i went to the cafe in the mid-afternoon to do more winterization stuff on my motorcycle in the tool shed. only my father was there, my mother having left with her friend nancy and my sister's godmother on a walk to fresh pond plaza and back. the 3 things i needed to do for the bike was 1) oil the chain, 2) run the engine to use up the gasoline left in the carburetor, and 3) remove the battery (so it can be maintenance-charged indoors). temperature was in the lower 40's today so it wasn't that cold, but holding the metal can of spray grease froze my fingers after a while, and my nose was running the whole time. after i finished i reassembled everything and put the cover on. with the way the weather's been so warm this winter, there's a good chance i could have the motorcycle back out on the road by march.

back at the cafe, i installed a memory card into the webcam, so it can record video on a schedule. little use of a security camera if it can't record. the 64GB microSDXC card arrived yesterday. i formatted it to FAT32 so the foscam camera can read it. it used to have a memory card but i took it for some other use. i found an unused fido jar in the cafe basement, took it back with me so i can make sichuan paocai with it. i helped my father fill out some medical assistance form for my grand uncle. this way the city pays us to take care of him. finally, before i left, i ordered online 2x 6" sweet onion chicken teriyaki sub from subway. monday is chicken teriyaki day, so each is only $3.50. i went to go pick it up from the somerville avenue store before returning home.

by that point it was already 4pm and i was eating something for the first time today. i ate half (6"), saving the rest for later. it was pretty good, not bad for just $3.50. of course i still remember the days of the $5 foot-long. now their cheapest foot-long sub is their $6 steak and cheese special (maybe i'll get that for tomorrow).

temperature plays a strong part in fermentation. whenever the heat in my house goes from 60°F to 70°F, both my curtido and sauerkraut go crazy. when i woke up this morning, cabbage juice had leaked into my curtido airlock. the bell in the sauerkraut airlock was floating to the top, when typically there's no activity in sauerkraut jar. i repeatedly tapped the curtido jar on the tabletop to get the air to escape upwards and for the liquid level to go back down. in the evening when i turned up my heat again, both the curtido and sauerkraut were fermenting again. this time liquid had actually spilled out of the curtido jar. i'm really tempted to just open the jar and put all the solids back down, but i don't want to risk contamination. the fermentation will slow down eventually after the first few days of heavy activity. i just don't want any of the liquids to leak out. maybe if i had more head clearance, say if i fermented in a large fido jar (apparently they off-gas despite the rubber gasket seal).

later in the evening i finished off that second chicken teriyaki sub. i discovered last night that the young pope had already been broadcasted in europe. this meant all the episodes were already available online, so i went ahead and grabbed all 10 episodes. one thing i began to notice while watching the show was the parallel between the young pope and our soon-to-be-president donald trump, both men seemingly unqualified for the job at hand, both mercurial narcissists.