i got to the cafe a little late this morning as i first went to star market to get some sweet potatoes on sale before heading to harvard vanguard to pick up a prescription for my father. temperature was in the 50's and i heard it might be in the 60's later, so i just wore a hooded sweatshirt.

we filtered out the wine from one of the 1-quart mason jar. this one was the properly cooked sona masoori combined with crushed jiuniang yeast powder and makgeolli lees from march 20th. the lees made it ferment something fierce, as it started bubbling almost immediately. the fermented rice had a nice smell, fruity, alcohol. tastewise it was very dry, a bitterness from the alcohol, no sweetness, no sourness. we poured the content into a nut milk bag and squeezed out the liquid. it tasted like very dry champagne. we added a few spoonful of sugar to make it more palatable, but it was missing that sour component characteristic of good fermented rice wine. drinkable yes, but not as good as makgeolli, or the jiuniang wine we collected last week.

there were barely an customers around lunchtime, so we had our own lunch. i had some leftover lamb pilaf my mother made over the weekend. business picked up starting around 1pm, and we were mildly busy until around 3pm. we missed making our daily average, but that's not including the 3 ubereats delivery orders we got earlier in the day. we closed out march making almost the same amount we made last march 2025.

reliable fence contacted me today with a tentative installation time: the week that my parents will be on vacation. that's actually perfect time, since i won't be working that week, so i can supervise the fence work. i also called them to make an appointment for them to come and check out my alley fencegate. they're so busy, the earliest they can schedule someone to come out won't be until the end of april. after describing the project, the woman i spoke with said i could send them a few photos and they can give me an estimate based on that.

i went to trader joe's to pick up a few things for the cafe. i stopped briefly at whole foods looking for bean sprouts but they didn't have any today. i bought a bag of herbs & spices popcorn that's surprisingly addictive, must be the yeast extract they added.

close to closing time, my mother and i went to the upstairs apartment to take away several bags of beddings and towels. esmei was there, happily greeting us when typically she's more aloof when we meet her around the cafe. i think she rarely gets visitors, so gets excited when people come over. my mother accidentally hit her head on the corner of a cupboard door, so we quickly went back to the cafe.

my parents stayed to eat some steamed red fish while i went home.

final day of march and i was determined to plant some garden seedlings. but first i had to melt draining holes in all my 16 oz. plastic cups. i bought a bunch a few days ago from the dollar store, but didn't realize i had a bunch already from last season. it took me a little over 20 minutes to make all the holes. it would've been faster, but some cups got stuck together when the melted plastic fused together and i had to use a knife to surgically separate them. i got a chance to check out the stevia seeds. they're so tiny, it'd be easy to mistake them for plant chaff. so small in fact the static electricity in the plastic bag them came it made them stick to the inside and hard to get out.

for dinner i cooked up the ichiran ramen my parents brought back from japan. the secret is the broth packet full of savory flavors. i didn't have any scallions but added an egg and some pickled radishes. it was pretty good, i drank the entire broth, something i wouldn't normally do with instant noodles.

i played an hour of cyberpunk, until 10pm. in went in search of easter eggs. i went to the columbarium and found evelyn parker and alex xenakis' niches. i went to the top of the advocet hotel and saw the roy batty easter egg. i got a call from nele springer to meet her back in dogtown. that ended up being a biotechnica trap as i was ambushed by a bunch of mercenaries. i was trying to kill them with skippy but switched to erebus when things got serious.

i wasn't going to plant anything until tomorrow, but i was struck with some sudden gardening inspiration and went to the kitchen to plant something at least. i started with the stevia seeds, planted in starter cells. the seeds were so tiny, i had to use a tweezer to gently place a seed into each cell. even the simple act of watering them might risk washing them away, so i had to be extra careful. i then filled two trays with cups - 12 each. to each cup i added some potting soil before watering them from the bottom in the sink. i then planted the following: 4 goat horn hot pepper, 4 long thin cayenne peppers, 4 serrano peppers, 4 corkscrew peppers, 4 fourth of july hybrid tomatoes, and 4 chinese long eggplants. i actually planted 2 seeds per container, as an insurance, but if they all germinate, i might end up with double the seedlings (not a bad problem to have). i didn't finish until almost midnight.

i stopped by the cafe in the late morning to defrost some foods we'll need for tomorrow. i also checked on the progress of our makgeolli. it now has the classic 3-layer separation: floating rice upper layer, liquid middle layer, and dissolved rice bottom layer.

i made it to belmont before noontime. my mother made hunter sausage & egg sandwiches for lunch. as soon as i finished eating, my father and i were out in the backyard. today was slightly overcast, with temperature in the upper 60's. warm enough to work in a t-shirt. the warm temperature seemed to be cooking the chicken manure in the raised beds and it smelled something fierce.

we were outside cutting down our pussy willow tree. it's one of the original trees that came with the house when my parents bought it back in 1984. actually, the original tree probably died a while back, but a sucker sprouted in its place, and over time became a full grown tree. the problem is the tree sits right on our property line, and overhangs into the neighbor's backyard. the pussy willow catkins are too high up to collect, and most importantly, our new fence installation would run through the tree. we've been meaning to cut it down for a while so this was the perfect opportunity.

earlier my father had already dug around the trunk so there'd be enough space for our corded 14" electric chainsaw to cut horizontally across the trunk. the trunk itself isn't too big, around 6 inches, but the root flare near the base of the tree expands outwards and would need to but cleared out as well. while we worked on the tree, my mother went out for a walk by herself. she came back with an assortment of pinecones.

