cristina was gone this morning by the time i woke up around 9:30am, as was to be expected. i spent the early hours enjoying the solitude, having a bowl of special K vanilla and almond cereal for lunch. sometime in the afternoon i walked down to the community garden to water my plants. i was supposed to gather some thai basil and garlic chives, but i forgot my scissors and bag, and by the time i realized what was happening, i was already too far gone to turn back. once i returned home, i changed clothes and rode my motorcycle to the garden, this time with my scissors.

the eggplants i'm growing are different from the one at my parents' garden. their variety is a japanese ichiban, which has pretty dark purple/black stems. the ones that i have are green stems. even the flowers look different. ichiban blossoms resemble oversized nightshade flowers, while my garden eggplants has pale pink flowers with more petals. when i got the seedlings there was no description on the label other than "eggplant" so i'm curious to see what the final fruits look like.

afterwards i rode down to the cafe to help my 2nd uncle sign up for an online bank account. i submitted an online a few weeks ago, but the bank replied back saying it needed additional information before they could authorize the account. turns out i made a mistake on the mother's maiden name. not knowing my uncle's mother's maiden name, i used my grandmother's instead. when the info didn't match, that's what caused the account creation to get flagged. once i got that resolved, the bank told use to expect a confirmation e-mail later today.

i finally found out the paint colors to my house. it would've been easier if we kept some of the original paints, but fortunately i have a habit of documenting everything and managed to take a photo of all the used paint can lids before they were tossed out. they are as follows: cabot colors slate gray (house), benjamin moore colorbook hot apple spice (windows), benjamin moore colorbook woodstock tan (trim).

i helped my parents print out a few more signs, as they had tossed the old ones i made since the cafe renovation. they will also be serving pepper buns (hujiao bing) and tea eggs now.

we finally ate the ichiban eggplant we harvested yesterday (paired up with the thai basil i collected from my own garden earlier). my father was impressed by how seedless it was despite being a mature fruit.

i returned home around 7pm, catching cristina trying to get into the house as i pulled around the street to park my motorcycle. when i got inside the house, she was gone, so she was probably leaving when i saw her. i thought maybe she'd gone out for a run because she wore her sneakers (but probably not the case because when i saw her she was wearing denim shorts). then when it got later, i thought maybe she went out to dinner with friends (spanish people eat dinner very late, typically 10pm), but as of now (12:30am) i still don't know where she is. i might need to text.