my mother asked me to work at the cafe today. i found excuses but she had a counter for all of them. i wanted to go to chinatown, but my 2nd aunt already went yesterday. besides, we'd probably go to malden 88 this weekend anyway, so there was no need for a chinatown supply run. backed into a order, i had no choice but to work today. but when i checked the webcam, i saw my sister was at the cafe today, which theoretically meant i didn't have to go. the cafe also didn't seem to be busy, perhaps a repeat of yesterday, when there was hardly any customers for some reason.

i left around 11:15am, packed a box filled with some fermented vegetables and a package of corned beef. today was a bit chilly, temperature in the 40's, but with intermittent sun. my mother tried the green cabbage kimchi, said that was the kind of kimchi she liked, the kind that wasn't sour. she tried the daikon kimchi and said it was too salty. my sister was at the cafe preparing her new salmon bento, she convinced a few customers to give it a try.

i cooked a new batch of tea eggs. even after all this time, i still haven't mastered the art of boiling the perfect egg. there's a science to it, and every once in a while i'll read some article or watch some video explaining how to boil eggs, and every time i try, it's never the same way twice.

my aunt and 2nd aunt both showed up. my 2nd aunt said her phone wasn't working. i took a look: for some reason it was in safe mode, not even sure how she managed to turn it on. i restarted the phone and it worked fine after that.

things were slow until noontime, when suddenly there was a rush of customers. in the span of an hour, we got more than a dozen orders, which worked to an order every 5 minutes. after that i managed to stick around before finally leaving by 2:30pm.

i didn't have lunch yet and though about making some musubi. but i figured i'd leave that for dinner, so instead i had a korean cup of noodles, continuing my string of korean foods.

in the evening i made musubi after watching a few youtube videos. i had to piece together the portions from a few sources, the rest i figured out through trial and error. traditional musubi uses short-grain rice, which i happened to have. 2 cups uncooked yields 4 cups cooked, which is the perfect amount for one can of spam. can't remember the last time i opened up a can of spam, probably not since the 80's. a single can of spam can be sliced into 9-10 pieces, i went with 9. for the seaweed wrap i used three squares of nori, each one cut into 3 strips.

i started grilling the spam slices before the rice was finished cooking. no oil necessary, the spam itself has enough oil to grease the pan. i also made a glaze sauce to grill the spam once more for flavor, a combination of shoyu, mirin, and sugar. i didn't have enough, so i used up a leftover bottle of teriyaki sauce, which i was basically making anyway.

once the spam was properly regrilled, it was time to assemble. i bought a musubi press nearly half a year ago and now finally had a chance to use it. i put the press on a piece of nori, then scooped some rice into the mold before pressing it down into a block of rice. i wasn't sure how much rice to use at first, so the first few musubis didn't have enough rice. i then sprinkled some furikake before removing the mold and layering a piece of teriyaki-glazed spam slice. i then wrapped the whole thing up with the nori, using some more glaze as a glue to hold the nori together.

i made 9 musubis and ate 3 of them. grilling the spam in a teriyaki glaze transformed them into something that was more delicious, i couldn't even tell it was spam. my nori wasn't wide enough though, so the spam and rice would stick out at both ends. this presented a problem because the exposed rice would started to crumble at the ends. next time i'll wrap the whole musubi in nori. the furikake also really adds to the flavor.

it's tax season and turbotax is my poison. the past few years each new edition of turbotax has dropped support for older macos. last year i was only able to use turbotax because i installed macos catalina (10.15) onto a bootable thumb drive and ran the software off of the drive itself. this year turbotax will only work with big sur (11) or above, so i had to create a bootable thumb drive with big sur. when i ran the installer it wouldn't work because i'm still using macos mojave (10.14). so i copied the installer onto the bootable catalina thumb drive and tried upgrading that way. i ran into problems because the installer reboots a few times, and every time it puts me back to my macbook pro system. when i finally got the installer to install, it got stuck in the final minute and wouldn't go any farther. i tried it a few more times, each time no go. not only that, it basically made the bootable thumb drive unreadable, so nothing left to do but start over. i'm going to see if i can upgrade my mother's imac to big sure, and run turbotax that way. if not, i'll switch to H&R block, which still works with catalina.