we started by removing branches, making it easier to eventually cut down the trunk. i climbed a platform ladder and stood on a stack of collapsible ladders our backyard neighbors had pilled behind the fence on their side of the property line. using a combination of pruning bypass lopper and chainsaw, we managed to take apart the tree branch by branch. a few times we even resorted to a pruning saw, when the chainsaw couldn't reach, and it needed more cutting power than a lopper could provide. eventually all that was left was a tall naked trunk with branches. we cut it down in segments until we finally reached the bottom. counting the growth rings indicated the tree itself wasn't too old just 15-20 years. there was some rot on the inside, so eventually the tree was just going to topple on its own if we didn't do anything.

it took us 1-1/2 hours to cut down the tree. it'd take us another 1-1/2 hours to cut the stump so it was flush with the ground. my father formulated the strategy where we'd cut the stump into squares, then using a heavy mallet to knock the pieces off. the part of the tree buried underground was a gnarly piece of wood about 1-1/2 feet long tangled in roots. it was also sitting on the original tree, which had disintegrated but was still intact and quite solid. fortunately we just needed to cut the stump flush to the ground, we didn't need to uproot the entire root section of the tree. eventually over time we managed to clear away most of the stump. we shoveled the dirt back into the hole, you couldn't even tell there was a tree there before.

with the willow tree gone, that area of the yard is going to be very sunny this season. it used to be quite shady, and that's where we had our orchids and pileas that prefer dabbled sunlight. we'll need to find a new place for them now. we didn't have time to collect any of the pussy willow catkins, i'll do that wednesday when i come back to do some more yardwork.

the other project we'd planned was to piece together a replacement raised bed. by that point it was already 3:30pm and we'd been working on tree for a good solid 3 hours, so we decided to call it a day. we cleaned up, put away the tools. i moved out all the osmanthus cuttings from the sunroom as well as the lemon verbena. we thought it died because it'd lost all its leaves, but my father pointed out there new leaves were developing from the hardwood.

i went down to the basement to water the plants in the grow room. last week i barely watered, just the orchids and pennyworts. this week i watered everything, and added 1 teaspoon of gnatrol powder to 5 gallons of water as a preventative (normally i use 3 tsp per 5 gallons). the yellow sticky traps don't seem to be capturing anymore new gnats which is a good sign, but alas, i did see one or two more gnats flying around, so we are still not 100% rid of them.

while my parents were busy making dinner (my father red roasted a fish while my mother mad a spicy stirfry with salted pork), i went back outside with some silicone and recaulked all the spigots on the rain barrels. not all of them needed it: the red barrels in the front yard used brass bulkhead fittings that are watertight and leakfree. but all other barrels got a new caulk sealing.

digsafe came by our place today, courtesy of reliable fence. we have no underground pipes or cables in our backyard, but they did mark up the sidewalk where the water main comes into the house. it looked pretty awful, this neon glue graffiti, but i read the paint they use is water soluble and disappeared after a few weeks to a few months.

after dinner i returned home via ebike. as much as i enjoy the speed of the ebike, it still can't compare to the speed of a motorcycle. i felt that tonight, when a car easily overtook me while i pedaled in my bike lane, despite going pretty fast for a bike. if i was on a motorcycle this would never happen. however, with gas prices so high right now ($4/gallon), an ebike is not a bad alternative.

i took a shower when i got home, then spent 5 minutes moisturizing with the aveeno eczema therapy cream. my skin has been pretty good for a while ever since i started using the aveeno, to the point where i didn't bother anymore, though i was cured of my dry skin. but the past few days my skin has started to hurt from the dry cracking and now it's started to itch. last night i had to moisturize before bed, felt a little sticky under the covers.

there was a celtics-hawks game tonight. boston was without jayson tatum. the game was tightly matched for the first half, multiple lead chances, no team leading more than 6 points. but the hawks broke it open in the second half, and pushed it to a 20 point lead midway in the 4th quarter. celtics didn't quit though, and got close to within single digits with just minutes left in the game. but they couldn't overcome the deficit, hawks win 102-112. at least detroit lost as well tonight, against the thunder, also a close game. i was kind of rooting for the pistons, even though had they won that would widen their lead in the eastern conference standings against the celtics. as of now boston is still just 4 games behind detroit.

instead of planting my seeds, or making a batch of jiuniang, or backing up my photos, i went back to cyberpunk for just a few hours. i'm hoping there are some hidden gigs i hadn't finished yet. like the skippy AI-gun gig. i need to kill 100 people with that gun before it'll give me a mission to return it to its rightful owner. i also explored dog town, climbed the cargo container city (it must have a name), felt a little anxious a few times being up so high. i went back to kerry eurodyne's mansion up in the hills when it looked like on the map it was another one of my apartments. apparently i can sleep there, even though it's not an official apartment. kerry was there, i chatted with him for a little bit.

i finished watching send help last night before bed. when i first learned that sam raimi was directly, i knew it was something i wanted to watch. though billed as a thriller, the movie still shows strong horror pedigree. it stars rachel mcadams and dylan o'brien as two coworkers stranded on a deserted island. this film gives me a lot of similar drag me to hell vibe, flawed characters faced with difficult moral choices which often delves into horror. i hope raimi continues to make these R-rated horrors, they're instant genre classics.

my parents went to costco on an early morning supply run. i seemed to have forgotten because around 11am i stopped by the cafe to put stuff away, not realizing my parents had already been there. so i continued to belmont on my ebike. temperature was in the 50's but still a bit chilly.

