my father showed me the 24" adjustable shelving unit that we were originally going to return but then my mother though my 2nd aunt could use one before my father assembled one of the units and realized it was too low (30in high). now we're using it to hold our takeout orders.
my father tried using the tayama rice cooker again, reducing the water. the rice came out better, but there are other things wrong with the rice cooker. for one thing, the lid opens to the side, when our previous rice cooker opens to the back. the tayama also has a tendency to burn the rice when left in keep warm mode for a few hours. when it came time to cook more rice, my father switched back to our old zojirushi.
it was a busy day. once lunchtime arrived, we were non-stop from 12 to 2pm. i ate what i could: little pieces of leftover charsiu, an ugly edamame bean, a mug of ice tea.
around 3pm i went on a supply run to fresh pond mall. at whole foods i got bean sprouts and cilantro, at trader joe's i bought baby cucumbers and linguine noodles. the whole time i had my eyes on the clouds, where they were churning in the sky, looking particularly sinister.
when i got back to the cafe my aunt had already left (she dropped by for some charsiu bento). i already felt some drops so we brought in all the deck furnitures and closed the umbrella.
between 4-6pm it was raining. at one point it was downpour and saw riverlets of water running down the parking lot. it was also a thunderstorm no less, flashes of lightning and explosive thunder punctuating the storm. it seemed like we were in a deluge, but later i learned the boston area only got 0.40 inch worth of rain. definitely enough to fill our rain barrels, but i thought we got more rain than that. our next change of rain is wednesday-thursday. if we can get some rain every week, it will help revive our plants.
by that point it was very busy and my father said i could go home, but because it was raining, i stayed until after 6pm, when the rain finally let up. i put the rain cover on my bike seat but it was still wet, no match for a downpour. when i got back home, the moving van was still parked outside: my next door neighbors (the biracial couple) are moving out. i didn't get a chance to say good-bye to them, hopefully i'll bump into them tomorrow morning.
it was 10 degrees warmer in the house, and i opened a few windows and ran the fan to ventilate. i checked my backyard deck plants, make sure they didn't drown in the rain.
as is tradition for friday nights, i made my luxury korean ramen for dinner. the redacted trump search warrant affidavit was released today at noon, so i watched a few news shows to get a summary of what they found. it basically said the justice department tried asking trump for more than a year to return the documents, and he finally did return some early this year, but there was reason to believe he had more. sure enough, when they searched mar-a-lago, they found exactly that, including even more super sensitive top secret files. the most important question is: why? was he just a hoarder? but there were stuff that you needed special clearance to obtain (even for the then-president), so how did he get them?