'd used to store some excess rain water when i had to empty two of the rain barrels to recaulk them last weekend.
the wings were finally done, we went inside to eat around 2:30pm. my father showed me the quansheng radios had arrived (more on that later). i also had time to order some heating oil ($3.390/gallon, my parents ordered 150 gallons). my mother gave my father a haircut, and said she could give me one too, but i said i wasn't in any hurry, and she could do it when she got back from her vacation. in the meantime, i pushed out all the equipment in the garage to get to the gas lawnmower. i added some gasoline to the tank and mowed the front and back lawn on mulch setting.
afterwards my father came out to help me get my motorcycle out of storage. i decided to keep it in the garage for the time being, but turn it around so i could ride off with it if i wanted to. we also had some old garden equipment we didn't want anymore, including a manual grass trimmer and an old scotts drop spreader that'd rusted up on the inside. my father said he was going to secretly throw them away in the neighbor's dumpster (they're doing a major renovation project).
we thought about planting the seedlings, but with night time temperature dropping into the 40's all this week, i decided to hold off on transplanting until next week, when the night time temperature will only be in the 50's. instead my father disassembled the bamboo squash scaffolding. while he was doing that, i brought out all the potted jasmines and gardenia and orchids from the basement so i could spray them again outside with an alcohol solution. i don't know if the spray last week worked or not, because all the plants (other than the gardenia and orchids) had mealybugs. at this point i've sort of given up on trying to control them. i plan on moving them all out next week, and will let nature take of them, weather and natural predators being the two things that control mealybugs.
after i finished spraying, i moved all the plants back into the basement before watering them. most of them still had moist soil, i only watered the ones that seemed a little dry. i also watered the pileas.
i finally finished by 6pm, but there's still more to do. like digging the bamboo moat, or spraying the grapevines with fungicide. and when the weather finally warms up next week, plant all the seedlings.
with so much gardening going on, i wasn't able to enjoy the otherwise big news of the day, which was our quansheng UV-K5 handheld radios finally arriving. we ordered them back on march 29th, with a 12 day on-time delivery guarantee. we ended up waiting over a month. the quansheng is longer than the baofeng, but still feels good in the hand. it's currently not compatible with chirp, but the company tweeted back in early april that they're currently working to to get the radio ready for chirp. in the meantime it does have it's own programming software, but it's PC-only. i haven't used it too much yet, but one feature i really like is dual channel independence: one channel can be in VFO mode, while the other channel can be in memory mode. on the baofeng it's one or the other. one of the first things i did was to put it on an airband frequency; was able to receive logan approach flight traffic chatter.
for dinner my mother made drunken chicken. the sauce was the star of the show however. she used my homemade chili oil sauce, combined with chopped garlic and soy sauce. we ate so much sauce she had to go back into the kitchen and mix some more.
after dinner i helped my parents with some device maintenance work. i replaced the cracked glass screen protector on my father's asus tablet. i added a 256GB memory card to my mother's samsung S9+ phone so she could store all her travel photos, download netflix shows, and listen to mp3 files. i bought some screen protectors for her last night that arrived today. at first she didn't want one, but i said it'd prevent scratches on her phone screen. i bought a 3-pack of soft TPU film protectors: since they're not glass, they only really protect the screen from getting scratches, but not prevent shatter damage in case of a drop. it had a weird application process, and the first time i did it, i got bubbles all over the screen that i couldn't get rid of. i rewatched the how-to video and followed the steps exactly for the second application. the film went on perfectly, not a single bubble, and so thin you almost don't know it's there.
i finally left by 8:30pm, the 76ers-celtics game was already at halftime. i didn't get home until 8:45pm, parked myself on the couch and watched the rest of the game. celtics lost but i don't feel too bad (even though philly didn't have joel embiid tonight, so it was boston's best chance to get a relatively easy win), 76ers played much better tonight. not that the celtics were bad, but they seemed like they were phoning it in, lacked intensity. like with 2 minutes to go, jaylen brown decided to try and run out of the clock even though boston was only up 4 points. that turned out to be a mistake, as james harden shot a 3-pointer with just 8 seconds to go to put them up 2 points. a ballsy move, basically sealed the game after that. harden had 45 points tonight, matched his playoff record. game 2 on wednesday is a must-win for boston, otherwise they'll be down an 0-2 hole. will embiid be back?
today is may day, which is a vacation long weekend in china. all of the chinese wechat friends were posting vacation photos. just for kicks, i went through the weblog archive to see what i've been doing on may day past. i went back as far as 10 years, and saw a posting talking about my moonshine project. making distilled alcohol has always been on my to-do list. i even gathered most of the equipment other than the copper worm, but somehow never got around to making it (the fact that i'd be in china a few months later might've had something to do with it). moonshine technology since then have vastly improved. you can now buy a 10 gallon still for less than $100, no need to destroy a perfectly good stock pot. plus there are even more online instructions on how to make moonshine. the only thing i'd still be missing is the mash ingredient. people typically use cheap animal feed, but it's hard to come buy living in the city, and ordering it online incurs delivery fees.