before i left for the cafe for my saturday shift, i searched throughout the house for the bag of microwave parts from my previous oven. i striped it for just this exact occasion, and wouldn't know you it, i can't find it now. i even went down to the basement, but couldn't find it. i did find my missing bike seat though, looked for that last time, now it just mysteriously showed up.
i got to the cafe by 10:30am, but my parents had already been there since 10am.
i remembered to bring my samsung tv remote, and put the samsung 32" HDTV i found on thursday on top of the unstable corner shelving unit. besides being the perfect place for a small tv, there's a DIY HDTV antenna we built a long time ago (using 2x4's and wire hangers) still hanging from the wall. i connected everything and then turned the tv on with the remote (which worked, despite it being from a slightly different model samsung HDTV). i navigated the menu to tv channel scan. after a few minutes, it came back with 55 channels, every single one of them with a strong signal. i was seeing channels i'd never even seen before. a lot of the subchannels were broadcasting old shows from the 70's and 80's, totally up my alley. i watched a little bit of mcmillan & wife (1971-1977) on cozi, a show i'd never seen before but only vaguely heard about, starring rock hudson and susan st. james. there was also the phantom gourmet on channel 38, and a tales from the darkside marathon on comet tv. working at the cafe just got a lot more entertaining. and if we get a roku or chromecast, we'll have more options. and to think, i got it all for the very low price of free.
my godmother showed up on a rare saturday visit. it was just as busy as last saturday, but with so many people working at the cafe today - my parents, my 2nd aunt, myself - there wasn't any order we couldn't fulfill. we had every time of order we could get, from walk-ins, to call-ins, to square online, grubhub delivery, and finally uber eats. once more we got a lot of taiwanese customers, all of them we'd never seen before. not too bad, considering it was the long labor day weekend, and all over town curbs were empty as anyone with the means to get away did so for the unofficial last weekend of summer.
the day went by quickly, and before we knew it it was 4pm closing time. after we finished cleaning up, left for belmont, arriving by 4:30pm. i saw some people at the nearby park doing something in what looked to be ham radio operation. i told my father and he took off to check it out without waiting for me. after unloading the car, i watered the newly patched spots on the front lawn. my father came back before i was done, said they were doing some sort of field radio stuff using a computer, operating in the 16-20m bandwidth.
i brought home the broken microwave hoping i could fix it, but i forgot to bring my security bits so i couldn't get the oven open to check to see if the switch was indeed broken.
i did help my father do some preliminary work to set up our spare 12V DC transfer pump so we can get it working for the front lawn using water from our rain barrels. we currently only have a pump working for the backyard. this required the use of a wifi DC power switch than can be controlled remotely via phone app. we wired up the DC switch first. it was our first use of the newly purchased replacement head crimping tool set. my father had some open-barreled copper ring connectors. we couldn't figure out how to use the crimper on the connectors until after i consulted some youtube videos. my father said he was going to just crimp them by hand and apply some solder, but eventually we did managed to crimp on 2 ring terminals to some thin self-braided wires. the crimper tool made perfect crimps we could never reproduce using pliers and solder. we hooked the DC switch to our lithium battery to test. for some reason we could never get any voltage on the output end, no matter how much we probed the NC/NO/COM ports. it was my father we figured out that the ports themselves don't provide any power; we have to supply the power to the ports, hooking up our pump along the way, to create a closed circuit. it took a while to understand the logic, until i finally drew up a diagram. we'll continue with our build tomorrow.
in the meantime my father had to make dinner, fried some panko-breaded pork cutlets on the stove top. they came out extra crispy, and my mother was nearly finished with her two porkchops by the time my father was done frying. ideally "tonkatsu" goes with tonkatsu sauce, but we didn't have any in belmont (in hindsight, i could've made my own, but not sure if i had all the ingredients), so we used ketchup instead.
i left by 7:30pm, but it took me a while to leave as i was trying to mount my gopro-attached selfie stick using the two double-ended clamping mounts. i found out there was no real good place on the motorcycle frame for the mounts. the only place the two could attach was across the handlebar. i set up something so the camera was mounted slightly above my head at an angle as i rode home. everything was very secure, nothing fell off or shook loose. when i got back and reviewed the footage, it wasn't that good. it was shot at an awkward angle, more like a vertical video. also the camera was tilted too far back, so it got mostly the back of the motorcycle. i think next time instead of mounting the gopro camera to the end of the selfie stick, i'm going to mount the gopro camera on its usual clamp mount, that way i can rotate and adjust the camera so at least it's horizontal.
i ended up buying a new microwave even though i might be able to fix the old one. the $150 panasonic NN-SN686S deal on amazon was set to expire in a few hours. it's a good microwave, i'm just not in love with the staggered button placements. but i looked around and couldn't find a better deal for a 1.2 cu.ft. 1200W microwave with inverter technology (only other company that uses inverter is LG). so i went ahead and ordered. worst case scenario is we return this one if i managed to fix the old oven, but we may also keep it, and donate the repaired oven to my parents, who are currently using a dinky tiny microwave after their old one broke.