my mother made homemade wonton soup for lunch. after we finished eating, my parents and i went out for a walk. my mother has been walking more the past few weeks, since the weather had improved, but also to prime herself for walking when they go on their turkish vacation. she forced my father to walk to, to build up some endurance.

we walked down to mt.auburn street in watertown where we visited arax market. my mother got some carambola, a yogurt drink, and an assortment of other foods. sevan baker and massis bakery are both closed on sundays, but roksana market was still open. we didn't want to go and leave empty handed, so i got a bottle of turkish fresa fresher sparkling apple flavored drink ($3). it tasted very similar to taiwanese apple sidra soda.

the whole trip took 1-1/2 hours. when we got back home, we also tried some persian lavashak, in various flavors: sour cherry, plum, apple, pomegranate, and apricot. they tasted pretty good - like bite-size fruit rollups - and most importantly, all natural ingredients.

later my father and i drove to the watertown home depot. we were looking for 2x10-8ft pressure treated lumber to build another replacement raised bed ($16.28 a plank), but they were all sold out. we still have enough wood back at home to make one raised bed, so it was urgent that we get more. we did get a 4x4-8ft post that we'll cut up to make the corners of our raised beds. i got a replacement accordion gutter downspout, and we got a combo outlet switch and a metal cover plate, as well as two shelving brackets. home depot was surprising empty for a sunday. maybe it's still too early for people to be working on their home improvement projects. the outdoor garden department is still mostly empty, outdoor spring plants haven't arrived yet (though there were plenty of indoor plants inside).

passing by the watertown mall, there seemed to be a gathering of car enthusiasts. they seemed to be ricer cars, and the fact that the owners were entirely asian seem to bear that out. most were economy cars, outfitted with spoilers, or personalized license plates.

by the time we got home it was already 4pm, too late to do any serious yard work, which we decided to save for tomorrow (when the weather will also be 10 degrees warmer).

we had a little bit of time to rest before my mother made xinjiang-inspired lamb stir fried rice. it was pretty good, some variety compared to what we normally eat. i finished first and drank some first batch makgeolli. after several weeks of fermentation, it had a slightly bitter flavor of high alcohol content. it was still sweet, which disguised how boozy it was. i felt like sleeping after a few sips.

i got home before dark, didn't even need lights. i replaced the gutter downspout before going inside. the previous one got crushed in the snow.

i caught the end of the celtics game against the hornets. other than the first half of the first quarter, the celtics dominated this game. boston was without jaylen brown and derrick white, but all they really needed was jayson tatum scored his first 30+ points game with 32. payton pritchard was no slouch either, with 28 points, many in the paint. celtics won 114-99. with just 8 more games left in the regular season, it seems doubtful boston will catch up to the no.1 pistons, despite detroit missing cade cunningham for the remaining season from a collapsed lung.

i finished the cyberpunk mission where i save songbird. it involved taking her to the space terminal where she had a ticket to escape to the moon. it culminated in a massive shootout against the station security as well as black ops from the NUSA there to recapture songbird. right before putting her onto the spaceship, reed shows us to take songbird away. i ended up dying about half a dozen times before i finally got the drop on reed and shot him dead. this time i stuck around to watch the ending credits for phantom liberty which reminded me of a 007 movie intro.

as much as i enjoy sleeping, as much as i need more of it, i still find myself waking up early, and have to force myself to sleep longer. i was up around 5am, just in time to hear my upstairs neighbors waking up and making noises. i woke up again at 7am, took a peek at the clock to see i needed 2 more hours of sleep to achieve a total of 8 hours.

it was cold in the house when i finally got out of bed at 9am. because i fiddled with the heating schedule last weekend, it messed up the temperature. i didn't bother fixing it since i was leaving soon anyway.

i went to walgreens to pick up a prescription before heading to market basket for some groceries. i was looking for white fish salad, they still don't have it. instead i got some smoked salmon spread. while paying for my food, the bagger boy got really angry with me when i pushed down some of the grocery items so they'd be easier for him to reach. "please don't touch, it's very rude," he exclaimed. i looked at the cashier and the woman behind me, does that make any sense?

i didn't have time to go home, i went straight to the cafe. i did stop to rummage through a box of discarded kitchenware on one of the side streets. so it begins! i picked up a mug, a qing-dynasty replica porcelain spoon, a glass bottle, and an 8oz. mason jar with lid.

my mother had walked to the cafe again, but my father got there ahead of her to deep fry a new batch of salt & pepper chicken. my mother said she was hungry so i started making some smoked salmon spread bagel sandwiches. i knew it wasn't going to end well because we soon started to get busy and i wasn't able to eat my sandwich until 2pm.

so we were busy today. not as busy as last saturday, and we didn't even make our daily average, but on a cold day, with another no king rally in boston, we'll take it. some drama: a woman left behind her very expensive APC purse. there was no contact info, but a chanel wallet with driver license and credit cards and cash. i told my sister to do a search for the woman's name and her home address, which brought up a phone number. she answered, grateful we called, after they've been searching for her lost purse all day. her husband came to pick it up soon afterwards.

then the bakery owner backed her car into the mercedes that belong to the assistant chef of the chinese restaurant. she called my sister immediately, told her what happened. there was barely any damage, just some very light scratches that could probably be buffed out. my sister said we wouldn't say anything unless the restaurant guy complained. sure enough, when i was outside, he asked if our security camera was working. this guy who has never spoken to me before much less said hello was now all buddy buddy with me because he wanted something. the only reason he knew about the accident was his car sent him a message that a collision event had occurred around noontime. i said i'd check, and then he came back before we closed to ask again. my mother told him the bakery owner said she did it, and that he should go talk with her tomorrow.

