after fixing my bike seat, i pedaled to belmont. it was warm today, enough to remind people that summer isn't over yet. i wore shorts and a t-shirt. when i got to my parents' place my father was finishing up mowing the lawn. i had lion's head meatball soup for lunch along with some radish cakes. later i ate half a mini watermelon.

i collected all the dried nigella seed pods and came back inside to collect the seeds. i also collected a small dish of columbine seeds, and a dish of alyssum seeds.

my godmother stopped by the house in the late afternoon to take photos of our flowers and garden plants. my father and i were busy removing crabgrass from the backyard and reseeding then covering up with a light layer of soil. we did the same to the front yard, that little stretch of sidewalk grass, yellowing in spots due to the asphalt bottom layer plus repeated dog urinations.

right before dinner john broke some sad news: his mother passed away last tuesday, the funeral service is this saturday. he said she was still running 4 miles a day in may, but was hospitalized at the end of the month as soon as she received her cancer diagnosis, and went into hospice care by the end of july. i'd wanted to ask him about his mother's condition weeks ago but i didn't want to bother him because he was busy with the house move, plus i didn't know if i could handle the bad news.

my mother finally cooked some of the fermented long beans, before it went bad (easy for fermented food to get moldy once out of the brine). we only had quarter of our original amount because my parents gave some away to my sister's godmother and my 2nd aunt. there was also another older batch in the paocai jar i gave them on thursday, but i didn't want to mix the two flavors. she chopped up the beans and stir fried them with some ground pork and chili peppers. these beans had only been fermenting for 10 days before they were removed from the jar; even though they tasted sour, there was also a raw bean taste. the final result was okay, but the beans could've been improved with a longer ferment. we also had some costo-bought calamari salad.

after dinner i biked home. i stopped at the park when i noticed some pinkish-blue large cumulus clouds hovering on the horizon, like mountains. i took some photos but they didn't do it justice, and the clouds soon sunk lower on the horizon where i couldn't see them very well.