i went to the garden this morning to water, on my way to belmont. it must've rained a little bit overnight, because i noticed a lot of leaves were wet. i harvested a few more tomatoes (regular and cherry), some long beans, and a bitter melon. i noticed another ripe orange bitter melon, going to wait for it to burst before collecting the red seeds. even though i currently don't have any hyacinth beans, i see new shoots emerging that will be future flowers and then future beans. likewise with the long beans: i didn't see any new flowers, but there was a bunch last week, and now i'm going to receive a flush of long beans before they flower again.

arriving in belmont, my parents were also harvesting. my mother went around the raised beds snipping off long beans. we also found a few dried blue bean pods and some dried long beans. the blue bean pods didn't look like anything, but when we broke through the dried pods, there were some dark blue bean seeds on the inside. we currently have about a dozen blue bean seeds total. if we're looking to grow a lot of them for next season, i'd like to get some more seeds, 30-40 at least.

for lunch i had a fried pancake rolled up with some pork floss. my mother finished watching reacher last night, and i recommended to her jack ryan, which i remember her saying she'd watched, but she didn't remember any of it, so started watching from season 1 episode 1. my sister dropped off hailey in the early afternoon. i replaced the living room wyze 2 webcam with a eufy 2k webcam. the has better clarity and it doesn't have the wzye's annoying limitation of only recording one video notification every 5 minutes. finally, we put up some curtains in my mother's bedroom using the spring tension curtain rod i bought a few weeks ago. we thought it was too long, but i managed to press it down hard enough so it was just 30 inches long, wide enough for the window. the western facing window currently has cellular shades, but my mother said they're too bright and they wake her up in the morning. there was just enough space in the window's inner dimension to install the tension rod in front of the shades (it helps that the shades are soft).

in the late afternoon i went outside to water the garden. i noticed the rain barrel gauge showed the barrels were at 1/4 capacity. i told my father, he said that was enough to water the garden for 2 days.

many of the blue bean leaves have white spots, especially the older leaves. there are also similar spots on neighboring plants, like ground cherries. it is climate related, heat damage from the dry and hot weather? or is it disease? or perhaps insects? my money is on insect damage, but i haven't seen any bugs other than a few flea beetles. could they have done all that damage? the problem is further exacerbated by the lack of additional plants, which would not only provide additional food choices for bugs, but more importantly, they attract beneficial insects, like ladybugs and drone flies. they used to be everywhere last season, but this year i've hardly seen them at all.

my father has been having some issues with our DIY lithium battery boxes. he's been running the thermoelectric cooler from one of the batteries, but after so many hours, the battery would shut down. the issue seemed to be BMS related but we couldn't figure out the reason. so he tried it with the other battery, and like the other one, it too shut down after a while. we finally realized the reason was we were cutting off the battery at 12.8V. technically a LiFePo4 battery can go lower than that, but in order to increase the longevity of the batteries, we set the low voltage cutoff to that amount. so everything worked as it should, and it's not because of bad battery cells.

for dinner my father cooked a tofu & chicken sausage stirfry and a long bean & bacon stirfry. he added thai basil to the bacon, which tasted weird, and it's probably my fault because i'd harvested a bowl of thai basil earlier (pulled off the flowers). we also had some bitter melon salad, which included the bitter melon i collected from my own garden, which my father said was already pretty ripe (leave it on the vine too long, the bitter melons will turn orange and you can't eat it after that).

there was some breaking evening news: the CIA launched a precision drone strike killing al-zawahiri who was hiding out in kabul, afghanistan. i almost forgot about him (he still alive?): after the death of bin laden, i figured al qaeda had been demolished, didn't realize al-zawahiri had taken the reins. are there anymore targets left for the US related to the 9/11 attack?

after returning home, i took a shower. i spent the rest of the night doing hydroponic/aeroponic/fogponic research. i definitely want to try building a low pressure aeroponic rig to grow some chinese mustard (which coincidentally the seeds arrived today). i also did some photo backups, to clear up space on my computer.