in the late afternoon an asian girl came in asking about the bakery, which had closed early since they were sold out. she spoke with my mother. she told her she talked to the owner about buying the place. she works in IT but her dream is to have her own bakery and cafe and have been saving up money to do so. the owner told her she was already in the process of selling the business, and offered the girl some advice, saying she should continue doing pop-ups for a few more years to gain experience. my mother was able to find out the asking price though, something the owner didn't even tell my sister: $130k.

after work i went home. my sister called me back, chewing me out for telling the restaurant worker what happened. it was barely a scratch, but now he's looking for money to fix something he probably wouldn't even have noticed if his car didn't have an alert system. i told my sister it wasn't my problem, and said she was going to call my mother and chew her out as well.

i went to star market to get some oranges. i also looked for some easter ham on sale but they didn't have any. after that i went to the dollar store to get some plastic cups for making pots. not only are there fewer cups in a package, but they cost $1.50 now.

coming back, i saw a woman standing on my doorstep. i thought maybe it was a solicitor trying to sell me something, but when i got close i saw it was my neighbor renee. she even called as my phone started ringing. i thought maybe she had news about hr noisy heat pump condenser. unfortunately it was for more selfish reasons: she was having iphone issue and uses me as her free beck and call IT support. she couldn't receive calls from her tax accountant (via a 1-800 number), but everyone else could phone in just fine. i'd never seen this issue before and couldn't fix the problem. the whole time she was talking to me, i was getting sprayed with spit. i wanted to bring up the heat pump noise but decided i didn't want to get bombarded with more spittle.

i checked out some boston no king rally photos. turnout wasn't as large as i'd anticipated. maybe the cold weather (30's) turned people away? i'm glad i didn't go. i went to the last rally which was enough for me. if there was a protest march though, i definitely would've gone, easier to take photos of that.

i delved back into cyberpunk, trying to finish the game where i help songbird and betray reed. knowing how the story goes gives me a chance to try different things. i bought an iconic weapon from herold lowe that i didn't have in the first playthrough: the NDI osprey power sniper rifle. it can be found naturally in alex's safe house but i missed it when i played through that mission.

for dinner - lacking any motivation to actually make something - i just heated up a bunch of pizza rolls instead. there was nothing good on television. i resorted to pluto.tv and discovered jack ryan: shadow recruit (2014) on one of the movie channels. i'd never seen the film before, mostly because it came out when i was working in chongqing, so it completely fell off my radar. i was surprised the movie was director by kenneth branagh, and he also played a russian bad guy, something he'd do again in tenet (2020). shadow recruit wasn't bad, although the russian plot to destroy america's economy was a little far-fetched. who knew that the US economy can be easily destroyed if americans simply elect a pedophile narcissist liar as president. it stars chris pine as jack ryan (the 4th actor to play this character), kevi costner, and keira knightley.

i had less than an hour to work before i needed to ride my ebike to belmont to meet up with the fence guy from reliable. i started a new batch of tea eggs. since it's been a week now, we tried the 5L jar of makgeolli sona masoori rice. it was sour, but also alcoholic, with barely any sweetness. we decided to let it ferment a bit longer. instead we filtered the 4L jar of properly cooked sona masoori rice with jiuniang yeast. we taste tested it first: not as sour, definitely alcoholic (though how much hard to say), some sweetness, but mostly sour and alcoholic. we poured the content into a nut milk bag and slowly filtered out the liquid. the idea was to add some sugar, which would balance out the taste. however around 9:30am i got a phone call. it was the fence, already at my parents' place. he came 30 minutes early. i told him to wait, and that i'd be there in 10 minutes. i stopped what i was doing and raced to belmont.

i met sean from reliable fence. i shook his hand, big and meaty. first thing he noticed was the license plate on the toyota parked in the driveway. it was an old massachusetts plate with green letters. the last time they issued those was 1987. we never thought about it, but it's actually an antique, something you rarely see these days. sean seemed very excited to see one in person. he told me to keep it as long as possible.

sean had already surveyed the backyard while he was waiting for me to show up. he brought up two issues without me having to point them out: the pussy willow tree in the path of the backyard property line, and the bamboo grove. i was impressed, since eddie from ideal didn't mention them until i brought them up. i asked if they'd put down cement. he said they didn't use to, but now it's standard practice. nowadays pressure treated posts are more environmentally friendly (copper-based treatment), unlike past treatments that used chemicals like arsenic. but due to the formula change, new pressure treated wood don't last as long as old ones. by adding cement, it contributes to the longevity of the posts. he told me how they do it, by pouring dry cement that hardens over time. he said for the post behind the bamboo, they'd need a special fence post since it'd need to be deeper into the ground. he said the replacement fence would be cedar stockade but the boards would be thinner, since they don't make them as wide as our old fence anymore. the pickets would also be more pointed, unlike our current fence, which got worn down over time.

sean told me he had 9 other places to visit today. he worked on the proposal in his truck while i returned to the cafe. by the time i got there, he'd already sent me the contract. price: $4580. so it seems like around $4000 is the going rate. mcdonough was the most expensive, at $4650, but not by too much. the cheapest was ideal at $4250. reliable was in the middle, though closer to mcdonough's price. ideal was cheapest and they seem nice, but there were a few red flags. i don't dought mcdonough would do a good job, but sean from ideal really impressed me with his knowledge about the fencing business and seemed to have an eye for details. reliable is also massachusett's largest fence contractor, so they know what they're doing. sean actually told me the price included a 20% spring discount, but i think that's mostly marketing talk, since all three contractors gave similar prices.

