Life

So after bellyaching about Safeway’s new price of $7.99 for 5 pounds of their in-house brand (Compliments) potatoes, which were the cheapest potatoes they have, I went the other way from my apartment and visited the nearly Italian supermarket, about a 10-15 stroll away. This is the same supermarket where I had found UFO secret sauce at back in June 2021, and made a walking video in back in October 2021. I actually had not been back there at all since that 2021 visit. But when I went this week, to my surprise I found potatoes! 10 lb of potatoes for $4.49! Russet potatoes were even cheaper (though I don’t like them as much)! It’s too bad I didn’t point the camera at the potatoes back in the 2021 video to manage to capture their prices back then.

Eff you Safeway. I now know where I am going to get my potatoes from, from now on, and selected other things like macaroni (which has replaced rice for me as a dinner staple) since the prices are comparable or better there. My only issue is whether I can finish 10 pounds of potatoes before they start to go bad. I also came away with some new earl grey tea in a fancy box, and a jar of some ajvar spread, which apparently is a Balkan pepper spread. The Italian store has a lot of interesting sauces, and I figure everytime I go there to pick up potatoes I can buy a new jar of something or other to try as well, as I like finding new weird things to put into my soup. I currently have a bunch of pasta sauce of different flavours that I put into my soup too, which has been very tasty, so that together with the ajvar, and some Sazon Goya spice packets that are apparently Spanish in origin and that were 75% off at Safeway so I had to try them, has made my recent hotpot soups very red.

On the way back from the Italian market, I got to walk down some nearby roads I seldom visit, but that I like for their serenity and countryside-like feeling, for lack of a better term. In particular, I like this road, or at least the grassy area to the side of the road between the pavement and the houses. Plus the way the road curves down and up.

I also saw some boys playing cricket, of all things, on the way home, this was a rare sight since it’s not a popular sport here. I actually don’t know the scoring rules myself, but I at least know enough about it to recognzie it even when it’s being played with a chair in place of the wickets.

Monday this week was Canada Day, which was nice, but ultimately nothing special for me. There were a few fireworks set off somewhere nearby during midnight, loud enough that I heard the explosions, but I didn’t see any fireworks despite having quite a nice view out of balcony door. Tuesday was the first Tuesday of the month, and therefore Safeway Appreciation Day and 15% off the price when the total purchase is $50 or more. So I went down to buy a bunch of frozen meat, among other things.

Up until this point, I had basically only bought meat to use within a couple of days of the purchase, but with meat a lot more expensive now on average and only really palatable during sales, and after reading how even “use by tonight” meat is usually safe to store for longer periods of time if frozen, I instead made an adjustment and am now buying meat when cheaper, and partitioning and then freezing the meat in portions to use whenever I need them. This also lets me mix and match meats, which is actually nice.

However, this means I need more tupperware than I have, since I don’t have many larger food storage container boxes in my house, and one of the tupperware lids broke off this week when I removed it from the freezer and then tried to open it right away. I’ve also read about Stasher silicone reusable bags as a way to store food (unsure if coupled with traditional tupperware or not), and that’s something I’ll have to look into. Research isn’t easy though because a lot of posts about people asking how to store meat in a sustainable and more environmentally way instead turn into high-horse preach fests about not eating meat instead. I fundamentally do not think being vegetarian or vegan is a healthy practice to begin with so that’s a non-starter.

I also need to get a new tea strainer — the Yoassi tea infuser I got in March 2022 (that I talked about and linked to in My Diary #081) had its bottom break off entirely, which was disappointing. It got a toss and a negative review on Amazon for having its bottom drop out. That being said, I still do have the strainer from the tea flask that I had mentioned that I bought three weeks ago. I don’t think I actually linked the flask though — it was this Takeya iced tea maker and it actually works fairly well. It’s also why I bought a larger ice tray and bin at the same time which I really, really like. The problem with the tea flask though is how big of a flask it is, and how, if I don’t pay attention and drink the entire flask in the evening and night, end up waking up 3 times between midnight and 6 am to go to the toilet.

I also got another kitchen tool this week, a garlic strainer from Safeway that lets me crush a garlic clove and get a bunch of tiny garlic bits. More or less. This is good, except that what actually happens in practice is that there’s also a thin layer of garlic leftover that doesn’t make it through the mesh and stays on the side of the strainer mesh where the garlic clove started. I’m not sure what to do with this layer yet or if it is actually supposed to work that way, I think perhaps the quality of this gadget is just low (because it came from Safeway). I usually just toss it into the soup or whatever I am making anyway though.

I did like all this food prep though, so I have also turned my cabbages into cabbage slices and put them into a tupperware box in the fridge instead of leaving the actual vegetables themselves in the fridge. The lily petals that I bought last week also suffered the same fate, they got chopped up and put into a tiny little tupperware container. I felt very fulfilled after doing all this prep work this week. It makes it much easier to get portions of things when cooking my soups. I do eventually want to make dinner side dishes in bulk and put them in tupperware containers for the week though, which is something I’ve never managed to do but have had as a minor cooking goal for a couple of years now. For that reason too I need more tupperware containers (or similar food containers) than I have right now.

