Life

No Memory Snippet or Song this week as things were crazy busy!

Something else that was crazy was that the air purifier that I ordered late last week, a WINIX 5520, wasn’t supposed to come in for 3 weeks or so (“July 19 – August 24”), according to its Amazon store page. They ignored that and sent it in 3 days anyway, so I ordered it on Jul 03 and it came on Jul 06. Well I’ll take that. Don’t mind if I do.

It’s a pretty nice unit, easy to set up and and very quiet to boot. It’s in my main room next to the computer table and the bed, and I see it go from blue (clean, pure air) to red (corruption abounds) now and then, like sometimes when I’m cooking for example. It’s connected to an app on my phone now too, although that part was optional, and it has a little vent up top where it blows out cool air that I think I can harness as a fan when I’m at the computer table, but haven’t really tried it out yet. It doesn’t work as a fan for my bed though.

WingBenny had insisted that I get one when I mentioned coughing and stuff back in May or June when smoke from forest fires blanketed our cities. Now the smoke is gone, but this is probably still a good thing to have overall, and maybe it’s just placebo so far but I haven’t had a sneezing fit while at the computer all week. I’m not certain I need to keep it running all the time, even though it’s just on automatic mode and on low fan settings most of the time, but we’ll see. I’m also happy to announce that I put Tigey in front of the fan sensor and the light didn’t turn red. This time.

I got to call the cops on Friday night, or rather on Saturday morning at about 3 am, to report (to the non-emergency line) a red van downstairs in the parking lot whose car alarm had been going off for over an hour. The lady on the other side of the line was very pleasant. Unlike the car alarm. She said she’d see if she could dispatch any nearby cops in the area to check out who owns the car via its plate and try to contact them, but it was 3 am and so I went to bed without waiting to see how it ended. This car also had gone off at 6 pm the evening before for a long spell, just before I left for the night markets, and also the next morning at about 10 am.

That’s the perpetrator! Someone else had stuck a note to the back of his car, I believe this was done after the 6 pm alarm (since it was already there by the time I started staring daggers at it at 2 am), so obviously I’m not the only one that was very irritated with him. I watched him take off the note and read it, get into the car, then open the front trunk and fiddle around with something in the guts of the car. Hopefully that fixed it. It didn’t go off on Saturday that I know of at least. Car license plate BGD-1947, just for a little extra internet shame. This is why I need to move away from huge apartment complexes.

I ordered grocery delivery for the second time ever early this week, and just like the first time, it was from from T&T Supermarket. The reason for this is that they were having a $59 or higher = free delivery promotion again, and because among other things I needed potatoes and wanted to try a bunch of other things but did not want the hassle of actually carrying them home. It worked fine, although they ended up cancelling my tofu order and not replacing it with anything else, which I guess is one of the bad things about online grocery shopping — you’re at the mercy of the staff when they decide they cannot fulfil your order. Hopefully you didn’t really need that item cause you won’t have the chance to substitute it with something else!

The delivery itself was also late — I asked for it to arrive during a 3-6 pm time slot on Monday, so that it would get here before my 6 pm to 9 pm daily stream started, but instead it only arrived at 7:30 pm and the delivery person couldn’t even find my lobby and had to call it for me, so I had to take a weird intermission during my stream to go down and get it.

And on the way back up, right as I was stepping through my front door, the bottom of the box burst open, sending the groceries spilling out all over the ground! Half of it in my apartment, half just outside the threshold of my apartment. Thankfully the stuff inside were all in their own individual bags too, and nothing was bruised other than a little bit of pride. I did get a good amount of loot, between the potatoes, carrot, radishes, lotus root, lychees that were on deep sale, king oyster mushrooms, a couple types of Chinese vegetables, some instant noodles, a lot of fishballs, and black sesame ice cream, which is a very interesting flavour that I had not tried yet up until this week.

The stuff smells so nice and the soup I made midweek with some of those ingredients was heavenly. And the russet potatoes were so much better looking (and easier to peel, and I think tastier too, though that could be a trickle-down effect from the other ingredients) than the ones from Safeway, although they were priced slightly more expensive than the bulk Safeway russet potato packs and slightly cheaper than single Safeway bags and any other sort of bulk potato packs that Safeway offers. I didn’t know potatoes could even be fragrant. Also, king oyster mushrooms in soup are amazing.

I went to various stores this week while in Southgate, looking for a specific type of chocolate, Neilson Jersey Milk, that I had never have before but that Jah had informed us was being discontinued (local). He said I should go try to find them if possible, and I agreed. An hour and change later, I was forced to conclude that Southgate Mall truly no longer had them in stock, however the closest I had come was in London Drugs, where I found this empty box:

Ah, so close. But the box didn’t even have a price tag attached to it anymore, and the chocolate bar in it was from the box to the right, so. Oh well. Not that I ever eat chocolate bars. I did take the box as a keepsake, though. And bought something else from there instead, maybe. To continue the theme of weird, local, time-limited foods, I also did see and buy this this week:

Maple leaf-shaped pasta from Catelli. How weird. Sure. Why not. I bought one and will flatten and keep that box somewhere afterwards.