so we ended up going with reliable. to start the project, we needed to sign the contract and to pay a 50% deposit. we could either mail them a check, use zelle, or a credit card (but with a 3% fee). we tried zelle, but the payment wouldn't go through. there was also a $1000 daily limit, so the payment had to be split into multiple parts over the next few days. we tried a few more times with no success, so finally decided to just mail them a check (office in woburn). sean contacted me later in the evening, said he was in belmont tomorrow and could come pick up the check, but i told him i already mailed it out.

my father had already squeezed all the liquids from the fermenting jiuniang rice into a large stainless steel mixing bowl. he also scooped out some liquid and added some sugar. with the added sugar the rice wine flavor was complete: sour, sweet, and alcoholic. he added about half a cup of sugar to the remaining liquid. after we mixed it together, we poured the jiuniang wine into two 1L plastic bottles.

i also mixed the makgeolli we started yesterday. it looked a little dry on top, but turned wet after i finished mixing everything. it needs to be mixed for 3 days before we cap it and let it ferment without oxygen. if we do a taste test, the makgeolli should be very sweet at this stage (if everything is fermenting correctly), with no alcohol.

my godmother showed up in the morning, along with alex who gave her a ride. i showed alex my ebike and he took it on a short test ride down the street and back. they left by late morning once we started to get busy.

so we got busy today. it started around 11am when we got a large online order that included 4 dan dan noodles and 1 vegetable stirfry noodles, which basically exhausted our stock of black soy noodles. i had to make more, as more dan dan noodle orders came in. there a total of 8 dan dan noodle orders today, so i ended up making 3 batches of black soy noodles. after 1pm things slowed down, only to pick back up again around 2pm. in the early evening after 5pm there was another uptick. my mother also sold some knitwear today.

my aunt showed up in the afternoon, had a sausage bento. she also tried our jiuniang wine, said she couldn't taste any alcohol, even though there was definitely some alcohol. after a few hours the bottled wine accumulated enough carbonation that the bottle became super stiff and we had to open the bottles slowly otherwise all the liquid would shoot out. CO2 means it's definitely still fermenting, the yeast turning the sugar into alcohol. we can expect the jiuniang wine to be more alcoholic over time.

i didn't bring anything back after work. since i had my ebike, i went the slightly longer way home. after a shower, i cooked up some spinach ravioli for dinner, and watched the hawks-celtics game. hawks controlled the first half of the game, as well as going into the second half. but it seemed inevitable that the celtics would take over eventually, despite jaylen brown sitting out tonight. celtics had the lead starting from the middle of the 3rd quarter and never game it up. celtics win 102-109.

given that we were busy the past two days, i figured today would be more of the same, especially since temperature was supposed to reach the 60's, the warmest day this week. but trying to predict whether we'll be busy or not is impossible, as today was shaping up to be a slow day. technically it was warm, but the sky was overcast so it felt colder.

the lull gave me time to make some smoked sprat bagel sandwiches with sliced onions, cucumbers, dill, and capers. for my money, white fish salad is still the way to go for a far more delicious bagel sandwich. smoked sprats are okay, but they can be a little bland, and messy to eat with all that fish oil.

heading into 2pm did we finally get busy. nothing crazy, but a sudden stream of customers. why didn't them come earlier? who knows. chinese sausage was the most popular bento variety, we sold half a dozen, when normally we might get one or two. once again we exhausted our tea egg supply, i'll need to make a fresh batch tomorrow.

ideal fence got in touch with me. eddie wasn't able to send the estimate to my e-mail, so he took a photo and texted me the estimate instead. he's asking for $4250 for a wooden fence, or $4000 for a vinyl. the way he was talking, it sounded like vinyl was going to be way cheaper, but only just $250 difference.

given that our latest rice fermentation experiments will end in failure, i decided to make a proper batch of makgeolli with the leftover bag of nuruk and 5lbs. of long-grain glutinous rice. first i had to soak the rice for 2 hours. at 4pm i steamed the rice for 40 minutes, switching the pans at the midway point. i then dumped the cooked rice into a large stainless steel dish and stirred the rice to help it cool faster. i boiled nearly 3L of water, then left it to cool. to help the rice cool faster, as soon as it was warm enough to touch, i broke apart the rice by hand and separated them into smaller clumps.

my godmother called the cafe today, spoke with my mother. she'd been back home from taiwan for a week now, but wasn't able to visit us because alex took her car. she could probably get to the cafe by bus, but i don't think she's ever taken public transportation before.

from 5pm until we closed we got busy again. my mother left early around 6pm to walk home, after cooking some pork & pepper stirfry and fulfilling what turned out to be our last order of the day (beef noodle soup and bento for here).

my father helped me mix the rice with the water (2.3L) before we added the nuruk. we reconstituted the nuruk in some water to form a slurry, but it would've been easier just to dump the nuruk powder directly onto the rice and water to mix. we then scooped the mixture into our 7L jar. the makgeolli should be ready by next thursday. my father decided he wouldn't add any additional water to see if that'll make any difference.

after we closed for the day, we heard people talking outside. turns out it was my sister speaking with a prospective baker who wants to buy the business from the currently vacating bakery. they also gave her some samples, a strawberry cream sandwich and a tiramisu sandwich. i had a few bites of the tiramisu sandwich: the bread was salty and savory from the butter, dusted in dark chocolate, with a tiramisu filling. it was pretty good. if these guys can actually take over that'd be great. we actually got a lot of new business by having a bakery next door.

