Life

Much to my horror, I kept on finding ants crawling about the place throughout the week — there were some in the kitchen behind the sink again on Saturday evening, a couple in my bathtub on Sunday somehow, then Tuesday evening again behind the sink, and then as a final straw, Thursday there was about twenty of them between the sink and the cupboard above the sink, not even forming a coherent line, just sort of plastered to the wall and slowly wandering around.

That last one was sort of damning because it made it very clear that there was either a hole between that cupboard and the wall that they were somehow coming in and out of, which was possible since the cupboard had no back or side board and was basically two shelves with a door, or that they were actually living inside the cupboard itself. Additionally, I had been monitoring above and to the sides of the cupboard the entire week and had not seen a single ant in any of those directions. I also noticed that they seemed to come out in the evenings and only every two days (possibly because I was spraying the area with insecticide after those days and that kept them away).

So, on Friday morning, I finally decided to take the step of gingerly scouring through whatever was in thay cupboard, to try to reach the bottom of it all. The top shelf of that cupboard only had a single rice cooker box. I looked around it and inside of it but it was clean. The bottom shelf, however, was chockful of plastic bags and tote bags. So I slowly pulled them out, one by one, and peeked around and inside each one.

And voila, after not too long at all, one of the top folded bags turned out to be a Quilts Etc tote bag and inside of it was something like 150 of those ants and a bunch of things that looked like sand particles. It was a terrible sight to behold. I immediately folded it back up and took it outside the apartment door, tossing it down the communal garbage chute. I then proceeded to unfold and check every other bag in that cupboard but found nary a single ant on any of them. I washed a few, tossed a couple, and folded up the rest again, and put everything in my cupboards (including some non-perishable food that was in the neighbouring cupboard) into two separate boxes to quarantine them.

There were a couple leftover stray ants (and another larger ant-like bug that I had previously seen that maybe had been preying on them) on the walls that I still had to flush down the toilet bowl afterwards, but even though I left the empty cupboards open for the rest of the day and the next day, I never saw a single ant in the kitchen after that. I think I’m finally done with this little episode in my apartment life!

I never did figure out what path they took to get to my bathroom in the three occasions that I did find some in there though, since I never found a path between the two places, nor did I find any ants elsewhere in the house. Dad thinks that finding them in the bathtub means I might have diabetes (something about sugar in urine) and urges me to go get a checkup, which I have been skipping for over a year now. It’s very possible, since I was diagnosed as being pre-diabetic the last couple of times that I had been there, but they were usually in the bathtub instead of around the toilet bowl so I don’t think that it was anything more than a coincidence in this case.

I also realized that the picture showing the path I saw them crawling up the wall last week, and the mention that I saw a couple in the back wall too, meant that they were crawling up from the back of the cupboard onto the ceiling, following a line to that wall corner, then down the wall corner, then into the innards of my house from the hole underneath my cabinet. Where they were headed was a mystery, but that wasn’t really the fastest way there.

I noticed though that among other things, they never attacked my tea collection, even though it was seated in an open, shallow basket container below the cupboard next to my dish rack. I never saw a single ant crawling on that wall that the tea basket was touching. In fact, that long ceiling route they took to get to the cupboard hole was very circuitous and specifically avoided the area of the kitchen where my tea was. This was even though there were some loose tea leaves and such that had fallen from their package and were just sitting at the bottom of the basket. Weird. But apparently a cursory Google search agrees that they dislike various aspects of tea leaves and tea bags.

They also never attacked my raw potatoes, as far as I could see, even though they were in an open bin in the neighbouring cupboard, less than a metre away from them. I do now believe that they were never going after food though — they were going after water, thus why they hung out behind my sink so much, since there was often splashes of water there from me using the sink. Anyway, I’ve thought that they were gone for good before only to have them return, but this time I think I’m finally done with them, so we’ll see if I can regain my trust in the kitchen again in a week or so.

That being said, I did see a couple other ants in the washroom on Saturday evening, but these ones may be isolated randoms coming from wherever all the other occasional random toilet bugs come from. These ones were not the dark red ones from the colony I saw and crushed this week. Might be worth monitoring though, but it’s the first time I’ve seen these and I might never see them again. Or the forward guard of a brand new colony.

Outside of ant eldritch horrors, the week passed by fairly peacefully. The temperatures started dipping down below zero overnight a couple of nights this week, and my phone’s weather widget insisted that there was snow on one of those nights, but my eyes pointing out the balcony doors told me otherwise. So as far as I am concerned, we have yet to get our first snowfall of the year. Apparently some parts of the city got a light dusting last Saturday/Sunday but not where I was, as far as I could see! Daytime highs are still hovering at or over 10 degrees Celsius though, and there’s even rain in the forecast later this week.

