i slept until 10am this morning. temperature was in the lower 30's but breezy, too cold to go running, so i stayed home instead. for lunch i made some scrambled egg whites with kielbasa sausage and leftover cellophane noodle salad from friday. i also made a matcha latte: 1 tsp of matcha powder mixed with some hot water added to a tall glass of hot milk warmed up in the microwave with a teaspoon of honey.

i spent the early afternoon taking care of some online business. i packed up the pixel 6 pro so i can return it. when i went to go print the mailing label though, i discovered it'd already expired. i searched the web for answers, the problem was USPS's poorly worded instructions. mailing labels are good for 30 days, they don't have to be used the day it's made. i folded the phone in extra bubble wrap before mummifying the box with packaging tape.

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sorting out an ebay return was the other thing i needed to do. my mother and 2nd aunt bought a pair of cashmere sweaters off of ebay. because it was a chinese seller, it took a few weeks to arrive. unfortunately the quality wasn't very good, and the material wasn't even wool, much less cashmere. the label - all in chinese - read 50-70% "viscous fiber" which is most likely some kind of synthetic material.

so i contacted ebay to initiate a return. the seller tried to talk me out of it by offering me a partial refund of $7 for each sweater (sweater itself costs $20 each). after conferring with my mother, we agreed it wasn't enough and still opted to return the items.

because the sweaters don't match the online description, it's the seller's responsible to pay for the return shipping. however the seller refused to pay, mostly because the cost of return shipping from the US back to china would be more than the price of the two sweaters.

so they came back to me with a counter proposal: $10 partial refund for each sweater. my mother ended up agreeing to this, so i told the seller we'd accept. but there was a catch: in order to send me the refund, the seller told me i had to cancel the returns first. but if i cancel the returns, ebay will no longer help me resolve this case since it'd be labeled as closed. the seller kept urging me to cancel the return, promising me they'd send the refund afterwards. but if i did what they asked, i'd have no further recourse if something went wrong. the fact that they lied about the sweaters initially made me not trust them.

so instead i contacted ebay to get the matter resolved. when i told the seller i was doing this, they were very against the idea, said it'd hurt their rating. i called ebay a few nights ago and spoke with an indian-sounding agent. some of her advice wasn't very helpful - like getting the seller to pay me indirectly through paypal - but she told me not to cancel the return, because ebay would not help me with the case afterwards.

i waited until today - during the daytime - to contact ebay again, figuring i'd have a better chance of getting an american agent. instead of a phone call, i got an agent (nicole) on chat. judging by some grammar quirks, i think it was still a foreign agent. but this agent seemed to have a better grip on the situation. after 20 minutes of back and forth, she finally processed the partial refund.

the last thing i did was to contact the seller and tell them what had happened. i ended up doing all the legwork to get the matter resolved. i even told them if they had anymore questions they could contact me. i never did hear back from them.

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wintertime is the best time for baking. today i was either going to make some blueberry muffins or try my hand at some portuguese egg tarts. i ended up going with the muffins. it's been nearly 2 years since i last made blueberry muffins (3 years since i made matcha raisin muffins). as far as baking recipes go, muffins are easy (compared to japanese cheesecake). my plan was to going down to the allston trader joe's to pick up some ingredients - along with a few cafe items. when i called my mother asking her if she needed anything, she told me my father had already went to trader joe's this morning.

so instead i opted to go to nearby market basket. but first i went down to the porter square post office to drop off my phone return. many of the clerks who work there are pretty awful. they're not very helpful, slow to deal with the customers, and are a stickler for postal bureaucracy to the point where it'd be easier just talking to a robot instead of a real human. "what's in this?" the clerk asked me. "i'm returning a phone," i answered. she saw the lithium battery label i put on the back of the box. "i don't think you can send this," she told me, before she went to the back to check. a few minutes later she came back and said the package was okay.

even though it didn't seem that cold according to the weather station, the fact that the temperature was hovering around freezing with a bit of wind made it so that without gloves and a hat it'd be uncomfortable being outside. because of the cold, my eyes started tearing up as i pedaled down somerville avenue towards market basket.

when my parents found out i was going to market basket, they added items to my grocery list. could you pick up some ground pork, coarse grind? a bag of potatoes, dark skin, not light skin. could you pick up some diet coke? it got to the point where i started to worry if i could even carry all that stuff home on my bike. i didn't get the coke, a 12-pack costs $7.50, not including deposit. better to wait for a sale.