i left with some pork & pepper bento my mother had already packed for me. first thing i did when i got home was to e-file my sister's godmother's federal taxes. hopefully it worked, i'll ask my mother to ask tomorrow. i also replied to paul about the fensu fence contractor he met yesterday. they want $800 to just replace the gate, or $1900 to replace the whole thing including the post. paul told me they were gone for the next 2 weeks.

after a shower i ate my bento. there was a knicks-hornets game, i watched just to see if no.3 new york would lose, provide a little separation against the no.2 seed celtics. sure enough, knicks lost, now boston is a game ahead. unfortunately the knicks have an easier remaining schedule. but after the celtics beat the thunder last night, i can easily beat their remaining opponents. the april 9th celtics-knicks game is going to be key.

old habits die hard: i went back to cyberpunk again. yes i finished the game, but i went back to a previous save, one where i impersonate aurore cassel. in this mission, instead of siding with reed, i betray him to help songbird escape. alex managed to kill kurt hansen (i didn't have the pleasure, so i wasn't able to loot his iconic weapons), while evil AI-possessed songbird and i escape the stadium. i didn't have erebus, but i still had plenty of formidable weapons in my stash. the barghest militia was no match.

i woke up at my normal time of 8am but instead of going to work i went to my parents' place to meet up with someone from ideal fence to do an estimate. my mother called me while i was enroute via ebike. i forgot what she told me but i found out she was walking to the cafe. i thought i might see her (walking) or my father (driving) but didn't see neither of them.

i arrived in belmont around 9am. the appointment wasn't until 9:30am so i had some time to kill. i decided to go out in the front yard and trim some bushes with the ladder. 9:30am came and ideal fence still hadn't shown up yet. i kept working until they finally called, said they were about to arrive.

eddie showed up from ideal fence, an older gentleman. he was gone last week, i asked if he was on vacation. he said he went to florida and north carolina. i asked about the weather, figuring it'd be warmer, but he said they had a few cold days. once again eddie pushed for vinyl fences. "just get it done and never have to think about it again!" i told him to give me two estimates so we can decide (the other being cedar wood picket fence). he measured the fence length (only once), 81 ft. he asked if we wanted "take away" which meant if we wanted them to take away our old fence. i was the one who pointed out the bamboo (he said it wouldn't be a problem) and the pussy willow tree. he said we could fence the tree so it'd be an issue for our backyard neighbor, or we could cut it. as long as the trunk is flush to the ground, they could work with it. i asked if they would put down cement, he said yes. when i told him my parents own a cafe, he said he actually spoke with my sister, who called them to put up barricades in front of the electric meters. i asked him about turn around time, he said 2-3 weeks. he could have an estimate for me by tomorrow. he saw my electric bike and asked a bunch of questions. how fast do they go? how far can they travel? how much does it weigh?

after eddie left, i went to work on the toyota, applying 3 coats of rain-x to the windshield and windows, and a coat of anti-fog inside the windshield.

next i put back some of the rain barrels. there was still water in some of them, a result of the frozen ice inside finally melting.

i then started some backyard tree pruning. i trimmed a few branches on the hawthorn. that is a scary tree. it looks fairly innocuous, but the branches have long 2-inch thorns which can cause some serious damage. the cut branches have to be treated carefully, cut into smaller pieces so nobody accidentally gets stabbed.

i trimmed the maple tree, focusing on tall suckers facing the south side of the tree. it was fairly easy to cut them down using the cordless ego pole saw. i learned it's much easier to trim the branches at at the midway point instead of cutting them at the base. afterwards i can go back and clean up the leftover bases. cutting down the branches is the easy (though more dangerous) part; the hard part is reducing all the cut branches for garden refuse pickup, which isn't until 2 more weeks. i had a few close calls when branches came crashing down. i did sustain a bunch of cuts on my forearm.

the last thing i did was to dump half a bag of chicken manure into each raised bed (except for RB3) before adding half a trash can of leftover shredded leaves. this should've been done in late fall or early winter, so the material can compost and be ready for planting by spring. but winter snuck up on us so fast, we didn't have time to do any of that stuff before the ground froze solid and it started snowing. the chicken manure smelled awful, we purchased them back in november 2024, so it had two winters to decompose inside of tightly sealed bags, but the smell only seemed to get stronger. hopefully the rain that's supposed to fall on thursday-friday will help get rid of some of that smell.

i left belmont by 1:20pm. i took with me the 2-gallon garden pump sprayer that still had 3/4 gallon of horticultural oil. i'd stripped down to my t-shirt because i warmed up from working in the backyard and didn't bother to put my jacket on. i immediately regretted that decision as it was actually still kind of cold with temperature in the 50's.

i went to the cafe. i grabbed the sprayer and went to my sister's place to spray her rhododendron bushes which had a terrible azalea bark scale infestation last summer. the plastic nozzle on the sprayer was semi-clogged, so not sure how well the oil sprayed out, but i could always reapply it again in a few weeks when the weather warms up. i only started using horticultural oil last summer (to treat a scale infestation on the cherry plum tree), so i'm still not sure how well it works, but all the literature i found said to use it against scale insects.

back at the cafe, i made a new batch of tea eggs. i've got my recipe down to a science, i can start a new batch in under 30 minutes using the steam technique, then leave it simmering on low heat on the induction cooktop for 2 hours. the only thing about the recipe i want to change is the brand of tea i use. through trial and error, i've found the best tea to be red rose tea bags. but for authenticity and maximum flavor, i really want to try loose black tea.

