after fiddling around with the broken juicer last night - taking it apart and putting it back together to see how it functions - i found nothing wrong with it. so i was excited to give it a second try in the hopes that it'd work this time. but when i attached the cone and tried to juice an orange half, once again it grounded to a halt. there simply isn't enough torque, the slightest resistance can stop the gearing. so i went back to my old braun juicer, and was dismayed to discover that it too was succumbing to jamming. finally i had to bust out my manual juice press which has been sitting in a box on top of my kitchen cabinet gathering dust.

the metrokane mighty OJ was definitely manufactured prior to 1994, because no product today would brand itself anything "OJ" as that term is largely associated with the infamous OJ simpson now. billed as a 'classic retro '50's design', it's actually kind of expensive, retailing for $45 but purchased at a discount of $34.99 from kitchen etc. i don't remember ever using it, but it was heavily stained (some mysterious red juice), like maybe a former roommate secretly tried it out but put it back into the box without washing it first. the might OJ is heavy, and at no time was i not worried that the metal handle would somehow snap and i'd smash the glass of orange juice to smithereens. however, it did work, but there was a lot of waste, i probably only extracted 50-75% of the juice.

later i went online to buy a new juicer. the default was the $16 plastic black+decker, but it was too similar to the broken juicer i found so i was looking to avoid that mistake. the $27 cuisinart brushed stainless CCJ-500 looked promising, but the motor was only 25W, simply not enough power, and actually less than the all plastic black+decker which is 30W. the top of the line home juicer was the die-cast stainless-steel breville 800CPXL 110W, but that thing costs $200, and as much as i love squeezing my own OJ, i wasn't going to pay $200 for the privilege. there was a $50 eurolux juicer with an astonishing 160W; it looked promising but the plastic handle seemed like it would break at some point, better to have less parts to worry about. i finally decided on the $41.50 epica citrus juicer. it had a 70W motor which wasn't bad (my braun juicer had a 60W motor). the motor does a weird thing where it shuts down if it overheats, and only works again after it's cooled down. the reamer doesn't autoreverse, but i read some reviews that said autoreversing is just a gimmick, and a single direction rotating reamer with enough power will very easily juice any citrus. it also had 3162 reviews, 90% of which was 4-5 stars. i noticed the price had gone up within the past few weeks (from $37), but it wasn't worth it to save a few dollars by waiting for the price to come down again, especially since i could get free 1-day shipping and have it delivered by tomorrow.

i rode down to the cafe in the late morning to deliver the orange juice, as well as two containers of tea eggs, 1 jar of korean kimchi, and various jarred condiments for rice porridge which i had in my fridge but never got around to eating. plus i brought samples of norwegian food for my parents to try. my mother was more vocal, but instead of commenting on the norwegian leverpostei or caviar paste, she couldn't get over how hard my ficelle bread was, which sort of ruined the experience for her. she tried one of the tea eggs, said it was okay, but could use some more simmering on low heat to get more flavor into the eggs. i returned home by noontime, quickly ate a tea egg myself (2 days in the brine, already salty enough, but i'll keep on soaking them), before going out again, this time to a harvard lecture at CGIS south: mobilizing without the masses given by diana fu.

the lecture was interesting, but a lot of intellectual speak, which fortunately i was able to follow. the gist of the talk was how chinese labor movements mobilize their workers when common labor tools like strikes are illegal in china. the field research was done in the previous administration of hu jintao, which was more open to labor activities. under the current xi jinping administration (and now that he's abolished term limits, emperor xi jinping) there's not only been a crackdown on labor movements under the authoritarian catch-all of social unrest prevention, but such activities have also been criminalized. unable to mobilize the masses, workers still demonstrate, but as individuals coached by clandestine labor organizers who don't explicitly tell workers to demonstrate (many workers can't, at the very least they lose their jobs, at the very worst they go to prison), but educate them in terms of what rights they should have and present them with examples of successful singular demonstrations in the past. one technique is the use of a "suicide show" where a lone worker threatens to kill himself unless certain work demands are met.

after the lecture i went to market basket to get a few more grocery items, including the unicorn cereal, which i couldn't stop thinking about when i saw it a few days ago. apparently it's a hot item because there was only one box left. the sky got progressively cloudier, big puffy patches of low flying clouds. i also got a container of drain-o max gel which i used on my bathtub drain. i plunged it a week and a half ago, but the past few days it started to clog up again, so i needed to go with a chemical solution now. half a bottle of drain-o was all it took to get the drain working again. i'll plunge it again for good measure within the next few days, after enough time for the drain-o to clear the pipes.

we had solid production the whole morning but by afternoon it dropped due to the increasing clouds. we still made 36.60 kWh today, which is pretty good (it's not every day we can set a record). if we make about 30kWh+ every day, we'll easily produce 1000kWh a month, which equals 1 SREC, which means money in the bank.

i went back to chicken caesar salad for dinner. this time i only used half a grilled chicken breast, and added some onions as well. it was still a pretty big bowl of salad, but i was able to finish it all, unlike the last time. i still have another half piece of chicken left in the fridge, enough for one more salad, but i also have some leftover beef stew, hopefully it hasn't gone bad and i can have that for dinner tomorrow.