i asked XP last night when he goes to work. he said 9am. so when i woke up this morning at 9am, i thought he'd already left. i used the bathroom and took a shower, getting ready to leave, when i heard him in the bedroom. while he was in the bathroom, i told him i was leaving.
i made it to the cafe by 9:45am. my mother baked some store-bought spring rolls in the oven. they were okay, but nothing like the ones my mother makes every thanksgiving. these had bean fillings, which made them taste like crispy mini burritos. they came with a soy garlic sauce which wasn't very good. we paired the spring rolls with some thai sweet chili sauce and some cilantro lime sour cream sauce.
i made a new batch of tea eggs. i was going to make some on saturday, but my 2nd aunt talked me against it, saying we already had plenty. i shouldn't have listened to her, when it comes to food predictions, she's the worst. anyway, we ended up selling all our tea eggs from last week and had to resort to selling freshly made tea eggs i made this morning, which don't have the full flavor of tea eggs that've been soaked for a few days. we sold 16 bentos today and 5 individual tea egg sales (2 eggs per sale).
around 11:30am the internet went down. normally when that happens, a modem reset is enough to bring us back online. but no amount of plug pulling was able to get the internet working again. so i called comcast. i had a better experience this time, the agent - joe - told me there were reports of outages in the area. he said they estimated it wouldn't get fixed until 1:20pm.
when the internet goes down we can't receive any phone calls. fortunately the google number is also forwarded to my father's phone, so we were able to receive phone orders that way. when the internet goes down we can't take any credit card sales. fortunately it has an offline mode, where it stores the card info until internet is restored and resolves all queued transactions at that point. when the internet goes down we can't see any incoming online orders. fortunately we can still see any new orders on the phone apps (just can't print out any order tickets). so that's what we ended up doing, falling back on our contingency plan.
around 12:20pm i got a text from comcast saying the outage had been resolved. but i kept reseting the modem and it still wouldn't connect, 2 steady lights, 1 flashing. i called comcast again, and after navigating the phone tree a few times, i finally managed to get an agent who booked a technician appointment for today, between 2-4pm.
the internet outage magically resolved itself around 2pm. it took a few phone calls to cancel the appointment. the outage happend right during the busiest time of the day, so on top of food preparation stress, there was the additional stress of not being able to easily receive orders and process payment.
in the afternoon during a lull i borrowed the car and drove down to home depot to get some potting soil for my grow bag. i got two 32 qt. bags of vigoro potting soil for $7 each. while checking out the outdoor plants, i ran into maureen. she told me about home depot's secret discard pile. i bought two red-white columbines ($6/each) and a potted lavender ($6). while paying for the plants, i ran into renee, who was out getting some gardening materials. afterwards i went to check it out the discard pile maureen told me about. she was already there scavenging, browsing the rolling carts full of damaged plants. whether this was all legal i wasn't sure, maureen said she got yelled at one time, but keeps coming back to check what else they've thrown away. i ended up taking 7 potted geraniums, 6 unknown flowering plants with dark leathery leaves, 1 potted fern, and a dahlia. some of those discard plants the employees damaged them on purpose so they can't be resold, but plants grow back, and even with damaged stems or flower buds, they can still recover.
i stopped by belmont to drop off the plants and a bag of potting soil. i then drove to my house to grab a 10 gallon grow bag, before heading to the community garden to drop off the soil. 32 qt. filled the grow bag with a bit of space on the top. i grabbed a ground cherry seedling from belmont earlier and planted it in the new grow bag. ann was there and asked me about my bitter melons, which weren't looking so good. i told her i'd be back to plant some bitter melon seeds, and there was a good chance the two i currently have planted might not survive. i then watered my garden before leaving.
i made it back to the cafe by 4:30pm, right before an unexpected hour long period where we got more than 10+ orders. by the end of the day we made nearly as much as last wednesday, which was the most profitable day last week. i ended up leaving sometime after 6pm. i didn't plan on working at the cafe all day, but i still managed to take a little gardening break in the afternoon, so everything worked out in the end.
i found out today that my current temporary roommate is actually named PX, not XP. when i asked him his name, he gave it to me backwards - western style - with first name followed by last name. but no chinese person would ever say their name in that order, where it's always last name first name.
typically i do my grocery shopping on tuesdays, but the past few weeks i've been so busy with either gardening or cafe work, i haven't been able to do much of that. it's also been a long time since i did any cooking, the past few weeks have been mostly frozen foods, instant noodles, or canned goods. tonight would be much of the same. i ended up heating a brick of lasagna in the oven, timed it so my food was ready right at the start of game 4 between the celtics-heat in miami. down 0-3, the celtics needed to win or face elimination. the heat won the first quarter, but boston tied in the 2nd, with miami with a 6-point lead going into halftime. in the third quarter boston exploded 38-23, and padded their lead even more in the 4th with 28-20. the final score was 116-99, the celtics live to see another day. could they make history by being the only NBA team to ever come back to win it after being down 0-3? certainly they don't need to look any further than the boston red sox, who was down 0-3 against the yankees in the league championship, only to come back and beat the yankees. if celtics can win game 5 in boston, then that gives them a fighting chance, with the series then being 3-2. i'm just happy the celtics didn't get swept. their 3-point game was clicking tonight, though i wish they weren't so dependent on it. but celtics also attacked the basket more, which opened up the 3-point game.
PX asked me what to do with the housekey tomorrow; apparently he's returning to his apartment. i told him to drop it off at the cafe, but if the apartment is still too dusty to be livable, i told him he was free to return and stay here another night. in terms of very short term roommate, he wasn't bad, stays in his room, came out a few times to watch some basketball.