I went out to meet Dad at Southgate Mall early this week as he had brought some food over for me, courtesy of Uncle Droy. Apparently they had sent a couple big boxes of nasi briyani to the family, not knowing that Jon was now overseas on his trip. The parents have very poor appetites these days, so I basically got his share too, and it lasted me two dinners and three lunches.

I also ordered some food on the Fantuan app later on in the week, since they were offering me some hefty discounts. This was the first time I had ordered meal delivery in over 6 months, I believe. That also came with a free month of VIP to make things even cheaper, but Fantuan uses dark patterns like cancelling your VIP free month status immediately if you unsubscribe from the monthly renewal, to try to get people to forget that they’re subscribed and eat a monthly charge. I haven’t unsubscribed due to that, but have several written notes to do so before the time is up. I am hyper-organized, but even then I can definitely see myself missing that over the hecticity of a month, never mind people who are much less organized. Very bad.

What was also very bad was that Fantuan did not seem to have a free delivery driver that evening, and the app showed them calling in for emergency drivers from elsewhere. Eventually a Doordash driver went to get my order and deliver it for the 10% tip that I had given. He couldn’t find my apartment front door though, and refused to follow my instructions on how to get there from where he was when he called me, so in the end I had to go walk out to the central office of the apartment complex to get it from there at 11 pm.

I did receive a refund for the shipping portion of my VR lenses this week, thanks to VR Optician, the company that I bought my lenses from. I had contacted them last weekend and asked them to file a claim against the Money Back Guarantee from FedEx since they had shipped it (local) using one of FedEx‘s International Priority services that had a guarantee, but the package had just sat in FedEx‘s warehouses for a few days before being routed here to Canada via the USA. They said that FedEx had accepted their request for a refund, and they in return refunded me the $32 CAD shipping for the lenses. Woot! This is a small, but hopefully lasting positive review for them. I did not get to do any VR this week though, since other games were taking up my time. I’m stretched out too thin with too many fun things that I want to do.

This week, I also received my second Twitch payout this year (and ever) from streaming, a cool $65.84 USD that I had earned(?) over the past five months:

$13 USD a month isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it is neat pocket change considering that I only stream to something like 1-5 people a night. People donating their Amazon Prime subscriptions help, but I think I only get to keep $2 USD or so for each of those, whereas regular subscriptions are a little higher but not that much more. Jahandar tosses some bits my way now and then and I believe I get to keep the full amount of one cent a bit from those, and he also donated five subs this year during the annual Twitch discount event (SUBtember (local)), plus he maintains a space to host my blog on his personal domain, so I’m eternally grateful to him for all of that. Lastly, I seem to make something like $2-$4 USD per month on Twitch ads, and those do add up over time.

Almost half of the amount above was made during the SUBtember/September month though, so I think the normal pace right now is still about 7-8 months between payouts and not quite 5 months. With that, I expect my next one to be around June 2026 next year, since I’ll be away for a couple of months in February and March 2026.

I have not been sleeping well lately but it’s all been self-inflicted, since the League of Legends World Championship is going on right now (local) and the matches have been a lot of fun to watch, especially with my favourite team, SKT T1 (local), still in the mix. This has often translated to 4am sleep times this week. I still didn’t end up taking any time off of work since I do some of my work during that night period anyway and just wake up late (at around 10 am) and continue on with my work day afterwards, though I probably should since I still have 3 sick days to use this calendar year or I’ll lose them at the end of the year.

I did also book, but have not paid for, my lodging in Sapporo, Japan, which will be my first stop on my Asia trip next February/March. I’m really looking forward to that now. I also have a pretty good idea of where I will be staying in my second stop, Singapore, after that, but I haven’t yet booked that one because I need to coordinate it with plane tickets too and check to see exactly what dates I want to arrive and leave. Argh.

I also bought early bird tickets for the Winter edition of the biannual Butterdome Craft Sale this December (local). The event runs from Dec 04-07 and early bird tickets (sold until Nov 27 2025) cost $7.50 instead of $10.00 for the general admission ticket. Oddly, when I went earlier this Spring, the at-the-door admission ticket was only $8 and not $10.

Lastly, here are a few autumn scenery views from my apartment balcony on Mon Oct 13 at 11:00 am. What a gorgeous mix of yellow and green trees. Southgate Centre also turned the Hudson’s Bay sign lights on for one of the nights this week, likely on accident. How nostalgic.