my parents showed up on a saturday, normally their day off. my sister asked my mother to dogsit hailey while my sister worked at the cafe. my father was at the cafe to help out in case it got busy, like it's been for the past few saturdays.
however it never got quite as busy as in past weekends. the influx of taiwanese customers never showed up, so it was back to our normal saturday crowd. we didn't make as much as last saturday, but we've made enough the rest of this week that we'd already surpasses last week's margins, so any bit of business today was just bonus.
the bit of drama today was when an indian customer driving a jeep ran over our deck rail planter. i heard a crashing sound so i looked outside but didn't see anything other than the driver parking his car nearly blocking our back entrance. but when i went out to look a second time, that's when i saw the crushed planter with dirt spilling out. by then the driver was gone. when i went to inform my sister and father, that's when i saw the guy, making a food order. "that guy in the sunglasses ran over our flowers!" i shouted in chinese. when my sister confronted him, he said oh yes, he was going to take a photo of the damage. i'm not sure he even apologized, but did say he'd pay for the damage. i told my father the planter costs $20, but somehow the driver haggled the price down to $15. to add insult to injury, he paid with a $100 bill and we could hardly find the change for him since most of our customers just use paperless payments.
my 2nd aunt brought some yellow bean sprouts she got from chinatown, asked me to turn them into a korean-style banchan. i don't really have a recipe, the few times i've made it were sort of improvised after consulting a few ingredients online. the basic "sauce" is just: 1 large tablespoon of gochujang, half a teaspoon of sea salt, half a teaspoon of fish sauce, a teaspoon of mirin, a teaspoon of sesame oil, and several minced garlic cloves. i'd probably add some dried red korean pepper flakes for texture and color which i didn't do today. i blanched the bean sprouts in boiling water for a minute, before soaking them in ice water then draining them dry. i mixed the sprouts with the sauce, along with some chopped scallions and roasted sesame seeds. it turned out pretty good, my 2nd aunt ate them with some rice and leftover chicken, saving the rest for my mother.
after we closed, while we were preparing to leave, my 2nd aunt snuck 3 portuguese egg tarts into my backpack. she made it a secret because there wasn't enough for my sister. i think she originally brought them for herself, my sister, and me, but she wasn't expecting my parents to be there as well, so it threw off her math.
we finally left by 4:30pm. arriving in belmont, there were a few packages on the doorstep: our 10A MPPT solar controller with various SAE cables and adapters from amazon; our latest temu order. the temu package was mostly clothes my mother ordered, through there was some plastic shower curtain rings and a 3-in-1 vegetable rotary peeler ($2.48) for me.
after finishing the portuguese egg tarts, my father tested out the MPPT controller. it's functionality is pretty basic, we won't know the true extent of the controller until we can actually connect it to a solar panel, and that won't be until tomorrow, since there wasn't enough sun at the moment. it did seem pretty close to the voltage value on the battery monitor display on the battery box.
we also checked out our 20A HQST MPPT controller in the basement currently recharging a sealed 35Ah lead acid battery from a 50W solar panel which runs out 12v rain water pump. when we first got the controller we could connect to it via bluetooth to see some historical charging data, but now we couldn't see the controller at all via bluetooth when using the app. that was the other reason for testing the controller, as i discovered a different (better) app to use. i even unplugged the battery, but no matter what i did, the controller wasn't visible via bluetooth. i think the built-in bluetooth module might actually be broken, so i contacted HQST, sent them a message asking for a solution. supposedly (at least from their amazon info) there's a 3-year warranty, and we got this controller back in january 2022. even if HQST won't honor the warranty the controller still works, we just can't monitor it on a phone app via bluetooth.
as is my usual saturday tradition, i didn't bother going out into the backyard, figured i'd do that tomorrow. for dinner my mother made beef noodle soup from some leftover broth they had at the cafe. she also made a thai stir-fry using eggplants and thai basil grown from the backyard.
i returned home around 7pm.
this morning was the match for 3rd place between sweden and australia. i meant to wake up in the middle of the night to see it, but by the time i checked the score the game was already over, sweden beat australia 2-0. the final is tomorrow at 6am, between spain and england. if i wake up in time i might try to catch a bit of the game live, otherwise i'll just find out the result later when i do wake up for real. i'm rooting for spain.