Life

This week was initially a much sparser week in terms of the ant population in my house. After last week‘s deluge, I was expecting to have to fight them all through the week, but I only found one ant late on the Sunday evening that last week’s blog was posted on, and then none at all through the weekdays, so the Days Since Ants counter was all the way up to to 5 and had almost reached the requisite 7 days to resolve the incident in my books. Then Saturday hit.

See, on Saturday, I found one more ant by the sink, and promptly crushed and killed it. And since Saturday is chore day, I spent some time on and off looking to see if there were any signs of ants anywhere else. Then I found it, the main trail that the ants were using. It turned out that their main trail led from a hole where the ceiling met one of the outer kitchen walls near the front door, down the outer corner edge of that kitchen wall, and then underneath the jutting out edge of the corner of my kitchen counter where there was a hole that led into the depths of the apartment. I squashed and flushed away over 20 ants using that path and sprayed it down with insecticide on Saturday evening alone. We’ll see if monitoring and securing that path encourages the ants to find food elsewhere instead. I did see at least one ant up in the very corner above the brown cupboards, heading into a crack in the ceiling, but as that’s way out of reach unless I use a chair, I wasn’t about to fight them there too.

That must have been the path the ants take (well, took) to get behind my kitchen counters, and then out from there onto the sink area or wherever else. Though there isn’t really a hole behind the sink that I can see so I’m not sure how they get out from behind the cabinets to the sink area. Maybe there’s a gap around where the faucet meets the cabinet. I’m also technically not sure if the main nest is behind my cabinets or up above the apartment and between levels somewhere, though hopefully it’s the latter. The ants were moving both ways though. Either way, now I’m watching all the wall corners like a hawk.

The path in question that I caught them taking looked like this. They started somewhere up here:

Went down this purple path along the corner edge of the wall:

And then went into this stupid hole underneath the counter:

I had no idea that hole existed until today. How am I even supposed to defend against that!

I also did see one larger ant-like bug, the type that is about 1 centimetre long or so, crawling on my kitchen wall mid-week, and while I was deciding which authority to call for help from, it crawled into a hole and behind my upper cupboards, so I let it be and summarily ignored its existence in terms of my Days Since Ants counter. It was probably just transitting between the hidden passageways in my apartment on its way somewhere else. It turned out that this was a different hole than the ones the small ants were using though, since the ants were going under the counter rather than behind the upper cupboards, but it also got a good spraying nonetheless.

As I know plenty of people were definitely wondering about it too, I did finish that entire jar of nearly-expired spicy ferns that I had bought last week too. It was sooo good with white rice.

This week I felt very rushed and flustered and frazzled for some reason, and all the time in the week flew by while I practically did nothing to advance any of my goals at all. I don’t really like this feeling because it means I got one week closer to my eventual death without accomplishing anything of note, though I think it beats a super quiet week where absolutely nothing happened.

My VR lenses were supposed to get here on Monday, but Fedex took its own sweet time with the customs clearance in Germany, and then shipped it here via the States instead of directly to Canada, so it got to me on Wednesday instead. The package was shipped with Fedex International Priority shipping, which I think means it comes with a Money Back Guarantee (local) thing where I could dispute and try to get my shipping cost back, and I mean the shipping details itself (local) look quite disputable to me but I’m sure they’ll find some excuse or another to say that the delay was justified. I couldn’t actually start the appeal though, as it seems like I needed an invoice number to do so, so I contacted the VR Optician company instead and am awaiting their reply.

FedEx did sent me an invoice for the GST on the package later this week though, on Saturday morning, but upon logging in to my FedEx account I found that the amount payable, $7.08 CAD, was already paid for. Assumedly by VR Optician. Cool. I did try using this invoice to file the money back guarantee with but it failed as there was no shipping number associated with it or something.

The lenses themselves were fine, although I struggled to find a good distance and lens width where I could see perfectly from. I eventually got it to a point where it mostly worked, but was still slightly blurred when reading things up close. But then this was a new eye prescription from last week that I hadn’t also turned into actual glasses yet, so it probably doesn’t exactly match my current set of glasses. It was still a vast improvement over wearing my glasses with the Valve Index over them either way. But like everything else, I didn’t have much time to play with the VR goggles this week. I only got 2 or 3 days of 30-60 minute sessions in this week, whereas last week I had 6.

On Friday afternoon, I went down to the University of Alberta to vote in our municipal election. This was advance voting, and took place in the basement level of the Students’ Union Building there. The queues weren’t very long (while I was there) but they were steady.

