my father called this morning, said he had to go to the cafe to defrost some charsiu pork, and said he could come by and pick me up because it was so cold. honestly, i didn't think it was that bad - temperature in the lower 30's - but the bitter winds made it feel like the teens. i'd originally planned on going to market basket and get some cafe supplies, so when my father came by around 11am, we went to the supermarket first before dropping them off at the cafe.

we arrived in belmont before noontime. my father toasted some garlic bread and we ate that along with the leftover barbecued drumsticks. the 100A daly BMS also arrived this morning, now the only thing that's missing are the 8 100A 3.2V LiFePo4 batteries, still on their way from china courtesy of aliexpress.

after lunch my father and i were outside dethatching the lawn, in preparation for some spring lawn fertilizing. it was surprisingly cold, but i still managed to warm up enough from all the raking that i took off my jacket. there was a helicopter annoyingly circling the sky above us. i looked it up on the flightradar24 app, turned out it was a state police doing training, circling the greater boston area. it seemed to be flying pretty low, but flightradar24 told me it was still up 3700ft (far higher than i can fly my drone).

once we finished dethatching, i brought out the crab grass preventer and fertilizer. apparently the best time to apply is before the 3-4th mowing; we haven't even had our first mow of the season, so we decided to wait until the grass had a chance to grow a bit before sprinkling the preventer/fertilizer. not sure how we ended up applying so early (end of march) last year, we probably didn't even mow yet.

we were back inside by 1:20pm and didn't go out again.

i was busy in the basement, treating the plants for mealybugs. it's mostly the left corner jasmine and the gardenia. i think they're starting to become more and more not because i haven't been vigilante with my spraying all winter long, but because the systemic pesticide granules i added to the soil back in late autumn have finally started to lose their potency. i figured in a few more weeks it might be warm enough for the jasmines to be moved outside for the season, so i just need to stick it out until then. the corner jasmine has a serious mealybug infestation though, even so that after i touch treated affected areas with alcohol-soaked q-tips, i ended up taking out the whole plant and spraying it down with neem oil in a cardboard box, the way i used to treat these plants last season. the gardenia also has mealybugs, all at the tender tips; they were easier to treat with alcoholic q-tips. i didn't bother doing a soil drench as all the soil still seemed moist. i did water the orchids though with some orchid fertilized water. one of the smaller potted orchids have bloomed (my father was in the basement yesterday, said it hadn't opened up yet).

for dinner my father made some beef shank noodle soup with the flavored beef broth (reminded me of vietnamese pho) he'd been stewing all weekend long. afterwards he gave me a ride back to cambridge.

my daikon radish seeds arrived, i'll need to go back to belmont this week so i can plant them in the raised beds. while i'm at it, i should also plant some cilantro seeds. cilantro seem like a cold weather plant, when it gets too hot they have a tendency to bolt.

i tweaked the cafe website, my sister doesn't like the bubble title headings, so i turned them into lines with centered text. i was researching what type of code i could pilfer but turns out i already had the coding within the CSS, just that it wasn't live yet.

the last thing i did tonight was to sew the button back on to one of my pairs of flannel pants. i did it once before with a pair of shorts that'd lost a button. it's not too hard, but i did have to consult an online video because i'd forgotten how to do it. it wasn't the best sewing job, but it should hold the button in place for a while.