Life

I mentioned at the end of last week that we had gone to see a house and that we ended up liking it, so I made an offer of $330k on the house. But we found out after a day and a half of hand-wringing that we lost the house to another bid. By how much? The winning bid was $330,300. Just $300!

Well, that isn’t entirely accurate, the main reason that the homeowner took the other offer was that that other offer was unconditional — i.e. they made an offer to buy on the spot, without a home inspection condition and without right to remedy or anything like that. I was never going to do that with a 19 year old asphalt roof whose tiles were visibly curling up. Good luck I guess if there were any leaks.

I was upset for a day or so, but also realized afterwards that we might have dodged a bullet. Who knows for sure of course, but back in early 2024 when I started looking for a house, one of the first listings I saw was actually the other half of this semi-duplex that was on sale. And while it was cheaper and eventually went for around $310k, from what I saw of that house, what scared me away was that it looked like there were possible foundational issues, as the concrete front steps were very obviously tilted at a different angle from the house itself. And since they’re two halves of the same building, who knows what sort of collateral damage there might be between the foundation and the neglected roof.

Oh well. I’ll never get a house. (Because I’m fussy. There’s four houses in various states of imperfection in the area that I could get right now if I wanted.)

I thought my sore throat from the sickness last week was mild enough that I didn’t catch a lingering cough. I did. Cough cough. It’s very mild still, but still very annoying that it always lasts this long after everything else is cured, and it is constantly irritating without being debilitating.

I continued my self-propelled art lessons this week, although progress was slow. I’m not worried about slow though, I’m more worried about steady, and whether I will still find enough time to do them once my anime, AMQ, and streaming activities resume at the end of this week. I don’t intend to showcase stuff every week, but I thought I’d upload some this week anyway, like my continuation of the picture that I started sketching (via eyeballing someone else’s work as a reference) last week:

The reference picture to that is in last week’s blog.

I’ve also continued working on general drawing lessons from that Drawabox site, and they’ve been interesting, even though they take a while. I took a picture of a montage of some of the resulting papers after their “homework exercises”.

I also bought a transparent ruler this week with grid markings to make it easier to measure stuff and draw lines more accurately. I settled on a Westcott ruler as that was the only one the bookstore that I visited had, and I didn’t realize it at first but that turned out to be the same one that the instructor in the Drawabox tutorials uses. That was a small but neat coincidence, though I am guessing that maybe in the “academic” world there’s only this one suggested ruler, sort of like how everyone uses Texas Instruments graphing calculators for math although there’s other brands out there too because that’s all that bookstores stock too.

Anyway this ruler is very long and also sticks to paper very easily. Kind of annoying. I’m sure I’ll get used to it eventually though. It’s nice that I can measure distances underneath the transparent ruler too since there’s grid lines all over it.

After nearly two weeks though, I’ve already noticed marked improvement in at least one area — drawing freehand straight lines from one dot to another. I still can’t do it if the dots are too far away, and even for the nearer ones its not perfect, but I’m far better at it now, after doing hundreds of them, than when I started. Especially when using Drawabox’s “ghosting” method (which involves going through the motion without the pen touching the page several times before making the line) in accordance with a trick that they only passingly mentioned once but which I found made a huge difference for me — touching the target dot with my pen just before moving my pen to the starting dot and drawing the final line. I guess that helps my hand “remember” what the ending point and the angle of drawing should “feel like” or something like that.

There are lots of pens and stuff around my desk now, so I converted one of my old David’s Tea cans into a pen holder. This works quite well and I’m very happy with this setup since the tins are nice and pretty.

I also started playing around with a digital art program this week called Clip Studio Paint (local), although it’s just a trial version as the program itself is subscribe to use, with a perpetual licence version that costs either $60 or $260 USD depending on the number of features one wanted. However, they apparently have sales four times a year, and the next one is allegedly coming up sometime in September, so I’ll try to keep an eye out for that and see what the prices are like then.

I’ve been casually poking at some introductory Digital Painting 101 tutorials over at Ctrl+Paint, but the instructor there uses Adobe Photoshop for some inexplicable reason so I’ve had to slowly plod around and look for their equivalents over in CSP. A lot of the shortcuts and stuff are the same though, but not all, but there are generally people in the comments who have pointed out where the equivalent tool is in CSP (or Krita, another art software that is apparently free) is.

(Note: I am linking to neither Drawabox nor Ctrl+Paint in this post because I already did so in last week’s post, complete with the (local) snapshot of both websites there.)