my mother made me some rice noodle mixed with ground pork, garlic chives, and bean sprouts. it didn't look too appetizing but it was pretty delicious (maybe because i was hungry from working all those hours in the backyard).

my sister's godmother showed up. she was here so i could give her her tax returns. she'll e-file her federal tax (where she owes money) but will need to mail her state tax (no refund or payment). she needs to add money to her checking account and will let me know by tomorrow so i can e-file her federal tax return.

i finally returned home by 3pm. i spent a little time cleaning the chain on my ebike. the rust i saw a few days ago and thought had disappeared was back again. it's only surface rust at this time, and i was able to clean it off completely using finish line 1-stp cleaner and lubricant. i sprayed a first coat before wiping it clean with a paper towel, followed by a second coat. what the bike really needs is a more thorough wash but i'm going to wait until the weather warms up to take out the garden hose.

i switched to my trek utility bike and went to market basket to get some cafe supplies and to find tonight's dinner. i decided on some frozen spinach ravioli with a ready made jarred pasta sauce.

i got back home by 4pm.

i finished cyberpunk tonight, finally met hanako at embers. there seemed to be 3 ending choices, i picked the one where i let silverhand take over my body so he could enlist the help of rogue to destroy arasaka once and for all. it involved defeating the final boss monster adam smasher after he murders rogue in an ambush. i was then given another choice, to let silverhand take over my body forever, or return to my body knowing i don't have long to live. the game ends with judy breaking up with me, me being the owner of the afterlife bar and going on one last mission to outer space. cue credits and a few poignant video messages from people i've meet during the game. they're leaving messages, but it's left unsaid whether V survives the space mission or not. the game then allows me to go back to night city, but with all the gigs and missions finished, there wasn't anything to do but sightsee.

i had dinner around 8:30pm, my aforementioned spinach ravioli with pasta sauce. i ate while watching the thunder-celtics game. it was a tough game, with OKC in a position to win for 3/4 of the game, but the celtics turned it around in the 4th quarter to break OKC's win streak. piston lost tonight, so the celtics are now 4 games behind detroit with 10 games left. the knicks are nipping at celtics' heel, 1/2 game behind.

finally we got busy today, between 1-2pm and then 4-6pm. just a single day we made a third of the profit compared to last week. if the rest of the week is as busy, this will turn out to be a very lucrative week. a lot of bentos, which exhausted our tea egg supply, will need to start using the backup batch tomorrow. we sold everything except for pad thai.

was it the weather? sure it was sunny, but it wasn't that warm, barely in the 40's. while the rest of the country is experiencing early spring warmth, new england is still stuck in a cold pattern that doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. it might warm up during the day, but the temperature always drops down into the 20-30's at nights.

i put up a sign on the door telling customers we're closed for the week my parents are on vacation. but apparently in got the wrong dates. i thought it was the week of april 5-11th, but they're actually gone the following week 12-18th. so they still have about 3 weeks before they leave. the way my parents were already packing up their suitcases this past week, i thought they were leaving sooner.

my mother taste tested the two fermenting rice in the fido jars. both times she spit it out, utterly putrid. i'm still hopeful that maybe continued fermentation will tranform the rice into something at least drinkable, but it's beginning to look more likely that this was a failed experiment. we didn't use the right kind of rice, nor used the proper fermentation starter (leftover makgeolli lees), nor the right amount of water (too much water in the jiuniang fermentation). but we made instead are large jars of rice-based sour dough starter, and that's not something you can drink. basically not enough sugar was produced, if any. without sugar, the yeast have nothing to eat, so therefore no alcohol either.

esmei burst through the back door in the late afternoon. she heard my mother cracking a hard-boiled egg. so when my father went to feed her some sweet potato skin - something she'd always eat in the past - she spit it out, hoping to get some egg instead.

my lack of sleep caused me to get a little drowsy during the quiet stretches of the day, but thankfully we were busy enough that i stayed awake throughout the day. i went home after work, there was still plenty of daylight, didn't need my bike lights.

i heated up a brick of stouffer's lasagna in the oven for dinner. stouffer changed their recipe a while back, but i feel like maybe they changed it to the old recipe, because it wasn't too bad, just in a much smaller size due to shrinkflation.

after dinner i started my other job, which is playing cyberpunk. with no more new missions or gigs, i basically just roamed around night city, looking for gang members to test out my guns. i like using erebus, the effects are super violent as it banishes their souls beyond the blackwall. every once in a while i'll accidentally trigger a police response, then i'm running around try to find a place to hide waiting for the arrest bulletin to end. i went in search of some easter eggs, like the murk mobile in the old mines. i then drove around the city at 140mph.

my father took my mother to her follow-up medical checkup today at 10am, to get her blood pressure measured and to give some blood samples. after she finished, they came by to pick me up around 10:40am. it was my first time riding in the honda after i gave the windshield the rain-x treatment last weekend. water was still beading on the glass but only because it was misting outside. my father said slightly stronger rain beads right off the windshield like magic.

we dropped off my mother at home before my father and i continued to restaurant depot in needham to get a few supplies. along the way we passed through newton center. a new c-mart is coming soon, after the last one in boston closed recently. this is good news, because it means we can visit this c-mart whenever we make a needham-waltham supply run.