I’m not sure I was supposed to take photos in there but I didn’t specifically see signs against it. I also scanned the elector registration document there with an app on my phone, as well as all the ballots itself, before I saw a sign on the ballot table itself saying that photos weren’t allowed at the voting table. Oh well. Minor crime, since I was just scanning my own ballots. I believe in preservation and archival of information (like what the ballot forms looked like) over rules like that anyway. Although those pictures were bad due to the lighting so I don’t know that they’ll ever see the light of day — in fact I got angry with the scanning software, vFlat Scan, as they’ve locked some features like auto-straightening of the scan behind a monthly fee paywall, with no option to just purchase the app with a one-time fee, since I last used it. They earned a 1-star review for me for that, and I’ll need to find a new scanning app at some point.

I also picked up an “I showed up” sticker for voting, which is what you can see Tigey holding in the blog introduction picture above. He did actually follow me to the voting station itself. We’ve voted. Have you?

The actual vote for this election is in a couple of weeks. The provincial United Conservative Party is trying to push into local elections as well, by changing the rules (local) to allow candidates to form parties in Edmonton and Calgary, and then sponsoring candidates to form a party (the main local one is called Better Edmonton (local) and is massively funded by the UCP (local) — there is one called PACE (local) too but they don’t seem competitive) in what is supposed to be a party-less election for city council and mayor, to try to gain control of the cities since they (especially Edmonton) are so much more liberal compared to the rest of the province. Their candidates, especially the mayoral candidate, seem to be losing so far despite all their dark money, but you never really know, and I hope they don’t make it.

Anyway, the evils of politics aside, visiting various parts of campus again was very cool. I had been through campus a couple of times recently when I was with my workmates for our monthly meetings in August and September, but because I was with others, I did not have time to stop and smell the roses. I was by myself this time, so I first stopped off at the bookstore to pick up a University t-shirt for $10 from the annual hoodie sale going on:

I was in a whimsical mood, so I also took a number of photos while I wandered across campus. For starters, here are some pictures of the main level of the Students’ Union Building, near the front entrance by the food court:

The place has changed a lot over the years. I don’t think there even ever was a public washroom there before. There were free telephones there though that are now gone.

Over in the Central Academic Building, I saw these new diagonal signboards that I thought were neat:

But also I just wanted to chronicle that that one Unicef ad, which was plastered all over campus, prominently spelled “thousands” as “tousands” instead. Does no one proofread anymore? Or is that some hyper-cultural term or generational slang that I am unaware of?

There’s also this building construction site between the Central Academic Building and the Tory/Business Building that I swear has been under construction since I was a student here, over 20 years ago:

I guess maybe it’s finally nearing completion? Or they’ve finally decided what to put there?

In the Tory building itself, the entire place has been refreshed and spruced up:

This area is actually a sealed up connecting area between what was two separate buildings, on the left side and right side of the second picture there, and the entire thing was merged into one building at one point eons ago, before I was even a student here. So the two walls even have completely different architectural styles. Anyway the connecting area used to be a lot mustier and darker (but also rather homely and nostalgic in a way) and now it’s brighter and has all those wooden pods at the side for people to use too.

I cut through this building up into HUB Mall, and while I was there I snapped a photo of this empty shop by the north entrance to the mall:

A few years ago when I was taking classes in the Humanities building, which is reached via the left passage just past the door marked 9201 there, there used to be a shoe repair shop here and the bored owner there would sometimes wander out to chat to people. He was an old man and I never did use his services, but he did use to accost me when he would see me and wave me down for a chat too. I remember he wanted to exchange email addresses or phone numbers or something at one point and I found that a bit creepy. At any rate, the COVID shutdown apparently eventually took down his business.

I also snapped a picture of this mascot of a new(ish?) Vietnamese food store that I had not seen before, Da Kao Bistro:

And a half-drawn Fraud Prevention sign in an RBC branch that amused me:

And this artificial nail vending machine standing by the walkway to the Rutherford Library:

I also saw this very familiar sign in the walkway:

Featuring an exhibition by Tamara Storm. This one is actually almost the exact same exhibition as the one I photographed back on Jul 19 2023:

The sign is the very same one, though it’s a lot more weathered by time now, and the jellyfish were also still there, but surprisingly there were a lot of newer exhibits behind it now that were not there the last time I took a photographic catalogue of the exhibit. From left to right:

What the heck. They’re so neat. I can see why this has been left up since 2023.

This also gave me yet another crazy idea on a way to expand my blog. We are actually mandated to come in to the University twice a week right now, which no one on our team is actually doing because our work output would grind to a halt if we did so, there’s far too much for us to do. Especially since we would only be able to do very limited work while on campus — we don’t actually have offices there and the hoteling space offices are almost always fully booked too (and they are very poor spaces to work at to boot). And no one is actually checking in on the mandate.

