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i went to belmont a little early today so i could make omelettes for my mother. i packed my leftover cubed ham, gorgonzola cheese, and half & half. i wasn't very familiar with the pan and how hot the stove was so the first omelette was slightly burnt (my mother's), the second was the best (after my mother cleaned the pan), and the third was cooked in brown burnt butter so it looked the dirtiest. my parents also didn't have sriracha sauce and that's like the secret ingredient to make an omelette really pop (although when we were nearly finished eating i found some sriracha in the back of the fridge).

i was surprised we got so much rain late last night. but that was a gift, because it meant we could aerate the lawn (which should only be done when the soil is wet) and then reseed and fertilize. unfortunately the manual core lawn aerator tool we have kept on clogging. i tried dousing it with some WD40 lubrication, which worked for a minute before the holes got plugged up again. finally we just gave it, figured the dethatching we didn't yesterday was enough.

we overseeded the lawn with the scotts drop spreader. that thing is old, and the metal holes at the bottom have corroded and gotten bigger than their specified size. for overseeding, the instruction said to set the drop spreader at 10 1/2, but we reduced that by half to 5. even then, it seemed to go through the grass seeds at a pretty good clip, and we ended up using about half the 15 lbs. bag of scotts sun & shade mix grass seed we bought from costco last monday.

once the seeds were in place, we fertilized with scotts lawn food. the instruction on the bag said to set the spread at 6 1/2, so we put it at 3. that turned out to be too little, but after we walked the entire lawn, we still had a lot of fertilizer left over. the fertilize also was very fine granules, that even with the spreader closed, fertilizer would still leak out. eventually i increased the holes to 4 1/2 to give it a proper coverage, but i still had some lawn food left over.

my father watered the front lawn but we didn't water the backyard because it was too sunny. we'll water it tomorrow morning when the weather's cooler. the key now is to key the lawn wet for a week to germinate the grass seeds. we're due for some rain thursday-friday, so we need to water until then.

we also cleaned out the basement growroom, in preparation for the eventual move of all our currently outdoor houseplants. we're thinking of moving the wooden plant stand into the basement. we threw away all the cactus tentacles that we cut off back in the spring in order to move out the cactuses. the weird thing is even though they had no light exposure for the past 5-6 months, these cactus branches were still green and alive.

there were some blue beans on the dining table. at first i thought they were jelly beans, but when i looked again i realized they were actual beans. my father said my mother collected them. when i asked her where from, she said, "the place where all the butterflies." the watertown community garden? she secretly picked a few pods last weekend and only now found them in her purse. these blue beans might be nonna agnes' blue beans. as for the other seed pods with the splotching shells, they might be dragon tongue beans. we might try growing some of these blue beans next season. they're Phaseolus vulgaris so they shouldn't cross-pollinate with the long beans (Vigna unguiculata) or hyacinth beans (Lablab purpurea).

my mother asked me to check the webcam videos to see who rang their doorbell last night at 10:30pm. my parents heard giggling and thought maybe it was some girls, but when i scrubbed the video and saw what happened, it was half a dozen adolescent boys running around the street. i got a pretty good look at the culprit, a boy wearing a vineyard vines t-shirt (distinctive whale logo), it wouldn't be hard to track him down if he lived in the neighborhood. this was a wyze cam so the quality isn't that great; the next time a eufy 2k goes on sale on amazon, i'll buy another one for the front door.

my sister dropped off hailey at my parents' place before noontime and then came to pick her up in the afternoon.

after dinner i returned to belmont. there was a patriots-jets game in the early afternoon that i missed because i was in the backyard working on the lawn. i caught the final few minutes, happy to see new england with a win. after a shower, i watched sunday night football between the chiefs and the ravens. i didn't think it was worth watching until i remembered who the two quarterbacks were, two of the most dynamic QB's in the NFL. i watched the end of it after the emmy's award ceremony got a little boring. it turned out to be an exciting game, baltimore came from behind to win it.