10:15am was when i left the house this morning for the cafe via motorcycle. i left a bit early, figured i'd get a headstart on some pre-opening preparations like cooking the rice. i decided to make a fresh batch of tea eggs, so they'll be nice and seasoned by next week. my sister saw hailey barking on her webcam so i went over to make sure everything was okay. i also set up the eufy cam instead of the wyze cam for better resolution and notifications. when i came back to the cafe, my 2nd aunt was already there.
it wasn't too busy today, but we did have spurts of business, where suddenly there's be 3-4 orders. it was busy the first hour we opened, then another hour in the afternoon. it was too hot for anyone to be sitting outside, but we put a table and some seats out anyway, in case somebody wanted to get heat stroke. my aunt and matthew showed up unexpectedly: my aunt was dropping off a wooden foot massager for my mother, along with some pastries they got in allston-brighton. my neighbor victor made a surprise appearance; i heard someone repeatedly whispering my name until i looked over and saw him. he was in the neighborhood attending susan's art exhibit, which happened to be in the gallery near by. i would've stopped by, but there's so many things to do before closing time that i wasn't able to go.
we ran out of sausages and i cooked some in the air fryer after first thawing out some frozen ones. it turned out to be a real mess, the inside of the kitchen splattered with sticky oily residue. later i found out did have some cooked frozen sausages, and i did all that work for naught. my sister also finally finished making the ramen bone broth. it took forever for the large pot of soup base to cool down, and even then it was still 120 degrees by the time we ladled the soup into individual containers. i only recently learned about rapid cool paddles, used for quickly chilling hot soup items; we'll probably be getting one to speed up our food preparation.
i left the cafe around 4:30pm. when i got to belmont, my father fired up the portable 12v refrigerator for the very first time. he filled the inside with drinks and set the temperature to 36 degrees. the fridge was at 78 degrees, it took about an hour on medium setting to reach 36 degrees. from the outside it looked a bit cheap, like a regular plastic cooler, but it's well insulated enough that i couldn't feel any cool air escaping. my father ran it off of our DIY lithum battery, to see how long it can run before it finally stops. from youtube videos it looks like maybe we can run it for at least 2 days straight off of a 100Ah battery. even though the portable refrigerator was cold, the drinks themselves were still warm, and would probably take another hour or so before they reach the same temperature as the fridge.
while we were testing our fridge, my mother came out of her bedroom and said my sister cut her fingers and might need to go to the hospital. so my parents quickly raced to my sister's place to check up on her. this seemed parallel to the time i sliced open my thumb back in 2009. turns out she had a mishap with a razor removing debris from her windowpane and accidentally cut herself. at worst, a very deep paper cut down her finger, not enough to go to the hospital.
my mother was in no mood to cook, and when they came back from my sister's place, she said we were ordering out tonight, which meant either domino's or burger king. we ended up going with the pizza option. my mother didn't even want pizza, but ordered a chicken caesar salad instead. i got a medium sausage and onion pizza, as well as a serving of their new philly cheese steak "loaded tots". my father and i drove down to cushing square to pick up the order.
loaded tots turned out to be tater tots served in a nacho style, covered in peppers and bacon and loads of cheese. i returned home around 7:30pm.
there's a good chance of rain overnight into tomorrow morning and the rest of sunday. i decided not to cover up the motorcycle, as it was covered in dark staining tree sap from the locust tree in front of the house. a good rainstorm is like a free bike wash.