among the many decisions i have to make on saturday is how much rice to cook. will it be a busy day? or will business be slow? i ended up cooking only 3 cups of rice, because there was 4 frozen containers in the freezer and two more out on the counter. i also held off on making any black noodles until we had the first sale on noodles. likewise with the dumplings, opted to make them on demand so we wouldn't have any leftovers.
we had 2 fairly large orders right when we opened. a customer called in with a list of things he wanted. i would've preferred he order online, so i wouldn't have to spend time re-entering his order after first writing everything done on paper. in the next hour we had 4 more orders, but business tapered off after that. blame the rain, but we got more business than i expected, despite the bad weather.
a new chinese astrophysicist arrived late last night. expected to study here a few years, he's staying in the upstairs bedroom facing the street. he came to the cafe in the afternoon to get some beef noodle soup and pay his rent. speaking of which, beef noodle was the top seller today, we sold 6, followed by 5 bentos.
i made another batch of tea eggs. we still had about 15 or more in the slow cooker, but tea eggs taste better when they've had a few days to steep in the tea egg brine, and saves my mother from having to make them come tuesday. not sure why, but recently we always get a few eggs that fall out of their shells. the eggs are still edible, they're just not good to sell because they don't have any of the traditional tea egg marbling, but instead they're solid black. is there a chicken egg calcium deficiency epidemic happening?
it's impossible to work with my sister without drama. so the front bedroom used to be a communal space when it was empty, but now that it's occupied, some furniture had to be moved out. one of them is a faux leather sofa chair. it used to be at my parents' place but was moved by my sister against my objection. now she doesn't want it anymore, and promised it to her godmother. i told her we should keep it, in case the upstairs apartment ever needs furnitures. regardless of what happens to the chair, it had to be moved since it was just sitting in the upstairs kitchen. my sister asked me to move it, and i was going to, but then she had an angry tantrum because i called her crazy, so i told her i wasn't going to help her. in the end my 2nd aunt convinced me to move it after all, and i only did not help not to help my sister, but to help my parents, otherwise my sister would call them all weekend asking them to move it for her.
closing time couldn't come soon enough. by then the rain had stopped, and bright filtered sunlight was shining through the thick evaporating clouds. i was prepared to take the bus to belmont after work, but my father made a surprise appearance at 4pm, so i was able to get a ride.
i wore my oil stained jeans from yesterday, hoping it'd help dissipate the strong oily smell, but it didn't help. these were a new pair of jeans too! so i learned an important lesson: don't work on the bicycle while wearing nice clothes.
i thought the mustard green leaves from last saturday were big, until i saw the monster leaves today. i think i could probably grow them just as big outside, but then they'd face the dangers of rabbits and other pests. grown indoors, they're safe, and doped up with a steady flow of nutrients, they can achieve their maximum size. i have to remind myself that this is all happening without any soil, which has always seem to be a key component of gardening. turns out soil is not at all important. mixing the mustard greens and chinese celeries turned out to be a bad idea, because the mustard greens outgrow the celeries, crowding them out. celeries grow upright, so i think they'd be easily suited to grow in this tub of 12 net cups. i may end up growing celeries indoors during the summer, since the basement is cool enough to keep them happy, and the grow room will be empty. so looks like there will be more hydroponics. as for the mustard greens, they grow so big, a tub of just 6 net cups would be ideal.
the aeroponic nutrient level had reached the halfway point. my father suggested i refill the tub before the level got any lower. so i mixed a 5 gallon bucket of nutrients. i took a reading of the existing nutrient solution in the tub: pH 7 TDS 720ppm. recall that the optimal values for mustard greens are pH 6-7.5 and TDS 600-1000ppm. the reading from the 5 gallon of fresh nutrients was pH 5.3 TDS 1311ppm. so i figured the final estimated values would be pH 6.15 TDS 1015ppm, which is perfect. while i lifted the lid, my father helped me scooping the new nutrients into the tub.
my father's new moto G7 battery arrived yesterday and i bought it back to belmont to install. the hardest part is opening the phone, which wasn't designed to be opened. various online sources suggested heating up the phone with a blow dryer to soften the glue holding the lcd screen to the body, but that didn't seem to work. i told my father i'd bring my x-acto knife tomorrow so we could try prying open the phone again.
for dinner we had reuben sandwiches. my mother had cooked the last of my corned beef in the early afternoon. they turned off the slow cooker by 5pm, and my father was already slicing the corned beef by 5:30pm. my mother didn't eat with us, retreating to the bedroom to watch her japanese/korean drama on the imac. the sandwiches were okay but a bit crude as they were assembled in a hurry, with large chunks of unmelted butter and rye bread that wasn't properly toasted. still, i was the first to finish my sandwich. my mother returned to the kitchen to wrap up half her reuben, surprised i'd already finished mine.
my father gave me a ride back to cambridge after dinner. my upstairs neighbors texted me again today, said they weren't going away after all. i thought it was weird that they were here all of yesterday, after having told me they were gone for a week. but i didn't question it, figured they got the days wrong, maybe leave later in the weekend.
first thing i did was to do a load of laundry. i think it's been more than a month since i last did laundry, so i had enough dirty clothes that i needed to do two loads. for the first load it was going to be pants, including the oil-stained jeans. problem with jeans is i can't treat the stain like normal fabric, otherwise i'll wash off the dye. the good thing about denim fabric is you can hardly see the oil stains. i was hoping after a good washing, the smell will be gone. unfortunately that wasn't the case. maybe it wasn't as strong, but when i sniffed at the spot that had the most concentration of lubricating oil, i could still smell it. maybe over time the smell will disappear eventually. i decided to do the second load of laundry tomorrow night, when we're supposed to get a cold snap.