Life

There was a solar eclipse this week, but Edmonton only got 23% coverage or so during the peak of the eclipse, so I don’t think anyone here in town really did much about it. I certainly didn’t, although it would be nice to go visit a place to coincide with a total solar eclipse in the future. Apparently Australia is getting a lot of them over the next couple of decades, relatively speaking. Actually, Edmonton’s getting one in 2044. Japan will apparently get a nice one in 2035. Singapore’s next one is 2168. I might not be around for that one.

There’s also a solar eclipse on my leg, as I picked up a bruise around my thigh that makes no sense, as it doesn’t hurt in the least even if I poke at it or press on it and I don’t remember how I got it. It looks ugly but will probably pass.

I had the walkthrough of my old apartment and handing over of keys on Monday, and to my relief I did not incur any additional charge. Even after 10 years of living there. I had spent 3 hours on Sunday not only vacuuming the carpet but also cleaning the window sills and vent tops and shelves and such, and I also tried to clean the balcony doors but there were stains left over on that, so I wasn’t worried. The agent that walked through the apartment with me did check one of the vent tops, so I’m glad I cleaned that. She said that their cleaners would be doing some basic “polishing” of the house before giving it to the next tenant anyway, and that that was included in the $150 transfer fee that they didn’t fully discount. I’d have paid that fee anyway so I don’t consider it an extra charge.

After we left my old apartment and locked up, I mentioned that I should have taken pictures of the place before I left for good. The leasing agent agreed that I should have, and said that I still could, since we were both still there. So I took her up on that offer!

I wonder how my old apartment is doing. In my last week or two there, three separate groups of people came to view it, so there’s definitely demand for it, and I’m sure it’ll be snapped up soon enough. I hope I remembered to change just about all the named mail that was going to that place. I’m sure that after 10 years I’m missing updating my address in some obscure places that only mail me every now and then though.

I mentioned last week that there was a magnifying glass that fell out of my box when the movers dropped one of my boxes in the truck. They offered to bring it back to me this week, but the mover that came used the call button on my apartment box downstairs, then when I didn’t answer that immediately, he left the magnifying glass in the lobby and then texted me to say that he had left it there in the corner of the front lobby, with a picture. I immediately received the text, and went downstairs within TWO MINUTES of receiving that text, and the magnifying glass was gone. There were people going in and out, but I have no idea who took it — whether someone decided to take it or if a cleaner threw it away, or even if the mover just took the picture and then pocketed it anyway.

I think that it was only a dollar store magnifying glass, so it’s a bit funny that they came all the way over here to deliver that anyway, but it did miff me that they delivered it and then it disappeared, and that he didn’t bother waiting for a reply to the text before he left. A so close and yet so far sort of feeling. The thing that compounded this is that they still owed me money for collecting both the deposit and then the payment for me, and when I called them about it, asking for the invoice and the refund, they sent the invoice on Tuesday stating that there was an overpay (to the tune of about $97) but not the actual refund itself until Friday afternoon, a full week after the actual move, after Harry, the sales manager who had negotiated me hiring them, had decided to go out of town on a meeting and Mattie, who picked up the company phone on Friday, had to try to track him down to make him give me back the refund and who gave me his own personal number in case I hadn’t heard back from Harry by the end of the day.

Anyway, apparently Last Stop Moving has a client referral program where you can get 10% of the fee that the client pays if you refer a client to them, but after these experiences? Not a chance. After dropping that box, not telling me about it even though I saw it, stalling for time at the end to charge more, losing my item, overchanging me, and then withholding the return payment for so long, their service was so poor that I will never use them again and hope no one I know does use them. It was like Harry was hoping that I would forget about the extra $100 (they nickel and dimed me for something extra so they only returned $97.90 in the end, but whatever) and thus the company would get to pocket it.

At least I got to test the apartment building front door’s buzzer system, which the management office said on Monday that they’d forward to my phone on Tuesday. I confirmed that unlike a certain moving company that said that they’ll do things but dragged their feet on, Rent Midwest did do this properly and promptly for me.

Mom and Jon came by to my house to look at it, and to take pictures from the balcony of my apartment. I was “living out of boxes” though, as my boss put it, with them strewn all around the house, and I still am at this point even though I’ve unpacked a couple of the more “daily household items” boxes now. I’ve also at least moved all the boxes so everything is laid out in rows and nothing is stacked on top of each other, so I can more or less easily retrieve anything from a box if I knew which box it was in. There isn’t much point in unpacking a lot of the other things, since I’m leaving in a week and change and they will collect dust out in the open while I am gone. Although I at least rescued half my plushies from the cramped garbage bag they were in, and put them with the other half in an opened plastic container box. I look forward to getting my new house and acquiring shelves and other furniture to actually unpack my books and stuff onto, hopefully later this year!

I went down to the University again this week to engage that travel agent about getting a visa to China. One thing that helped was that they clarified that they’d know by this Wednesday on whether the consulate would accept my application or not, and they’d bring it back FROM Calgary as part of the fee when the driver went down next week too, so I could pick it up directly from them on Thursday or Friday next week if they accepted it. That was much better and safer than waiting for them to mail it back. And I received a text on Wednesday saying that the initial part was successful and my application that the agency helped me fill in had been accepted by the consulate.