In addition, the last time the mandate was updated, it was also said from the top, and confirmed multiple times by our team leads asking the executives, that we could spend our time on campus just largely focusing on networking and socializing with both our teams and clients too, which was undoubtably a way of the executives just saying yes to anything benign to get us back into the office but something they’d show mock surprise at and say was never a thing if ever asked about down the road.

But the reality is, if we were to go back to work “onsite” twice a week, many of us would be not in our main building but instead at separate locations around campus, for example the libraries, working from laptops and such with slow wireless internet, slow processors, single small monitors, lots of missed notifications, and we’d still be separate from the rest of our team at almost all times, and all that would kill our productivity. But this was deemed an acceptable trade-off by the executives at the time.

Yet, while thankfully we were shielded from this nonsense by our team leader (and an overwhelming amount of project work for our team, especially on the developer side which I’m not on), this actually opens the door to a very specific sort of semi-malicious compliance and blog enhancement at the same time. I could actually insist on “complying” with this and spend some of my time, twice a week, walking around campus and chronicling the University in photos to archive it for the future. Looking at and recording different buildings, different exhibits, different signage and posters, and so on, just by virtue of going to a different location to work every day.

This would mean actually working on my Collections/Sets page though. But that section of my site is one that I’ve ignored for years just due to having so much else to do. It’s something I want to do, but have no resources to put towards. But this would be something else that would fit great in there — a University Pictures page. I sadly do not have photos from the time when I was a student here, but I still do have random pictures going back to at least 2018, and with archival photos its always the case that never mind what you don’t already have — the sooner you start, the better your collection will be 50 years from now.

Hm.

Anyway, moving on, I wandered into the Rutherford Library building itself, taking a couple of interesting photos of displays in the main lobby. Like this Wellness Mosaic:

And this Campus and Community Recreation October Calendar (hey, the annual Turkey Trot happened last week):

And this scribble board with weird answers that was off to a side:

Stay classy, kids.

That was all my pictures from the University from Friday, though there were two more minor pictures relating to notes from later on in the day while passing through Southgate Mall on the way home. Firstly, I mentioned last week that the (relatively) cheap barber in the mall had closed down. I noticed that a large sign advertising them was still up though, so I took a picture of that:

They were called Denim & Smith Barbershops, and Google claims they’re temporarily closed but I don’t know.. their shop was where that woman on the left is standing, and it’s completely boarded up right now with even their branding sign gone, and no notice saying that they’ll be back at so-and-so date.

Lastly, I bought this for myself from the Winners store in Southgate:

This Rolife Sakura Wine Alley brick set was on sale for $40, and it usually goes for $55-$60 in any retail store around here or online, so I was happy to snap it up for that price. I think that maybe it was discounted because the plastic and part of the outer paper wrap was sliced open at the bottom, though I didn’t see a similar slice in the two other Rolife boxes they had there (that I didn’t want — I only collect blocks for food-related scenes right now). The rest of the wrap was still intact and the box itself was also intact and unopened though.

There was an Internet outage on Saturday this week that took out my Internet long enough that it overlapped with the start of my usual stream time. Due to that, I didn’t end up streaming on Saturday. The internet was down from about 4:40 pm to 7:10 pm, plus or minus a couple of minutes, but this was also the first time that I remember it going down in well over a year. I sent the Shaw (well, Rogers) techs a thank you note for fixing it using the feedback form on their website later in the evening.

While I didn’t do much this week, I did flesh out my trip a little bit and start looking for accommodations to book. It’s hard to book though when I haven’t even decided which locations to visit on my trip yet, never mind how long at each location. Deciding on that stuff so far in advance is so difficult! But I absolutely have to start booking some things next week before they sell out, since I plan to go to multiple tourist-heavy events this trip.

Over the past couple weeks or so, I had noticed that the Pebblebee tracker that I had given Dad had not been seen for over a week, so I figured that it had run out of battery or something. We sent Jon over to the parents’ place to help hunt down the charger and plug it in, but after he fiddled around with it, he sent me a video showing that it was charged but was unable to remain on when they tried to turn it on. Weird. I hope it’s still under warranty. Jon is leaving for a trip to Asia with his girlfriend tomorrow though, so he could not deliver the tracker to me, and so I’ll probably stop by the parents’ place at some point next week to pick it up and check in on them instead.

Last but not least, these really weird skies were from Mon Oct 06 at 5:42 pm:

The dark and light blend of clouds were kind of wondrous, and the fact that it ended at a line in the horizon also added to the surreal effect. I also took a picture of the sky the next evening, Tue Oct 07 at 5:50 pm, because the line of the horizon here also reminded me of the skies on the previous evening: