i was the first to arrive. first thing i did was to make some rice. there was 8 containers of frozen rice in the freezer from saturday, so i decided to only cook 4 cups of rice. my sister wrote a list of things to make, like somehow i was responsible for them, even though she could've made them herself. brew some black tea, brew some jasmine green tea, make boba. i was already on my way to making them all before my sister showed up at the cafe. because it's usually my parents who open up the cafe to start the week, there were some things we forgot to do, like take out the leftover black noodles and dumplings from the freezer. i ended up having to make new batches of those items since it'd be too long to wait for them to thaw out naturally.
my 2nd aunt showed up for work sometime after 11am, right when it was starting to get busy. for the next 1-1/2 hours we had steady business, but when it was all over and we saw the total, it was that much. a lot of small orders versus bigger ones. but there were still a lot of hours left, and as the day wore on, orders started accumulating, and by the end of the day we made about the same as last tuesday.
the internet went down a few times today. i even called comcast, and all i got was the automated service telling me to reset my modem, which did fix the problem, but i'd like to know what was causing it in the first place, and more importantly, will this continue to happen in the future. i ran a speedtest, about 40/6Mbps, which seems to be faster than what it used to be (15Mbsp download).
my 2nd aunt bought some trader joe's korean rice cakes to the cafe today. she cooked some for me to try. they're okay, and very convenient if you can't make rice cakes on your own, since it comes with a sauce packet as well. but for my money, i still prefer the taste of homemade rice cakes, which isn't that hard to make, just need a few essential ingredients (seaweed & dashi for the broth, gochujang and pepper flakes and dark corn syrup for the sauce, and fried tofu and scallions besides the rice cakes).
our tea eggs sale are going through the roof, to the point where i'm thinking about upgrading our tea egg slow cooker. we had about 10 leftover eggs from last week and a fresh batch i made on saturday but never used. so we started with 40 eggs this morning. by the end of the day, we'd sold 17 eggs, nearly half. it made me regret not making more today, but my aunt said we had so many, there was no need. the thing with tea eggs is they taste the best after they've had time to simmer for 2-3 days. eating a freshly-made tea egg is like eating a hard-boiled egg, no flavor. it's starting to feel like the early days of our tea egg business, when our tiny slow cooker could only hold a dozen eggs. now i make 30 eggs every batch, but our current slow cooker can hold up to 40 eggs depending on the egg size.
my godmother came to the cafe today. she's leaving for a 2-month trip to europe on monday. one reason she came by was for me to check her phone, she couldn't receive any e-mails on her hotmail account for over a month. my guess was her mailbox was full (i was surprised hotmail offers users 15GB, it used to be just 2MB), but she never received any warning messages. to make matters worse, she couldn't remember her hotmail password, so wasn't sure what would happen if she reset it.
my sister was getting on my nerve today. yelling at us for order mix-ups, accusing us of never helping her out. or making a mess of the kitchen, and never bothering to clean up afterwards. she kept turning on the kitchen lights even though it was already super sunny with the door and open window. finally by day's end i had enough and yelled at her. i told her the only reason why i was working at the cafe was to help out my parents and i couldn't care less about helping her since she's a crazy person. my sister hates it when people call her crazy, and started swearing at me. my 2nd aunt had to coax me to leave, which i was very happy to do.
when i got back home by 7pm i was in a daze. i took a quick shower because i wore my oil-soaked jeans and i couldn't stand the smell. next time i do laundry i'm going to use the enzyme odor wash on that pair of jeans to see if it'll help. i brought in all my houseplants, since there's going to be a cold snap tonight, with temperature dropping into the lower 40's. i'm worried about my belmont plants but i won't be able to check on them until after work tomorrow. the weekly supermarket circulars arrived today. i'm happy to report that last week's appearance of the market basket circular was no fluke: i got it delivered again this week as well.
there was a pivotal game 5 between the 76ers and celtics, which i had in the background. i felt like i was procrastinating something but didn't know what, so instead i started debugging my weblog code. ever since my webhost upgraded to php 8.1, my blog was broken. i've been making do with manual postings, but tonight i went about fixing the problem for real. after several hours, i figured out the problem was i was calling elements in an array without using quotation marks, which is now mandatory with the new php. it took a long time to figure out because i couldn't get my code to display any error messages. i solved the problem by using print/echo commands, and narrowly down the problem to specific segments of code. it was basically blind debugging, but i finally managed to fix it. there's nothing complicated with my blog anyway, just some php code, a mysqli database, and a few tables.
while i was debugging i had the game in the background and it didn't look good for the celtics. boston trailed for 3 quarters, only leading in the final quarter during garbage time. the bench players got the lead down to 12 points with some quick threes, but philly tightened their defense and locked down the game in the final minutes. it was a painful game to watch, glad i wasn't watching it too closely since it was a heart breaker. at some point i took a break from coding to reheated a leftover greek feta & spinach quiche my sister had bought yesterday.