i went to market basket this morning to pick up a few things (yellow bean sprouts, baby cucumbers). if the lack of available parking space on the bike rack is any indication, this is going to be a crazy christmas weekend for supermarkets. afterwards i went to work at the cafe by 11am. my mother had already warmed up the reserve batch of tea eggs so i made another new batch to take its place. because of the slow week, we didn't need to make as many tea eggs, and still have dozens of eggs left over so we don't need to resupply our eggs just yet.

my latest temu package arrived yesterday, my parents brought it to the cafe today. it included a penguin-shaped fridge deodorizer ($3.32), some bird whistles ($3.98), and a set of silicone kitchen spatulas ($5.94).

my mother made some scallion bread with some of the leftover scallions i bought from haymarket last friday. we reheated some portuguese custard tarts and i ate two. my aunt came to the cafe and invited us to her house for christmas eve dinner. she left before my 2nd aunt showed up directly from chinatown. she bought a large container of stir-fried rice noodles for just $6 and i had some for late lunch. she also bought some sesame-paste filling glutinous rice balls that we cooked and ate a bit later.

my father printed out the manual for the new quansheng firmware and was studying it today. he said documentation for the 3rd party firmware is more robust than quansheng's own documentation. the ability to flash the firmware makes the quansheng the baofeng-killer in terms of low cost handheld transceivers. i'm curious if quansheng will introduce a new version of their radio with slightly larger memory space to allow even more firmware upgrades.

i returned home around 5pm. a package waited for me on the doorstep, i thought it was something cool, but it was just the saliva specimen test kit for the mass general hospital genetic research i'm taking part in. for dinner i had some luosifen.