That visa application was weird, since there were several questions where our exchange basically was (paraphrased) “Nah, don’t worry about filling in that section super accurately, they don’t care about it either. We’ve been doing these for years and we know some things don’t translate well into English.” Things like “Oh, you don’t have your plane ticket yet because you are waiting on your visa application to buy them? We will make up an itinerary for you.” And suddenly my visa application has an Air Canada plane from Edmonton to Shanghai on it even though that’s not the route I’m taking. Still, I appreciated all their help and they were very helpful, and though it was a bit pricey, not having to go down to Calgary was a good trade-off too.

I also withdrew and exchanged a bunch of money for my trip this week, though it’s largely only for the Japanese leg of my trip so far. I don’t have that much fluid money, nor do I want to drag around a couple thousand dollars in various currencies.

I probably will skip all my introspection sections in next week’s blog again, like I did in last week’s blog, because I need the extra time to prepare and plan for my trip. So no Song of the Week, Plushie of the Week, etc until I return from my trip. I still haven’t decided how long my trip is going to be.

In terms of my new apartment, I spoke to a housing agent and also had a maintenance person come over. The washroom is plain lousy, with no way to fix the poor water pressure and occasionally off temperatures. Apparently the shower system they use is the standard now and they’re going to be replacing the better one in my old apartment with this one too, but also this problem is probably partially because there’s a lot of people in the building (and the management is cheap). Whatever.

Next, the thermostat temperature pointer is broken and never changes, though adjusting the temperature itself is working. The maintenance person that came over confirmed that they could not fix it (again, cheap management).

The maintenance person did fix the stove for me though, which involved lifting up the stove cover, something I had not realized could be done, and reattaching something that came loose inside. This electric stove is very strong, and boils things much, much faster than the stove at my old apartment. I also really like being able to see my computer screen from the kitchen, and vice versa. Very convenient.

They also confirmed that there isn’t a switch for the bathroom vent — in fact it’s apparently always on, and inaudible, and if I can actually hear it then there’s something wrong with it and I should contact them. Sounds good to me. Or rather, the lack of sound’s good to me.

He also added a door sweep under my door to prevent the cold air wafting in from there, which was neat, though he warned that that meant that my apartment would be warmer during summer. I don’t care about that, since it’s not like any other apartment has a huge wall vent blowing cold air at their front door, and the door itself isn’t particularly well insulated so it’ll still be slowly radiating cold air into my place even with the big gap under the door stoppered up. That door sweep will also help prevent dirt from getting in.

Anyway, the new apartment is pretty great outside of the bathroom. There are still neighbourly noises, so it’s not completely silent, but it’s occasional and not incessant through the day and night, so that’s very nice. I feel very.. almost self conscious without white noise running all the time, after having it constantly going basically 24/7 for months. There’s less of a mild feeling of panic now when a few seconds of silence appear between successive Youtube videos or Twitch streams or anime episodes or AMQ songs.

A few neighbours have also come by to visit me, though these neighbours are of the avian variety. I’ve noticed them flying to the apartment balcony above me too, or to the sides, but they also occasionally stop by my balcony and I even got to capture some pictures of them.

Those pictures are just from Friday to early morning Sunday of this week alone. I think more birds have visited my balcony in the past week than the past 10 years at my old apartment’s balcony combined. This also means they’ve been leaving a bit of bird poop behind on the balcony, but apparently the prior resident left behind a broom on the balcony as well, propped against the wall and out of sight so the cleaners never saw it (or didn’t bother) to remove it and the previous tenant forgot (or didn’t bother) to take it with her, so that’ll help.

The sun can be really bright at times during the day though, but now that I have my blackout curtains in place too, I can just temporarily close off half the balcony door and that does the trick until sunset arrives.

Oh, and I learnt that my community mailbox does not have a solid back, as I accidentally pushed my mail (mostly brochures) out the back of the box and onto the floor of the mail room when trying to take it out of my box this week. They were just ads though so I filched a copy of them from the recycle bin to scan. What a weird community mailbox we have.

Thai New Year was on April 13, and apparently the local Thai Express stall in the mall food court was giving out free cake to the first 100 patrons on April 12th as a promotion. I had seen the sign for it a couple of weeks ago:

And I duly went down at around 10:40 am of the 12th to get mine, together with some lunch and a complimentary free drink that they always give me. Apparently I was too early and was basically one of the first there.

They apologized that they only had one flavour, chocolate banana. No no, that’s a good thing. I don’t have a sweet tooth, but choco banana evokes a very Japanese memory anyway so that was a good thing. The cake itself was quite nice, though really creamy, and the box was cute too but I didn’t keep it around.

And finally, here are more pictures of the view from my apartment this week. I spent some time wondering why the car in the bottom right of the third picture was on all night. I’ll probably witness and photograph a crime from here eventually too if I’m vigilent enough about it. Also I was wondering about setting up a camera here, pointed out at the balcony, and live-streaming the view. It probably won’t happen, but it’s interesting to think about. I love the view of the clouds and the unique sky every day, it’s a feast of calmness and abject joy.