I went down to the office to meet all (well most, one person was on sick leave) of my pre-merge work team this week, on Thursday. Semi-official back to work mandates or not, this was the first time in eons that I had been down to the University and met most of my team. I had been looking forward to this meeting, where we met in a room and whiteboarded a bunch of ongoing issues that we were having, and apparently everyone else had been looking forward to it too as we hadn’t seen each other in pretty much a year at this point (because none of them besides my supervisor attend the team buffets that he puts together!).

After the meeting, I went off with Sandy and Melbourne to a nearby diner called Off Campus for lunch.

We spent about 45 minutes here eating and chatting. I took a snapshot of all of our dishes, starting with the Double Cheeseburger, courtesy of Melbourne:

Then The OC Special pizza, 10-inch, courtesy of me. This was pretty great and tasty, the ham slices were large and generous, and even the crust was enjoyable and not bone-dry crunchy:

And then the Hawaiian Burger with a side of fries, courtesy of Sandy. Melbourne and I ended up eating most of the fries because he couldn’t finish it.

After the meal, Sandy and I parted ways with Melbourne and we walked back over to the University bookshop, which we had passed on the way here. He bought a shirt while I went for that ruler that I posted earlier, plus a ream of printer paper. I also saw this big, lazy bear plushie at the bookshop:

There was also this t-shirt on the side showing the anatomy of this bear, which apparently is called the Bookstore Bear. I cackled.

I also saw a nice shelf of anatomy plushies but I did not buy any of them, or any other plushies, at the store, as they were very expensive. I just wanted to capture my regret here though.

Separately, I bought a couple of packages from Amazon this week. One already came in as I had ordered it near the start of the week. It was a couple of Fabled Lands adjacent gamebooks and books that I was made aware of this week and wanted to snap up a copy of before they went out of print or something:

The right one, The Keep of the Lich-Lord, is an adaptation of a gamebook from another famous series, Fighting Fantasy. Similarly, the one on the left, The Castle of Lost Souls, is an adaptation of a gamebook from a series called Golden Dragon (local). I do own the original version of both of those books (I actually own two, maybe three copies of the Castle of Lost Souls). There are apparently adaptations of other books in those series too and I should look for those at some point. Maybe at my future new house once I unpack all the ones I have onto proper shelves instead of having them languishing in boxes, sealed away and unreachable to mortals.

Another thing I bought from Amazon this week were some wireless earphones that Jah recommended and that were discounted. It was serendipitous because I do need new earphones, although I have another cheap wired pair coming in from the first package (but being delivered separately) as well. I don’t have a Prime sub at the moment and so had to assemble $35 of stuff before I could order that though, so I threw in some more food stall building blocks. This collection will probably be pretty epic and fulfilling and generate a lot of satisfaction for me once, yet again, I have a place to assemble and set them up at my future new home.

On a larger money-spending scale, I’m eyeing January or February 2026 for another trip to Asia, if nothing changes on the house front. I mean, I kind of want to buy my tickets months in advance this time so they’re cheaper, so I might just have to bite the bullet and do it soon because 5 months out or so is about the right time to do it. I need to research exactly when I want to go, and where, in order to maximize the number of festivals and events that I can see though. I’ve cleared this with my boss tentatively, but it’s also such a large monetary commitment to make. So we’ll see.

Next up, the reverse, about money past spent. Dad and I visited Winners when we were at Southgate Mall last weekend. The Winners store there has a couple of shelves with weird premium-type teas and other food items that I think gets restocked with different leftovers from I don’t know where, and I like browsing through it for things I’ve never heard of to try.

When I went there with Dad for example, Dad picked up a box of Turkish chocolates for $5 and I picked up a box of Coconut Lychee tea for $7. I wasn’t sure that I’d like it because I don’t like sweet teas, but I did very much like this one. It’s at least an A-tier tea for me, possibly with a chance to hit S-tier before the end of the tin. We’ll see how it goes. It’s a brand called Sansa Tea and apparently I might be able to find them naturally in the wild in Loblaws supermarkets like the Real Canadian Superstore. Don’t know for sure because I don’t tend to visit their stores.

Lastly, in a fit of aplomb over losing the bid on that house, I decided to appreciate what I had in this apartment, particularly the view from my balcony, and took pictures of the sunset nearly every day this week. Earlier in the week there was a lot of car alarm honking, for about a minute every 30 minutes or so, which drew me out to the balcony to see if I could spot the offending car or not (I couldn’t), but that stopped in the latter half of the week.

Sun Aug 17, 8:56 pm:

Mon Aug 18, 8:45 pm:

Tue Aug 19, 8:53 pm:

Wed Aug 20, 9:24 pm:

Thu Aug 21, 7:08 pm:

And then again at 9:10 pm:

The skies truly are very beautiful here. Rain, clouds, and the sunset, all the artist tools in Mother Nature’s toolbox to create resplendent scenes with.