Life

Auntie Stella, an Indian family friend, did not make it into the new year. As far as I was told, she was admitted to the hospital last week after suffering from severe pain, where they found that late-stage cancer had spread in her. She spent her last couple days comatose surounded by family and friends, some of which apparently flew in from Singapore, and then passed away on New Year’s Eve.

While I did not know her well and had not seen her in over 15 years, it still put me in a very pensive mood for the entire week. I remember her as a kind and cheerful auntie and my enduring mental image of her, from a period where both her and Uncle Droy and my parents all still had dark hair instead of white hair, is of her exasperately yelling at her kids to behave and stop horsing around, hah. Now all those kids are adults, too. They helped our family when we first moved to Edmonton, and she also provided the family with some wonderful nasi briyani over the years, usually around special occasions, and I always got some of that through my parents too. It was something I’d look forward to through the year.

Life is fragile and people are growing old. I have not had anyone within my immediate circle pass away yet, and after nearly 42 years on Earth I know how much of a blessing this is. I hope everyone I know has many decades of good life ahead of them yet.

I learnt all this when I went to my parents’ place on Tuesday this week, to hang out with the entire immediate family. Kel was here on a visit back home from China, and Jon brought his girlfriend over as well as we sat around, chatted aimlessly, and had dinner together. I introduced my siblings to Geoguessr and set them up with my account — apparently like the early days of Netflix, many people report sharing a paid account within the family and such with no repercussions. Which I think is smart on their part to leave well enough alone, it’s free advertising.

I also brought home a couple of gifts while there. One is a plushie from Kel who will be featured in next week’s Plushie of the Week, but arrived just in the nick of time for the annual plushie group photo featured below. Another gift was a spare raincoat from Mom that she had seen, liked, and thus bought on a whim, and I think she wanted to give it to Kel at first, but it was too big for her, so they regifted it to me instead.

This was a very ridiculous gift event to me though, because this turned out to be the exact same raincoat that I said, back in March this year in My Diary #181, that I almost pulled the trigger on because I also really liked it. Bujt it was $69 at the time, and the price was not palatable enough for me. I did return to the store later on in the year, saw it there again, and passed on it. And then returned a third time a couple of months later, and it was gone. Oh well, I thought, it wasn’t meant to be.

But apparently Mom had other plans. She claims to have found this raincoat on sale in the bargain section for about $20 or so, sometime back when she went to the same Real Canadian Superstore that I found it at, and it was the last nice-looking one there in a sea of uglier things on sale, so she bought it. It does fit me, although it’s medium-sized and not large and so I cannot also protect a bag underneath of it or anything like that, but hey. The most ridiculous part though, is that at no point did I post a picture of the raincoat, or even its brand, either here on the blog or directly to the family. So this purchase and gift was entirely coincidental and serendipitous in nature.

Anyway here’s a picture of the pink/purple raincoat for posterity’s sake. It’s from Joe Fresh, which is apparently a Superstore/Loblaw internal house brand.

A couple of other acquisitions also came into my possession this week. One was a sticker book by an artist named Noisywyvern entitled Firefly Sunset Reusable Sticker Book. Their website shop is here (local) and has other items in the Firefly Sunset line, but not this specific notebook. I got it from the Makers store in Southgate though, which is a store dedicated to showing off and selling products from local artists and designers. Good stuff. The artist apparently does booths at various conventions around Western Canada, so maybe I’ll meet her at one one day.

For the moment though, I chose and bought the sticker journal out of a couple of possible choices in the store because I like the fantasy starry night sky theme a lot. I’ve been wanting a lightweight sticker book to bring around with me not only to conventions, but also on trips in general, as a way to collect and paste stickers and stamps and other ephemeral memories, and this seemed perfect. Otherwise I never take or buy stickers because I have nowhere to put them. I will probably endeavour to buy at least one sticker per convention that I visit next year… err I mean this year, as a keepsake to put into the book. And I’ll fill it up when I go for my Asia trip too. I will also probably limit it to 2026 only, so I don’t feel too bad about filling it up too quickly or anything, and buy a new one next year.

