Life

Much like last week, the latter part of this week was absolutely freezing, and it seems that the winter chill will last for the rest of the upcoming week too, all the way through the terrible event that is Christmas. I’m not a Christmas person, we’ve never celebrated it, although at least it no longer gives me seasonal festive pain to see it everywhere around me these years. The frost will take care of that though, if I step outside at any point this week.

Thankfully the early part of the week wasn’t bad, so I went out to the mall to stock up on groceries on Sunday and Monday. I ran into some plushie drama there, of all things, and I will tell that story down in the Plushie of the Week section. For this part of the blog though, I want to highlight this product that I’ve recently fallen in love with, Aurora Cauliflower Hot (local):

It’s not hot at all to me and my spice-insensitive tongue, and it does introduce a layer of oil to the soup that I mix it into, but I tried this last month for the first time when it was on sale, and I like the way that it goes with soup and/or white rice so much that I’ve bought it from Safeway several times since at regular price. Regular price at Safeway is $6.99 though, and the Aurora website does sell it for $6.00 a bottle — too bad the shipping directly from the website seems to be a flat $25 rate. Teehee.

Anyway my tastes and purchases come and go, and I wanted to leave this here as a marker for my future self to look at and remember back on a product that I really liked in this particular point in time, like I have seen past me’s do at times at other earlier points in my blog. Hi, future me.

Later in the week, despite the cold, I went out for a team lunch with my workplace team at Yang Ming Buffet, the Chinese buffet place where we’ve gone to for our last three team lunches now, the most recent one besides this week being in February 2025. Seven of us went: Ronnie, Zach, Babita, Justin, Sandy, Alex, and me, while a couple of other people cancelled due to the roads and feeling antisocial. Sandy had just finished an exam earlier in the morning too and we didn’t expect him to show up, but he did due to a last minute whimsical decision on his part, surprising us all.

It was so cold that Alex and I, the two people on the team without a vehicle and who thus use public transit to get around, needed to secure transportation from someone else to get here, and Justin picked us up from a gas station next to the closest train station, Coliseum LRT Station. Even just walking from the station to the car made my ears freeze painfully. This was nothing compared to what happened to me earlier in the trip though, as I had to run through Southgate LRT Station to make the train that would get me to the meeting spot on time, a dash across a track that involves going up and down some stairs.

I’ve mentioned it before at the bottom of this diary snippet, but what basically happens when I do this is that when I get onto the train, my panting catches up to me and I start feeling very, very… I used to call it dizzy but that isn’t really right, as I don’t actually feel dizzy. My world instead shrinks from even just the half a minute of dashing — it takes me forever to regulate and calm my breathing down again, and I get a really, really uncomfortable sensation in my chest. I think my blood oxygen then goes weird, as the strength saps out of my arms and legs and body and the limits of what I can see of the world around me slowly closes in upon myself and I start pouring sweat.

This is a weird thing that only started to happen when we moved to Edmonton long ago, and usually only when it involves both running and stairs together (even slowly climbing a small mountain, for example, is usually fine.) It lasts a few minutes and then I’m fine, but it’s really unnerving when inside of this bubble of helplessness, and this time it lasted for four whole train stops or so before I recovered. I was getting close to panic pressing a button and getting out to try to recover at the train station instead, but all those intermediary train stops were outdoors anyway and I wasn’t going to sit outside in the cold. And by the time the train reached an indoor station, I had already mostly recovered. This time it did leave me with a woozy feeling all the way to Coliseum LRT Station though, which only left me once I settled down in Justin‘s front passenger seat after the walk through the biting cold with Alex, who I had met at the station.

Still, the rest of the day went well, especially the buffet itself. We were met by the usual Bellabot at the entrance to the restaurant, although she was asleep this time:

To quickly summarize this part of the blog, we came, we ate and chatted, and we went home happy. I didn’t take any pictures of the side trays and the restaurant itself this time, but here’s what the central trays looked like today (I believe they are always the same every visit, though):

Decadent and comforting. I took my usually four plates and a bowl of congee at the end, plus a small bowl of wontons from Sandy as he could not finish them:

The whole thing cost $26.55 after taxes and a 15% tip, and I got to skip breakfast that morning and dinner that evening.

