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i set my alarm to 9am this morning, so i could beat the rainstorm that was coming and get to belmont beforehand. i checked the weather app though, and it radar was showing the rain wouldn't come until 12-1pm. i slept for another hour before finally get up at 10am.

i biked to belmont around 11am. i told my mother it wasn't going to rain until 1pm and she still had time to go out for a walk. i ended up going with her. she usually takes a loop around the reservoir, i took her on a new path, one then went uphill and behind burbank school then downhill to the high school and back. she'd never been this way before. by the time we were a few blocks away from home, it started drizzling lightly.

i had a chinatown sponge cake for lunch. when the rain started to pick up, i went out into the backyard with an umbrella to admire the garlics. the rain, the sun, the cold, the chicken manure, it's all the things garlics like.

later in was in the basement doing my weekly weekend plant maintenance. first i swabbed any mealybugs i saw with alcohol. then i sprayed any additional areas with neem oil. finally i watered the plants with some mosquito bit-soaked water. since it was raining out, i figured i could fill a bucket with rain water if i just left it out in the backyard. but the plastic sheet my father had placed over the basement entrance managed to funnel all that rain water into a central location that i could then collect with a bucket.

in the late afternoon my father cut up the last of our homegrown buttercup squash. even though it looked old and the green had faded on the outside, on the inside the squash was right orange and still fragrant, a miracle that it was able to keep for all these winter months. my father used the squash to make some sweet porridge. my parents also made some beef patties, cooked in the electric baking pan. we ended up eating "dinner" around 3:30pm.

i helped my father use imovie on his macbook pro. he learned how to split clips, extract music from youtube videos, embed the music back into his silent movies, and export and reencode the videos for the web. he made a video of my grandfather organizing a sports competition and another video of my 2nd uncle's marriage (circa 1963-1964). this was using old 16mm film that was converted to video (VHS) that he later transferred onto digital8 before now finally converting it into video files.

i left around 6:30pm. it was still raining, i drove one of the cars. earlier i'd already stashed the bike in the backyard, underneath a tarp. my plan is to drive to my coronavirus vaccine appointment tomorrow in medford square before returning the car in belmont.

i finally had a chance to turn up the heat, which was the first thing i did when i came home. but it was still warm enough that once the temperature reached 65°F, the heat never did fire up again for the rest of the night.

i tested the slow fermented jiu niang, it's day 4. there was already a layer of liquid at the bottom. it smelled like jiu niang (which is always a good sign) but when i tried it, it was only blandly sweet. the good things is there was no sourness, but it still needs a few more days before it'll reach peak sweetness. so the questions i have are: is it not very sweet because of the long-grain rice; or is because the temperature was too cold in my house? i'm leaning towards temperature reason. another test i could do is to run simultaneous fermentation of short-grain and long-grain glutinous rice. that way i can rule out if sweetness is dependent on the grain-type.

feeling a bit hungry because i had dinner in the afternoon, i had an instant cup of korean ramen. i ate while watching old SVU episodes before finally seeing the latest episode of for all mankind.

finally, i checked my seedlings. the transplanted hyacinth bean from last night, the one i replanted kind of crooked, i was happy to see it growing perfectly straight now, and about to unfurl its first leaves.