at restaurant depot we got a case of beef shank. for whatever reason, only the needham store carries beef shank. just like how only the everett store has beef tripe. i don't understand why they can both carry the same thing? saves us the trouble of having to shuttle back and forth between the two stores depending on what we need to get. we also got a few boxes of linguine noodles. we thought about getting some eggs too, but the cheapest we saw for large eggs was $30.99 for a case of 15 dozen, which comes out to 17¢ an egg, not as cheap as costco.

coming back from needham via 95/route 2, we stopped by the fresh pond trader joe's. we got some baby cucumbers, edamame, and bananas.

we went to the cafe to drop off the supplies. i was going to stir the fido jars one last time, but my father tried the fermenting rice and said not to bother. like yesterday, they were still bland, which is not a good sign. they're supposed to be sweet at least, meaning the starch is getting properly broken down into sugar, which will then feed the yeast. only thing left to do was to cap the jars and wait until the end of the week to try out our rice wine. hopefully they'll taste okay and not put us in the hospital.

back in belmont, my mother made wonton soup for lunch.

in the late afternoon i ventured down to the basement to check on my plants. for some reason all the overwintering peppers have died. they did well for the first months, but then one by one they just shriveled up and died. can't be because the soil is too dry since it's properly moist. not any kind of insect infestation since there's never any gnats on the traps. does look like diseases either. i'm not too sadden by the turn of events, peppers grow quick, especially if i start new seedlings within the next few weeks.

as for the grow room, i didn't see any signs of flying fungus gnats. nor did i see any new captures on all the yellow sticky traps. after 3 weeks of proper soil drenching with gnatrol, have i finally solved my fungus gnat problem? i didn't bother watering all the plants, just the orchids and pennyworts. i also fertilized the gardenia and watered some osmanthus and small potted jasmines with the leftover fertilizer water.

for dinner my parents made a pot of assorted fish cakes. my mother also made a salted pork stirfry with some longhorn peppers and onions. i ate mostly the salted pork, fish cakes not my favorites, although i did eat some (including some tofu and daikon radish dipped in hot sauce). we ate early, my father gave me a ride back to cambridge by 6pm.

paul has been talking with a handyman who looks to replace our broken basement door for $1260. i agreed, just to give him a victory, since i'm normally the one saying no to any sort of fixes. my share of the repairs comes out to $500. i wrote them a check and slipped it through their mail slot.

for whatever reason, i woke up at 7am this morning, couldn't fall back asleep anymore, even though i went to bed last night at 2am. it wasn't raining yet, but the forecast said rain would come around 10:45am, so i had to leave before then.

i left by 10am. my ebike was still outside underneath the tarp, double locked to my regular trek utility bike. i figured if anyone wanted to steal it, they'd have to go through the hassle of taking both bikes.

i passed by the bakery, which was crowded with people, something like 20 customers inside. it still doesn't make any sense they'll closing by month's end. it's not because of business, they're always busy. i did notice the owner wasn't there, on what will be a busy sunday the second to last weekend before they're gone forever. i also saw an article on boston.com about the closing. the owner must know the writer.

i went to the cafe to put away the tea eggs and leftover rice, and to mix the fermenting rice in the fido jars. all the jars were around room temperature, didn't seem like there was much fermenting. the 4L fido jar - the one with properly cooked rice and 3 crushed yeast balls - looked like nothing was happening. it didn't even have a smell. when i started stirring, it started bubbling. i tasted the metal spatula afterwards, no taste. no sweetness, no sourness, just tasted like cold bland rice. the 5L fido jar was cooking. there was a vigorous amount of bubbling and it smelled like makgeolli, with a slight fruitiness. when i stirred it though, the surface went placid, the opposite of what happened with the smaller fido jar. i tasted the spatula as well, expecting som sort of flavor, but it was just as bland as the previous jar.

i got belmont around 10:30am. i took out the battery from the ebike because it was down to 19%, wasn't sure if i'd have enough juice to make it home. it was probably so slow because i left the bike outside, battery doesn't perform wll in the cold. i went to the garage to find a tarp to cover up the ebike and went inside to charge up the battery.

my father made a fried egg, a taiwanese scallion pancake (which i ate with some pork floss), some hunter sausage, a mug of matcha latte (my mother made that for me), and a tokyo banana cake. my aunt dropped it off last weekend, i wasn't able to try it then. it tastes exactly like a banana and shaped like a banana too. makes me wonder: why not just eat a banana instead?

it was supposed to rain the rest of the day but it didn't really. the midmorning rain never really came, just a very little sprinkle at best. in the afternoon there was about round of rain, but just a light cold drizzle. when the battery finally finished charging 4 hours later, i went outside to put it on the bike and remove the tarp so i could get a free bike wash. i wiped off all the mud stains from a winter of riding.

i finally ordered some stuff from rareseeds. once again i waited too long, and two of the things i wanted - asian asters and taiwanese eggplants - were sold out. i ended up getting seed packets for stevia, serrano tampiqueño hot peppers, heavy hitter okra (it'll be our first time growing okra), blue butterfly pea, and swiss chards.

for dinner we had som reuben sandwiches. i brought a can of sauerkraut that i bought yesterday. my mother also made a potato salad but the sandwich was already filling enough.

i didn't leave for home until 7:20pm, waiting for the rain to stop. i put on my rain pants to stay dry, figured i'd be riding through a lot of leftover puddles.

spent the rest of the night playing cyberpunk. i finished one last gig for mr.hand. turned out to be the very last one, he gifted me a sports car and some maxtac mantis claws. the end is near! only mission left is to meet hanako at embers. maybe there are a few more gigs i haven't done yet. i've resorted to calling random people on my phone list, but nobody's picking up.