after i got home, i went to star market where i saw they had a sale on cokes. it was a weird "buy 2 get 2" deal, but the circular didn't have the price. when i got there i saw a 12-pack cost even more - $10 a pack. that's just crazy. but with the deal, for $20 i could get 4 12-packs, so it comes out to $5 a pack, which is more economical. unfortunately they only had 2 cases of diet coke so i didn't bother getting them. when i got back home and reported what i saw to my mother, she said i should've gotten the diet coke and picked up some regular coke as well. my sister also called me, said her dog needed sugar-free peanut butter. so i went back to star market to get the cokes (i didn't however get any peanut butter).

i made a brown cow as a late afternoon drink. i feel a little guilty drinking it because of how much sugar it contains: 4 large scoops of vanilla ice cream with a cup of root beer. it's also not a drink that can be sipped slowly, since there's ice cream in it, so i pretty much drink it all at once, a big rush of sugar. no wonder i didn't feel sleepy today!

around 6:30pm i started on my muffin recipe. i had most of the ingredients other than frozen blueberries. as soon as i decided i was going to make muffins today, i left a stick of butter out on the countertop to thaw (since late morning).

i first combined all the dry ingredients in a large plastic container with a lid: flour, corn starch, baking powder, salt. i then mixed these ingredients by shaking the container. flour plus corn starch is essentially just cake flour. baking powder helps the muffins rise, and salt is a flavor enhancer.

the hardest part of muffin making is creaming the sugar and butter. i've gotten better at it from all the times i've made muffins. i start with the butter, breaking it apart and mashing it with a wooden spoon. i then add the sugar, working at it with a fork to mix it in with the butter.

normally i add some lemon juice for some acidity. i always thought it made the muffins taste better (tart with sweetness), but then i read the secret to moist and tasty muffins is to add some yogurt instead, which is what i did this time (1 cup) instead of lemon juice.

once the wet ingredients were mixed, i started adding the dry ingredients in thirds, washed with some half and half each time. finally to the batter i added two cups of frozen blueberries. frozen works the best because it thickens the batter, so the berries get suspended within, instead of all sinking to the bottom if the batter was too runny. i then scooped the blueberry muffin batter into the jumbo muffin tin.

i first bake on high temperature (425°F in my case) for 10 minutes. i forgot why i do that. is it to brown the tops first? or to help it rise higher? i checked the oven afterwards, the muffins still seemed flat. i then baked for 30 minutes at a lower temperature (375°F). after half an hour the muffins didn't look brown enough so i baked for another 10 minutes.

the final muffins did end up rising, but not the overflowing mushroom tops like store bought muffins. i think the main culprit is the baking powder. i figured maybe it was 2 years old (since expired), but when i checked the can, the expiration date was november 2020 - over 3 years ago. no wonder they weren't rising. i'll be sure to use fresh baking powder on my next batch.

i didn't eat the muffins though, saving them for tomorrow. instead i boiled some frozen ravioli and heated up some pasta sauce for dinner.

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there was a pacers-celtics game tonight. boston had the lead for most of the game but they weren't able to deliver a decisive finishing blow to indiana, whom - to their credit - never game up and kept battling back. the lead wasn't very big and it'd only take a well-placed run for the pacers to steal the game. pacers' best player haliburton was on minute restriction after his hamstring injury. after clawing back to take the lead down from a 17-point deficit, indiana coach then sat haliburton for the rest of the night. that ended up saving the celtics, as they started rebuilding the lead again, to finally win the game 124-129. final few minutes was a little scary as the pacers chipped away at a 12-point lead to within striking distance of winning the game. celtics need to improve their game in the final few minutes as well as the 3rd quarter which seems to be when they lose focus. pacers outshot the celtics 37-25 in the 3rd quarter.

after the game i finished watching sunday night's episode of true detective. it took me a few days, watching minutes at a time, but i finally finished the episode. there's a lot of supernatural elements this season, to the point where it's not really a detective story grounded in reality, but rather a horror story with ghosts and primordial evil. if you enjoy it as a horror series it's not bad. let's see if they'll stick the landing.

i ran a time machine backup tonight, hoping it'd release some much needed storage space on my computer. the last time i backed up was back in december, so it wasn't that long.

later in the evening i started cleaning up, washing the few pieces of leftover dirty dishes and pans. i got a mini scrubber from market basket, i really like the compact size, makes washing dishes fun again. i also took out the trash. last weekend i didn't bother because i didn't have a lot, so when i went to throw out my compost, there was an awful fishy stink from decomposing fried chicken bones from 2 weeks ago. i also got a new bathroom cleaner that i was excited to try out so i ended up washing my bathtub. i got the cleaner for soap scum on shower curtains, but i realized the cleaner is only for hard surfaces like tiles and glass. supposedly it had a eucalyptus smell but i didn't notice any fragrance.

need to get to the cafe early tomorrow, my mother told me this afternoon that they have two large morning orders coming in.