As portended in last week’s blog, I went out to a third participating location for the Downtown YEG Burgerfest event this week, on Monday. All three locations I visited were very different — the first place I had gone to was a restaurant with pub vibes, the second one was a restaurant with eatery vibes. This one was called Let’s Smash Burger and Shakes, and very much had fast food restaurant vibes.

It seemed like they only had kitchen staff and if there were people waiting at the counter, someone would come in from the counter after a minute or so and wait on them. And even though it was still in the event period, the employee who eventually came up was at first confused as to what Burgerfest I was referring to, and then after I showed him the picture of the thing on Instagram, he said that ah, that burger was just a normal BFF Smash burger that was listed on their menu already:

And that it wasn’t $10, but it wasn’t the $11.95 listed on that sheet instead, it was in between — $10.95. What nonsense! I was confused at first and started comparing the ingredients, but yeah it was the same thing — the description of the burger on the Instagram listing for this place’s burger was a “Double Lakeside Dairy wagyu patty, mayo, ketchup, Cheddar cheese, red onion, tomatoes, lettuce and B&B pickles”. Basically the same thing. I had half a mind to walk out anyway since it wasn’t the advertised $10 though, and try an interesting burger and salad thing from a couple of stores away, but I decided to stay and try it.

And honestly I’m happy I did, the burger actually tasted pretty darn good in the end:

What I will remember the store for in the end though is that just before I left, I asked the server if I could wash my hands at a sink in the washrooms in the back because burger-eating was messy and left my hands oily. He instead said that I could use the sink that you can see in the second picture of the restaurant above, the one facing the order counter and kitchen. There’s a sink behind the right side of the metal food counter there, behind the Reese’s boxes. So that was cool of them. I appreciated that, doused my hands there, and then left the restaurant fairly satisfied.

I had a couple of stops on the way home from this place, and one of them was to go back to the first restaurant that I had visited last week, Jack’s Burger Shack, and take a picture of the outside of the shop. I had forgotten to do that, and when I noticed I was near, I snapped the picture.

I’m gonna slip that into last week’s blog post as well, belatedly, as well as Jul 06’s dream, which I had forgotten to add in.

After that, I walked down to Churchill Square to catch the train home from there. While there, there was an event called the Edmonton International Street Performers Festival (local) going on, so I stopped by that briefly as well. This is one of our city’s actual “legitimate” festivals and runs for 10 days this year.

I knew from checking the website that there was someone doing caricatures here, and I quickly found him as well:

His name was Simon (@caricatures_bysimon or @caricaturesbysimon, he seems to own both) and he did up a nice one for my Tigey collection:

Very nice! He’s the first one to attempt drawing the bag that Tigey was seated on too. He had drawn it on a full sheet of paper, so when I got home, I cut it out inexpertly and slotted it into a plastic sleeve, and then put that into the book sleeve with the other three drawings of Tigey that I have collected thus far. Item get!

On Friday evening, I skipped the usual nightly Twitch stream and went hunting for night markets in Edmonton again. I was visiting two this time, one in Central Edmonton and one in Western Edmonton. The transit loop itself from the transit centre nearest my house, to the first one, then to the second one, then back home, including waiting time took over three hours. I mean, I left the house a little after 6 pm and returned home a little after 10 pm, and I only stayed at each place for about half an hour. Yay Edmonton’s world-class transit! Yay……. and also, a woman handed me a Jesus pamphlet while I was waiting for a bus on the way to the first night market. That will get scanned and uploaded onto archive.org at some point.

Anyway. These were actually two decent night markets, compared to most of the other ones I’ve been to in Edmonton. They were both outdoors, for starters, and in the evenings. And consisted of more than 7 tables. That already puts them well ahead of the curve up here. The first one I visited was The Grand Night Market (local). It looks like they move around the city, which is cool. This week they were at an area called West Block Glenora, which has a really nice name by the way. It was surrounded by construction though:

The night market itself was hidden in a little chic shopping area behind the construction though. It wasn’t that big, with about 30-35 stalls in all, but it wasn’t bad and had lots of vibes.

I ordered dinner from this food truck, Flipside BBQ, and the specific dish I ordered was their Flip Belly, for $17.88, $18.77 after tax.

Was this worth $18.77?