We also had an in-person team meeting scheduled the next day, but it was still as cold as the buffet day, with snow making the roads treacherous, so mercifully my boss called it off and we spent a bonus day working from home instead.

We’ve reached the final week of work before our (paid) winter break now, and half the team is now off for the rest of the year, while a skeleton crew remains to close out whatever tickets we can before the whole University goes into slumber. I mentioned before that I’m part of this latter crew and that I almost never take the time before Christmas off, but what’s different this year is that I’m not taking the first few days after New Year’s Day off as well, even though nearly everyone takes some time off either before or after the break, since I’m saving up my time for that February/March trip. I did take a day off earlier in the week though as I had a persistent three-day headache, which I blame the wild change in seasonal temperatures for. I still only took 9 of my 10 paid sick days this year, though. The last one will go bye-bye into the ether.

A couple small changes happened in the last couple of weeks from a local point of view that I wanted to note down here. The first is that Canada changed its weather warning system to now include a colour code at the front of every issued weather warning to indicate its danger level. There are three colour levels, going from yellow to orange to red from lowest to highest severity, and this news article (local) explains it. It still sounds very weird calling everything so far a yellow warning though. This apparently started on Nov 26 2025, or at least that’s when all the newspaper articles I see posted it, but I didn’t actually notice a Yellow Warning until last week.

The second thing is that I found out early in the week that Thai Express, at least the store in Southgate but probably across the entire franchise, raised their prices late last week or early this week. The dish I go for the most often was Tofu Tom Yum, Extra Spicy, and as recent as Dec 09 2025 it was $14.99 in price, plus GST. On Dec 14 2025 though, the price had risen and it was now $15.49 base price, plus GST. A permanent rise, they said, because everything cost more now. Bah. I still do get a 5% discount by paying in cash anyway, and that basically counteracts the GST so my final price is $15.46, but the discount existed before the price increase too and used to mean that I paid $14.95 as a final price after tax and the cash discount. I guess I’ll eat a little less often there than before. I took the opportunity to catalogue their menu prices while I was seething.

The third and last thing is that our local transit system, Edmonton Transit Service, finally started to accept credit cards when tapping on and off the gates at transit stations and on buses. This started on Dec 08 2025, and here’s (local) a news article on it. I’m not sure its working right though, as when I scanned my phone on the reader, I did see the reader accept it, and the charge did appear on the virtual credit card linked to my real one via Google Pay, but it didn’t actually list a charge on the history, just a “Transit” notification. Like this:

The two Transit entries were me tapping in with my phone at Coliseum Station, and then out again at Southgate Station later on, on the way back from the buffet, as a test. What does this even mean? A chargeless charge? The expected $3 charge hasn’t appeared on my card yet, whereas everything else before and after it has. When I flash my card on the reader, it does throw two replies together though, one error that it has detected more than one card linked to the phone or something, and then right away after that, a second success message saying that the card was accepted. So which is it? Whatever. It does read it, and if its not working properly then its not my problem. Or maybe a combined charge from ETS will eventually arrive at the end of the week or month or something. Who knows.

One thing that did arrive this week is a Christmas card from WingBenny, sent over my way while he was in Hong Kong. Thanks Benny! It’s a Sanrio card with a popup tree in the inside of the card that unfolds when I open it. It doesn’t scan well:

So here’s a picture of it on the floor:

The envelope was also very cute, and was held tight by a Clara sticker from Honkai Star Rail.

I recognize that sticker as the official Honkai Discord server has that as an emote and I’ve used it on Satinel many times in our private chats. So in order to preserve the sticker I cut open the envelope from the side instead.

Like last week, and to some extent the week before, I saw very few ants in the house this week, enough that I just pushed this section way down here instead of leading with it. I saw a couple by the bathtub again but even those have mostly disappeared. There’s been none on the floors or around my main cooking cabinet for around 3 weeks now, and I mostly credit the diatomaceous earth with this. I’m not sure if the ants have taken to the ant poison yet, so time will tell on that front.

I did see a couple of ants over at the other kitchen cabinet through the week though, and even on the stove, which I’d never seen them on before. It was just four or so over the course of a week though, but I do wonder about getting the same ant poison that the pest control guy got so that I could lay some traps on that cabinet too. I don’t think the ants are walking over a path near anywhere that the pest control guy applied the gel to, though I’m not certain of this.