i arrived at my parents' place in the late morning with greek salad ingredients for dinner later today. i had a leftover barbecue drumstick for lunch with some suanmeitang drink. they bought the specialty spice packet in taiwan and left it outside to boil while barbecuing yesterday. it has a complex flavor, my father said it's because of the smoked dried sour plums, but i could taste additional ingredients, like licorice, which is common a lot of chinese medicine. it wasn't very sweet, nor was it particularly sour, it tasted like drinking some kind of herbal chinese medicine.

in the early afternoon my father and i went to binbin's place to check out on the house. tom called me last week (when i was in chinatown), said there was some kind of certified letter from the condo association, but it was actually a fake certified letter. the first floor was 84°F, which meant the 3rd floor attic space must've been 90°+. we opened a few attic windows while we were there. the basement was very cool though, in the 70's. i spotted some mouse droppings, which must've been old, since there's nothing to eat in the house. my father wanted to take the sofa recliner chair in the basement, but not only was it heavy, we didn't have a place for it in belmont, so we ended up just shooting a video so my mother could decide whether she wanted it or not. it's only thing to take a few unused supplies, but when you're removing furniture from somebody's house, that's crossing a line.

when we returned home, my sister was there asking me for help to upgrade her macbook so she could use the turbotax software. i also tried a slice of the cheesecake jack's wife made and delivered to my parents yesterday. his wife is a gifted baker. it was a real cheesecake and not a puffy japanese cheesecake which is more of a spongecake. it tasted good, but the crust along the outer edges and bottom were a little hard.

the only gardening i did today was to water the squash and cucumber plants and inspect them for squash vine borer eggs (which there were). it was hotter than yesterday, but didn't feel as humid. i also soaked a 2nd batch of tamarind seeds; none of the ones i soaked yesterday had exploded yet. i'm sort of hoping nones of these will either since i already have 6 tamarind seeds planted.

later i fixed the solar fountain i found a few days ago, thrown out by my indian neighbors. it seemed brand new, surprised it'd be broken. i went online looking to see if anyone's ever fixed it before, and sure enough i found a woman who explained how easy it was to repair a solar fountain. apparently sometimes the magnetic propeller gets stuck; all it needs is some disassembly. there was no debris inside, but once i put all the pieces back together, it was working again. the same thing happens to my aquarium filter, i should've known they used the same principle.

the lotuses are doing their own thing. i'm kind of surprised none of them have formed any aerial leaves left, i figured we were long overdue. instead, it's been coin leaves after coin leaves. still, summer just started even though the recent spate of hot weather has made it feel like it's been happening longer than it actually has. i need aerial leaves before i can get the go-ahead to start fertilizing, in which case the lotuses will begin to grow even faster.

i made greek salad for dinner. in hindsight, it wouldn't have been hard to make pasta salad instead, since it uses 90% of the same ingredients (including feta and ham) but i would've had to make my own dressing beforehand at home. maybe we'll have pasta salad for next week. my parents didn't have a big enough bowl to mix the salad so i ended up mixing it with my hands to get to all the ingredients at the bottom of the tall bowl. everyone seemed to like it but i thought it was only okay since i already ate so much greek salad last week.

my father decided to rescue the mysterious plant growing on the patch of sidewalk grass. he thought it might be a mimosa, or maybe a silk tree (AKA mimosa tree). to me it resembled a tamarind. he noticed that at nights it'd close its leaves. later back at home i did some research and realized it's some kind of locust tree seedling. most likely from a nearby locust tree i often see around the corner.

earlier this morning on my way to belmont i found a set of bird-shaped cups. i figured they might be useful as garden scoops, but i was curious as to their original purpose. i did a reverse image lookup which didn't find a match. but maureen was able to find out what it was: skip hop dunks, bath toys for babies but also function as rinse cups.

i've decided to wake up at 3:30am so i can bike to the mass ave bridge and see if i can get a photo of comet NEOWISE looking northeast which will appear starting about 4am. the limiting factor is the weather: will it be so cloudy i won't be able to see anything? a lot of nights i'm not even asleep by 3:30am, so i wonder if i should even bother sleeping and simply stay up until it's time to go.