i let hailey outside for one final bathroom break last night. when she didn't return even after i called her, i went outside in the cold in my underwear to look for her. trying to find a black dog in the night is not an easy task; i turned on the backyard floodlight to help my search. she was hiding behind the bamboo groves. i couldn't reach her, all i could do was shake the bamboo stalks like bars in a cage to get her to come out. suddenly i felt the bamboos crashing like there was something heavy up above and then a loud fluttering sound overhead. what did i spook? maybe a large sleeping bird.

hailey woke me up at 6:00. i let her out again to go use the bathroom. i was afraid she wanted breakfast but when i crawled back into bed she quietly curled up in a ball on the other end. later she left to go sleep on the sofa, and maybe better to welcome my sister when she comes to pick her up. at 9:00 hailey came by to wake me up again. this time i knew she was hungry so i got up and scooped out 3 cups of dog kibbles added with some water. i video chatted with sunmeng briefly, about to go to bed in china.

i called my 2nd aunt to ask her about the ice cream freezer. she said ice had already formed on the inside, which meant it was cold enough (perhaps too cold?). however, we were both looking at the weather. ice cream is one of those seasonal food items. when the weather is hot, it sells, but when the weather is cold, it doesn't. our stretch of unseasonably warm weather this week (normally 50's, but we had 60-70's days) have disappointed customers coming into the cafe to find out we don't have any ice cream. this weekend looks to be another 60-70's stretch, but it's the weather next week that has us concerned, since it looks rainy and in the 50's, typical early spring weather. so we decided not to order any ice cream, since it'd only sell for this weekend, and then just for the rest of the week.

my sister didn't arrive until almost 11:00. once she took hailey, i packed up my things and left. i stopped by the watertown home depot to pick up a bag of manure ($5.77) and a new spray nozzle ($8.97). the weather was a bit raw, with an overcast sky and a cold drizzle. i returned to cambridge via greenough boulevard, between the cambridge cemetery and the charles river (another way would've been via coolidge avenue). i stopped by the community garden to drop off the bag of manure. there was no easy parking spots so i temporarily hazard-parked in front of a hydrant to drop off the bag before going home. i didn't eat lunch until around 12:30, a kielbasa sauerkraut english muffin sandwich with a pickle and a glass of orange juice.

i answered a call on my father's cellphone. a young woman (sun) was calling to find an apartment, the same girl who lived at my place last summer while i was still in china. the same girl who despite warnings not to do any cooking, cooked the crap out of my kitchen so that it smelled of oil long after she was gone? the same girl who left long strands of hair everywhere and even now i still find traces of her floating around? she called hoping that my apartment was still available, not realizing i (the homeowner) would be the person on the other end of the line. if she wanted a short stay i might've allowed it (make some vacation money), but she wanted an apartment from june to indefinitely. i told her about the vacant room at my grand uncle's place, but she wanted an apartment close to the subway, "like your apartment." good luck finding an affordable place for one person close to the T!

in the afternoon i returned to the garden once the rain had stopped, to mix in the bag of manure into my plot. i borrowed a digging spade and a weeding claw from the tool closet. i only worked about 2/3 of the garden, since the other side had some perennials and i didn't want to accidentally uproot anything until it had some time to emerge. i wore a pair of disposable vinyl gloves which had already ripped at the fingertips by the time i was finished. the city hadn't turned on the water yet, so i washed my hands in the pool of rainwater that'd accumulated on the trash can lids.

while i was at the garden, i also took a survey of what's growing.

i went out once more to star market to grab a box of strawberries and some klondike bars. the weather looked miserable, but no additional rain fell the rest of the day, and by day's end there was even some peeking of the sun.

in the evening i did a thorough watering of all the plants in my grow closet. the pots in the back are the hardest to reach. the lupines and some delphiniums are getting leggy, which means not enough light. i'll have to see if they're hardy enough to begin transplanting outdoors because soon they'll overgrow the ceiling level of the lights.

eggplants are weird: their leaves look wrinkled, like they're not getting enough water, but i think that's just the way they typically look. they seem to do well growing indoors, not getting leggy like some plants.

for dinner i made 2 chicken salad sandwich. later in the evening i had an urgent bathroom situation, but it wasn't too bad. it does make me think that the chicken might've gone bad. unfortunately there's still another serving of chicken, reserved for tomorrow night.

it'd only been tuesday night since i upgraded to cyanogenmod 12S, and one thing i noticed today is the photos are now exactly 4x3. in the past, photos taken with the oneplus one were a few pixels shorter, so when i resized them the dimensions were a little weird, which sort of bothered me. but now i see that the problem has finally been fixed.