since it was such a nice day, afterwards we spent some time pruning the backyard maple. end of winter is the best time to prune, while the buds are still dormant. the tree itself won't win any awards for best pruned, and large section are diseased and rotting, but it refuses to die and continues to thrive, giving us ample opportunities to practice our pruning techniques with refreshed hardwood. fast vertically growing suckers are always a target for elimination, but the pressing need this season is to cut away the edge of the canopy to allow more sunlight to get to our raised beds. i worked in my t-shirt without gloves, at times dangerously close to the miniature chainsaw head of the electric pole saw. i ended up with scratches all over my hands and forearms from the many branches, like i was in a knife fight. my father seemed remarkably limber for someone who could barely walk on saturday, but i did most of the ladder climbing and heavy lifting.
our next door neighbor saw us working in the backyard and came to ask us more about our solar panels. last time was the wife, this time it was the husband. we gave him as much info as possible, it seems like he'd already done some of his homework, even contacted a few companies (like sun bug, though they had the most expensive price at $5/W).
afterwards we cut the pruned branches into smaller more manageable pieces and threw them away in our garden refuse bins. it's actually early for yard work, traditionally the first spring yard waste pickup isn't until the start of april; maybe they might change that since it's been so warm recently and people have gotten a headstart on their gardening schedule. i also moved all the houseplants back into our grow room.
i didn't have lunch until almost 4pm, by then it was nearly dinner. my father had already prepared some rice porridge for me earlier, just needed to be reheated, and i also had some cold ribs with some blue ribbon sweet barbecue sauce. my father called me mother to let her know we'd be having pizza tonight, but she said she was going to swing by burger king after work and get us some burgers instead.
another day we didn't make 40kWh, despite the clear sky and sunny conditions. maybe there was a tiny bit of clouds, but i like to think the warmer weather cut into our solar efficiency.
my mother didn't get home until almost 6:30pm, stuck in traffic picking up our dinner. burger king shortchanged our order, gave us one less cheese burger.
later my father was playing with his moto G7 phone and discovered emojis and animated gifs (for texting).
when i got back home kevin was still cooking in the kitchen (whatever it was seemed slightly burnt), a load of laundry spinning in the washer. even though the area around the toilet was dry, the grout between the tiles were urine-soaked, and i had to wipe the floor down with bleach again more i could use the bathroom and take a shower. i wasn't in the mood to confront kevin about his lack of bathroom etiquette (again), figured that was a discussion for some other time.
i spent the rest of the evening catching up on the 2 new episodes of better call saul and backing up my oneplus one. even though i planned on giving the phone to my mother, i wanted to make a full backup so that in the event she doesn't want the phone anymore (maybe finally upgrading her iphone 5s), 
i can restore the phone to the way it was before. after manually copying the photos and music and books (and then erasing them off of the phone so they won't be included in the backup), i tried to do a remote backup from the phone directly to my computer. it did something, but the file size was suspiciously small (4GB when i was trying to backup nearly 20GB worth of data). just to be safe, i made another backup the manual way, by launching into the TWRP recovery partition and backing up that way. it took nearly 20 minutes, after which i then copied over the backup out my computer, which took some more time.
once that was done the rest of easy: i went into the settings and factory reset the phone. it was a little scary because the first time the phone rebooted, it seemed to be stuck in the boot animation. i rebooted the phone again, this time it managed to open to the homescreen. i did a fresh setup, only thing i did was to login with my mother's google credentials. i didn't do any migration, wanted to set up the phone as new to avoid any bloatware.
most of the apps i easily downloaded from the play store, with the exception of netflix, which i had to search online for the apk (v6.26.1) because netflix won't install on any phone with an unlocked bootloader or rooted device. i also side loaded some icon packs. i started off with the default trebuchet launcher but there was hardly any customization options so i quickly switched to the nova launcher. one thing i always wanted to do was to have a staggered icon layout instead of a simple grid. you lose a few icon places in the process, but i think it looks cooler, definitely not something you can do on an iphone or even with a regular android launcher.
originally i just had a single homescreen, but decided to have a secondary homescreen that had a netflix widget (with recently watched shows) and a transparent weather widget. i also sideloaded the google discovery integration so you can swipe right for the latest google curated stories. finally i set the localization language to taiwanese chinese. later i had the bright idea of using an icon pack that mirrored iphone icons, so this phone would be an android-ios hybrid.