The pickled papaya was not as interesting as it sounded, however the pork belly itself was actually really nice. I had dinner in a little attached patio area that was next to the outdoor market and outside a nice little book cafe. This place was actually really grand, minus the housefly buzzing around my food.

After chilling out for a bit and watching some kids play Red Light Green Light, I left the area and headed to the second flea market. This one was called the Callingwood Night Market (local). Both of them seem to be sponsored by actual farmers’ markets, which explains where they get the vendor power from. I’ve never been to the Callingwood one though, and I’m not sure if I’ve been to the other one, 124 Farmer’s Market, recently.

The Callingwood one was located in a neat-looking shopping area, except for the fact that the buildings all face outdoors. C’mon guys, Edmonton is winter for 6 months of the year, stop with the stupid outdoor malls.

This outdoor night market was a lot bigger, with about 75-80 stalls or so in all.

They had a healthy variety of stalls too. And some really uh, niche ones, like this cribbage stall. I’ve been to so many makers’ fairs and craft fairs and markets this year and have never seen a stall dedicated to just cribbage. Until now.

How cool. I wish I had more disposable money. I did not end up buying anything from this market, though I was tempted.

On Saturday, it was Community Day in Pikmin Bloom (local), my walking app of choice, which meant that I could earn a meaningless badge for walking 10,000 steps that day. I had a couple of things on the menu today, the first thing being the annual Japanese summer festival being held by our city’s Japanese Association (EJCA), called Natsu Matsuri (local). So to get in my steps, I decided to walk all the way there from my apartment, which was a 1 hour 15 minute walk across 5 km of roadside pavement. The sun was hot, although I kept to the shade and had water to keep my hydrated. I did see a pretty large car wash on the way there that reminded me of a toll bridge or country border, and wished that I could go stand under one of the hoses to get sprayed.

The other interesting thing I ran across on the way was a little “festival” event that I didn’t know about. This was at Hazeldean Community League, and I was elated to randomly stumble across it, even if I didn’t really have time to stop by and give the stalls a good shake.

This event was called RPG-A-THON (local), and as far as I can tell was an event where people could pay $40 and join an inside area where they could sample a bunch of tabletop games. Or just walk around the vendors outside for free, which is what I did. Also, happy 10 year anniversary to the Amundsons!

There were about 20 vendors in the outside area, spanning things like clothing, art prints, and various other crafts. There was even a booth selling board games there.

I only stayed for a few minutes before hurrying on though, as I was pressed for time. A bit further along, I reached the Argyll Community League, where the EJCA Natsu Matsuri event was being held. Unlike previous years, I had to pre-register for this one even though it was free, and they gave me a little inked star on the back of my hand after confirming my registration, before allowing me into the venue.

Despite the pre-registration stuff, it was still insanely crowded. This is a good thing for the health of the event though, although their venue was a little small for it for sure, even counting the outdoor area. It was exactly as crowded as I remember the last time I went as well, back in 2019. Maybe a little bit more so. But perhaps that’s because I arrived at the very start of the event.

I sadly only had about 20 minutes to spend here, but that was still enough time to go around all the stalls twice:

I had also pre-ordered some food here, a bento both with two inarizushi, and two futomaki from one of the EJCA subgroups called Matsu no Kai.

I picked it up from a side window and saw that there was only a list of about maybe 20 people or so that preordered that. It cost $7. Was it worth $7? The inarizushi, the rice wrapped in the brown tofu pouches on the left, tasted a bit weird to me, but likely because I’m not used to whatever they put in it.

I was hoping to see Shinya, or maybe one of my Japanese teachers, there at the event, but I did not manage to see them, nor did I stay for any of the demonstrations, this year, as I left soon after eating that.

The reason that I only had a limited time here was that I had an open house to attend with my siblings and Dad about an hour or so away, and this was scheduled at 2:30 pm for that was the only time that all of us could attend within the time window of the open house period, so I had to leave the event at 1:30 pm in order to reach there on time. The house was pretty good, and the family unit seemed to like it. It was a little on the expensive side though, but it does also come with an air-conditioning unit built in. I might put in an offer on it.

But we took no pictures of it, at least none that I want to share, so in lieu of that, here’s an interesting poster in Southgate Mall:

And Dulux’s official petition (local) to change “Fip red” to something else. Fun, but I don’t want to subscribe to their newsletter just to vote on this.

I had a regret about this visit though, which is that on the way out, I gave Dad and my siblings a package that I had ordered from Amazon on their behalf since I had Amazon Prime for the Amazon Prime Day event that went on this month. However, I also had Tigey with me, and I was going to visit them the next day, on Sunday, anyway. I could have given them Tigey as well and let him stay with them overnight. I failed to do this and regretted it a little afterwards when I thought about it. Oh well, at least that meant I got to sleep with Tigey as per usual tonight.