i asked my father if the rain barrels were filled, he said other than the rain that fell yesterday afternoon that left about 2 palm wide increase of water, nothing else fell again in belmont after that. that was a surprise because last night we had a bout of torrential downpour in my cambridge neighborhood, but thinking about it now, it was too brief, wouldn't have amounted much of accumulation anyway. so in hindsight, i should've have emptied the barrels if i knew we weren't going to get any rain. but all indications as of thursday was for sustained rainfall as tropical storm fay made a pass up new england. but it tracked further west, so once again the boston coastal area was left with little rain. or next potential for rainfall looks to be monday.
when my mother saw the imac, she immediately claimed it for herself, to watch her shows in her room. i said she could do that on the tv, but a computer interface is the better choice when it comes to streaming chinese-subtitled korean dramas. the latest one is langlangbay.net, which doesn't seem to have any advertisements (or maybe i'm just blocking them with my chrome extension), but has a vast collection of the latest asian dramas, all subtitled in chinese. each episode is an aggregate page that points you to a list of servers, and it's your job to sort of click around until you find one that works. she spent the rest of the day watching some korean drama with the imac on the dining table.
it was so hot today i stayed indoors for much of the day instead of braving the wall of heat permeating outside. my mother made me an egg sandwich with some orange juice.
i only went out in the late afternoon, while my father was grilling some food on the barbecue. i planted my taramind seeds that i'd been soaking since thursday. only half a dozen had that "exploded" look, and they were coated in this slime that was hard to wash off, and the seeds had increased in size 2-3x. those seemed the most viable and i planted those in small pots filled with compost topped with commercial potting soil. the rest of the seeds looked like there weren't any changes, i left them to soak some more. this tamarind germinating experiment might be a fun excursion but i don't know how i'm going to keep them alive, give their tropical nature. i had to apply some diatomaceous earth on the tomato plants. there are still flea beetles: they seemed to have ignored the eggplants but there's a mild infestation on the tomatoes. i have to keep on applying DE until i no longer see flea beetles.
we had barbecued drumsticks, italian sausages with fennel, and taiwanese sausages for dinner. my mother also mixed up a fresh batch of purslane salad. today i realized that purslane reminds me of seaweed salad, their slippery yet crunchy texture. i don't know how my father did it, but the chicken tasted like they were fried, the skin crispy and flavorful. the taiwanese sausages were a little hard because the sausages themselves are dried, but they have a distinctive sweetness that characteristic of taiwanese sausages and makes it worth eating.
since my sister was home, i got a ride back to cambridge with her. when i got back to the house, it felt like a furnace inside. i immediately turned on the AC and put the box fan in the hallway so it could transfer some cool air into the kitchen and the rest of the house.