i noticed it last night: my long beans and shikou eggplants have all sprouted. i was particularly surprised by the shikou, these were old seeds, i didn't expect them to all germinate. there's just enough room to fit the 3 eggplants in the grow closet but the long beans have to make do with the limited sunlight from the rear kitchen door.

my arm had stopped hurting enough last night that i was able to sleep on it. this morning the pain was even less. this wasn't the case for my sister however: i heard she has covid arm, a large itchy welt where she got her injection. i read this occasionally happens with the moderna vaccine, but will go away on its own eventually.

in the early afternoon i went to market basket to pick up a few things. i seem to love going to the supermarket. i go when i have things to buy, i go when i have nothing to buy. when i came back i also went to star market to buy some mandarin oranges. they have them in $5 boxes but i had to buy 5 eligible items in order to get that price. i ended up getting 2 boxes of oranges, 2 bags of salad, and an ice tea.

this being the last day of march, i tried to retroactively update blog postings for this month, but i didn't make much headway. the older a posting gets, the harder it is to update it. i only had a matcha latte for lunch so when i got a bit hungry i had some water crackers with roquefort cheese.

i finally finished watching the empty man. i'd been watching it in segments for the past few days because it was too scary to watch in a single sitting. it's surprisingly well-made, with high productive value. the movie confused me at first because it starts off in bhutan, where a group of hikers encounter some ancient evil. i kept checking to see if i was watching the right movie. only after 20 minutes do we get to the actual story of the film. it reminded me of the ring, the same urban legend contagious horror, how once activated, the evil is unrelenting in its pursuit. there are also elements of cosmic horror, an evil so ancient it transcends time, space, even reality. i was also reminded of the phantasm series: a lot of different suspenseful elements combined together, the plot almost seems irrelevant, just a vehicle to serve up various scenes of terror. there was even some giallo thrown in for good measure, a woman is murdered by a scissor-wielding intruder. the ending was so-so, but like i said, it's not so much about the destination, but rather the journey.

march 2021 has been great solar-wise. it didn't rain much which meant a lot of sunshine and a lot of production. it's the most productive march of all times. it's so productive that we made more this month alone than january and february 2021 combined. it's also the 8th most productive month of all times, closely matching what we would normally produce during the summer, which is all the more remarkable considering it's still just winter-spring with its shorter day lengths.

when my parents returned home i watched through the backyard webcams my father setting up the rain barrels. he told me this morning he already activated the ones in front of the house; tonight he assembled the ones in the back. this is all in anticipation of the rainstorm that's supposed to arrive later tonight, dumping an inch of rain, enough to easily fill all our barrels.

i had 2 burgers for dinner, this time with a bowl of salad. for dessert a couple of mandarin oranges. i watched the mavericks-celtics game, boston ended up losing again, but kept it close, with a chance to win. by late evening i started hearing the sounds of the rain beating against the side of the house.