Life

I didn’t sleep well this week, and actually didn’t sleep at all on Sunday night, while only sleeping for two hours on Tuesday night. Due to a combo of stress and/or excitement about the two big upcoming events, and the noisy asshole above pacing back and forth all night (and the loud white noise suppression I have to run at all hours) that I’ll be rid of soon. While this meant that I was very tired the next day afterwards, it also meant that I had really good nights of sleep the two following nights.

I haven’t booked any aspect of my trip or any of the stuff I need for moving yet, but I did chat with my enlistment officer over at CMPB to confirm that Singapore still does not have a travel ban against me and that the letter she gave me was still valid while my case is under (seemingly perpetual) review. She confirmed that it was.

The rental managers came by to do a pre-inspection check on the apartment early in the week, and then later on in the week, sent John by again to do a few touch-ups. He changed the toilet light switch so that the ventilator was linked to the lights, added a curtain rod above my bedroom window, and changed the kitchen sink’s faucet, though not the actual sink itself. Here are some before and after pictures.

Bathroom light and ventilator switch (with the panel removed):

New one:

Curtain rod in bedroom (the “old” one was just no rod there — for curtains in the bedroom I’ve always just used the extendible pole that presses up against the insides of the window frame to keep it up, as we “weren’t allowed to have or install curtain rods” when I first moved in.

The sink, with the old, rusty faucet taken out. I feel like that faucet already got replaced once, actually, and is only 3-4 years old at this point, whereas the sink is easily 10+ years old and all scuffed.

The old sink with its new faucet:

I like this faucet style much better, but I don’t like this specific faucet because it seems to default to hot rather than cold in the middle, and I tend to stand slightly to the right of the sink when using it anyway due to where my garbage bag is, so when I flip the tap on it tends to skew left, which makes the water even hotter.

He also replaced some bulbs in the bathroom — and then came back the very next day to remove all of them again, as he was given a directive from the housing agent to just go ahead and replace most of the lights in the unit as well.

They were bulbs and pale yellow incandescent lights before, now they’re all bright white LED ones which he says the housing staff wanted to put in to cut down on labour costs (i.e. his job!) as they didn’t have bulbs that need replacing or something like that. Um, okay. They’re blinding like the sun, too.

Here is John replacing the front hallway light:

You can see the bathroom and its lights in the background — it was a long metal strip with three holes for light bulbs set into it. Once those got removed, it looked like this:

And then once the new lights were installed, it looked like this:

Then the kitchen light went too:

I definitely remembered him from last time and he sort of recognized and remembered me with a bit of prodding. I told him I was moving to a new unit nearby (he said he had been there recently too and it was a good unit) and then would be looking to buy a house in the next seven months or so. We chatted a bunch as he worked, and then the next day when he returned again, though for some reason there were two or three stories that he repeated over and over, something like seven times each in an hour — one was to always check any forms before you sign them when buying a new place and to not trust lawyers that say they’ll change them later and jump at the early move-in option if I was buying a new townhouse or something because he had been bitten by that in the past, but that currently it was a buyer’s market and all the lawyers would be fighting over the commission.

And the second was that Canada kept requiring him to declare some overseas property he had in Malaysia and money he had in a Singapore account even though he wasn’t earning anything on it so he was going back there later this year to sell it all and consolidate his funds back in Canada. And something about how the Malaysian dollar (the ringgit) used to be worth $2 to 1 Singapore dollar, and he thought it’d stabilize there, but then that rose to $3, and now to $3.60, with people expecting it to hit $4 Malaysian to $1 Singapore dollar soon, due to the political instability of having four ruling party changes in a year

Not sure why he kept repeating those two stories. Third on the list, a bit behind those two in frequency with about four or five mentions, was how he had a teacher friend in Singapore who made a lot of money doing tuition as a second job for students as Chinese parents put a lot of pressure on students there now and how he pitied the younger generation there these days that had to suffer under said pressure of having tuition classes every day after school and got in trouble for not having perfect grades.

But anyway he was nice in general and I asked him if he did any freelance house repair/touchup work on the side, hoping for some connections there once I got my own place. He said he used to but not anymore but that he would be happy to help out once I got my own place — we didn’t trade contact information or anything like though. Although I got his surname as well, so now I know his name is John Chee.

He also gave me the light bulbs that he had just replaced the day before, to keep, so that was nice. I lost one bulb that was in the bathroom light strip the previous day (I only used one bulb in it to save slightly on the electricity bill) as I believe he took it with him at that point and I only realized it afterwards, but I gained five new light bulbs of the same size the next day!

The mug I won from a streamer last week arrived this week, so here’s a picture of Tigey next to the mug: It arrived much earlier than expected. I made a nice cup of David’s Tea, Valerian Nights flavour, as my first drink from it. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with that mug versus the unicorn cup that I currently have.

I shared that picture with the streamer’s Discord server too. Spreading the gospel of Tigey. The alien’s name is Glerm. The green one.