Also, I need to see if there’s any sort of a kitchen gadget to easily slice up green vegetable leaves, like cabbages and lettuce, into smaller bite-sized slices usable in soups and such without shredding them into little strips. I actually briefly tried to look for the existence of something that could help with this earlier in the week, but my Google-fu failed me as I had no idea to even succinctly describe what I was looking for.

I found out that I had miscalculated my finances again after last week. I had said that I would scrape by with about $5 left in my account after my rent payment at the start of the month, which was true. However, I also had my RBC credit card bill coming in on the 8th of the month that I had forgotten to account for, which was annoying since my paycheck typically arrives in my account on the 10th. This was a small bill in comparison, about $175 or so, as a couple utilities were still attached to it and I never bothered to remove it as I figured that having a bit of action on that credit card each month was probably important to keep it from expiring or something. But still, I had to dig deep and raid a bunch of boxes and old wallets in my house until I found another $180 in loose notes (and a lot of loose coins, but the bank does not accept coin deposits) to deposit into my account. And after all that I survived that July 6th deadline with $7.64 in my account without having to touch my investments, my extra money on the Scotiabank account, and the $400 or so in my RBC USD account. Giri giri safe, again.

There’s a store in Southgate Centre called The Seven 80, named after Edmonton’s first local telephone area code (780) and selling some local stuff, that I had never been into until this week. They sold some interesting things like uh.. beard soap and oils, and a bunch of someone’s Farmers’ Market style sauces that they named after local ice hockey players. Connor’s Hot Mustard, Leon‘s Backhand Sauce, and Elixir of the Hopkins.

This week, I also shot my first two pigeons with the water pistol that I bought last week. It was just loaded with plain water. Their presence in general has been lower the past couple of weeks anyway, but hopefully this encourages them to go poop elsewhere.

Our temperatures will rise next week into a mini heat wave (although for us, this “heat wave” is just 30-33 degrees Celsius or so, whereas in many parts of the USA, as well as inner British Columbia next week — they’re about to face 40-degree weather — that would be considered a heavenly cool day!), so maybe I will turn that pistol upon myself for some cool relief.

I spoke (or will speak) with Zian again this week, we hadn’t spoken to each other since I was in Taiwan on my trip, before I got sick, until she contacted me again this week. She had been busy with exams too and I had forgotten about our Sunday chats. Oops. I also finally caught up with all my mailbox ad scanning backlog this week on Friday, exactly a month (Jun 05 -> Jul 05) after I arrived back home from the trip, as well as fully unpacked two more boxes from my apartment move before my Japan trip, so this week definitely felt very fulfilling.

I also spent a bit of time this week weeding out and downthumbing a bunch of homes from the realtor portal site that I gained access to last week. Mostly older ones that had been on the market a long time, or that were way too far out on the edge of the city away from reasonable amenities and transportation. So many new ones get added so often that it felt like a constantly fighting a losing battle though, which is actually a good thing in that it means I have lots of choice to pick a good house from. But I wasn’t trying very hard this week at any rate due to the Steam sale and other games to play.

I don’t eat any of my medication pills very often anymore, neither the estrogen pills (because I’m lazy and am not producing testosterone either anymore anyway) nor my antihistamine ones, but I still do once in a while get a hive on my arm that’s often one of the first places that those hives (that I used to get a couple of years ago and complained a lot on the blog about) appear on my body. At that point I quaff a pill and it disappears an hour or so later and I never hear about it again. I always wonder what the cause of those hives or whatever is though, since there’s nothing obvious that triggers them.

Here are some sky pictures from this week. There were some more faint angel ladders on Tuesday this week that I captured.

And even more on Friday when it looked like there was a tear in the clouds and mystical beings were descending:

Then on Wednesday, there was an AMAZING red sun going down behind partial cloud cover. Pictures do not do it justice because the phone camera did not capture the colour correctly:

But it was as bright red as the top two red strips of the sun in this retrowave sun picture:

And as you can see in the third picture, it even eventually took on a couple of horizontal stripes across its spherical body as well as it went behind some of the clouds. It was very retrowave-ish, an aesthetic that I like quite a bit, and was quite a sight to behold even though it didn’t last very long.

This happened again on Saturday evening, and although I couldn’t capture the bright red hue again, I at least went to take some funky pictures of the large sun behind the clouds or smoke or fog or whatever was blocking all the light except the bright red wavelength.

The sun was reduced to a huge, squishy-looking, bright red ball that one could look at directly as it went down below the horizon. It looked very nice and mystical.

Next, here’s a nice evening sky from 10:57 pm on Thursday night:

And then another one from Friday evening at 10:03 pm.

I feel blessed to have this great view from my apartment, even though I probably won’t be here for that long, and even though in the late afternoon the bright setting sun means I often have to close my curtains. These are still glorious sunset palettes almost every single day and I look forward to the daily sunset surprise.