The Sousou no Frieren anime (first cour) ended this week, and while there were lots of good anime this season (and basically every other season as well as I enjoy watching anime seasonals in general), this one was an extra leap and bound over the other shows this season. And last season. And apparently every season ever, according to the community:

I really liked it because it’s very pensive, thoughtful, and vicariously nostalgic, with a lot of great and memorable characters and moments, strong writing without leaning into tropes, strong directing that makes the characters seem alive and ties the great music and visuals together, the entire fantasy world vibe, and more. Apparently the main person who directed it, Keiichirou Saitou, was also the main director for Bocchi the Rock!, another beloved recent show to me, and apparently those are his first two TV anime series as the lead director as well. Hopefully I’ll find some nice merch for both of those series when I go to Japan next month.

Talking about which, I haven’t yet booked my tickets for that trip, though I am monitoring prices. Calgary has a direct flight to Tokyo via Westjet now, and I noticed that that option never comes up when I do Edmonton to Vancouver searches, but I think it actually comes out cheaper in a lot of cases, so I need to think about taking a bus down there and then flying to Tokyo as my gateway into Asia. I still need to do the fare comparisons though. And this would mean losing out on that familiar feeling of visiting Vancouver International Airport and its lounges that I’m well-acquainted with by now.

I haven’t booked my movers for my apartment transfer in early April as well, though I have done some research into them and spoken to the family about it to see if they have any recommendations (they don’t) and to arrange a few other things. I’ve also emailed a potential cleaning service and was quoted $42 per hour for up to 8-12 hours depending on how much they have to clean. The main thing I am worried about, actually, is that I know from keeping my expenses in a spreadsheet from the past two months that my bimonthly paycheck comes in on the 9th-10th of the month and the 23rd-25th of the month or so, and rent is pulled on the 1st of the month, and my main credit card payment on the 24th-26th or so. I expect to have $4300-$4500 or so of fluid money in the account, possibly a bit less, by the end of March, not counting the rest of my investments and my side bank account that I don’t want to touch right now.

That’s great at first glance, but then before the first paycheck, I will need to pony up the $1300 or so for rent, taking me down to $3000, and then some unknown amount for moving costs, including not only the actual movers but also the cleaners, and then a spare amount in case some other costs unexpectedly arise. It shouldn’t take that much but I’ll put aside $1000 for that, bringing me down to $2000 minus the usual food expenses and such.

All that is fine in a vacuum, but then I also need to book my plane tickets and the lodging for my trip to Japan and then to Singapore, and possibly elsewhere too. I’m thinking of going down to Calgary to get a tourist visa to China so that I can visit Kel if I find a cheap plane ticket, for example. And I have to withdraw a certain amount of money in various currencies to have with me.

Much of this will end up on the credit card bill anyway and will thus be deferred to the next month, and my last month’s credit card total isn’t very high so it likely won’t be an issue even if it gets processed before the late-month paycheck comes in at around the same time, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t warily keeping an eye on my account and trying to figure out the order of operations of things and whether I will be okay by the time the 9th and 24th of April rolls around. I should be, but you never know. I’m not sure that I’ll book my entire trip itinerary at once though, I might not be able to fully afford that if I do it before March’s credit card bill deadline (as I would have to pay it off in the 3rd week of April). I think I would definitely be fine if I booked it after that cut-off date and put it on May’s bill though, since I’ll still be paid while I’m overseas and will have that extra month’s buffer by then.

I’ve been getting very forgetful lately, or rather, my concentration and ability to remember small things that I need to do has been shot. Despite near-daily AMQ games to train the memory. The main indicator of this for me is that I’ve left the stove on and over-boiling water on it many times in the past month or three. Water for tea, water for soup, water for noodles, water for boiling my pork or chicken pre-making soup, water for macaroni, water with macaroni inside.

I’ve forgotten about those pots to the point where I have to add additional water or burnt whatever was in the pot, probably about 10 times over the past 2 months or so. I still haven’t caused the stove alarm to go off from heating an empty metal pot though (I did this once, many years ago, but it didn’t cause a general fire alarm), but I have ended up with said poor metal pot being mindlessly heated with nothing inside a couple of times. I’ve also done this a couple times with macaroni in the pot now, so there’s some permanent black marks demarcating a macaroni mass grave at the bottom of my larger pot, and that’s my main regret of this forgetful streak. I’ll be glad when I move out.

The backs of both my upper arms have a small area, right by the armpits, that’s started to itch again. This happens every few months, isn’t linked to the eczema thing (which oddly has just about disappeared now even if I stop taking the pills), and is irritating both in the literal and the mental sense. This time I’m trying not to scratch and aggravate them. I suspect everytime in the past that I’ve tried ointment on it, it’s dried up the skin and made it worse too. Water and a prayer will do the trick this time hopefully.

Oh, and the marbles reference at the top of the blog post is in reference to this Youtube channel, which was linked to me in one of my Discord servers this week. It’s very similar to, but thematically different from, the other marbles channel that I’ve watched and linked in the past, which I’ve enjoyed watching videos from and even idly watched while curled up in an internet cafe (well, a manga cafe) in Osaka. Good times.