If that sounds like a new year’s resolution, it’s because it is one, tentatively.

The other main item I bought this week was a Solis Edge (local), a $280 portable travel router that allegedly comes with 1 GB of data every month “for life” (and all the caveats that come with a statement like that) as well as a way to buy data on the go for the day or for the month in most countries around the world. It’s going to be one of the pieces in my setup for my real life streaming project while on the trip, if I get that together and working in time. And even if not, I can still use it personally outside of that, or give it to Dad or Kel to use the free data while they are travelling around the city without a local phone plan. We’ll see how well theory translates to practice, though. It has to work with the other pieces of my setup and it might not. But I bought it from Amazon (since the site itself was sold out) so I have a return period that ends just before my trip starts.

I still have done next to nothing for my actual trip besides book a couple of accommodations, and I’m now down to a month or so before I leave. This is why I don’t book trips so far in advance, I just get paralyzed with choice and wanting to see how things shape up before I book things that lock me in to things that I cannot back out of. I do need to start moving on this though. Or so I tell myself every week.

Back on the topic of new year’s resolutions, I didn’t really make any last year, except to maybe continue streaming until the end of the year and to maybe visit another Canadian town this year, both of which I maybe-did. This year, one will be to fill up that sticker book from things I visit this year, and another will probably be to try at least one new food item per week. Though this will be a bit of a challenge, similar to the bread one back in 2023 where I made myself eat bread, a food group that I disliked from young, at least once a week — where the challenge was not the actual eating, but the procurement of interesting things to eat during winter, since I just don’t travel far during winter outside of the immediate mall next to our house. Sure, there’s more than one supermarket/retail store there, but for the purposes of the challenge it would be pointless to just eat a different brand or variation of something that I’m already familiar with or something like that. But it’s probably going to have to be like that some weeks.

We’ll see though. The challenge can evolve as time flows past it. For this week, I tried two new things from the Indian section of Safeway’s new international aisle: a snack called bhungra and a condiment called mango pickle in oil.

The first one, bhungra, looked like this:

I opted for the spicy version and it is indeed spicy. Which is probably good since the underlying wheat flour puff underneath tastes like.. well, it has a bit of a grassy taste that I associate with wheat cereal products, just coated with very obvious chili powder flakes on top. There’s also a lot of salt on it, which turns the mouth dry after several pieces. Like many snacks, the salt makes it addicting, but makes me feel bad about eating it after. It’s not terrible, and I would eat it if it were free, but I probably wouldn’t buy it again. That bag was $2.19.

The other Indian thing I bought this week was pickled mango. Specifically, this container:

I eat a lot of hotpot soup plus rice, and one easy way to incorporate new ingredients that I’ve never tried, and something I always want to do, is to find items that can go into the soup or onto the rice. This condiment was one of them, although I was not prepared for how it was stored in the container, hah. It was a sealed plastic bag that I then had to further cut open to use.

I was very surprised when the actual scent of the pickled mango hit me though. This was something I recognized well — a smell (and taste) that one often smells wafting around Indian houses and restaurants, and that one could even sometimes find inside my favourite Indian dish, nasi briyani. Not the ones that Auntie Stella made though, and it’s not what makes that dish tick for me so I prefer not having it in there, but I’ve definitely had it in iterations of that dish made by some restaurants. I do like this condiment, I just had no idea what it was called before, so it technically isn’t new. And what I thought were “bones” that always came with this spread turned out to not be bones at all. I guess they were parts of the mango stone inside the fruit. Or maybe the pickle peel or something. This one was on slight sale, at $5.99 for the container, and I might buy it again in the future once this tin is done. We’ll see. This tin will last for quite some time though, and I can occasionally catch a whiff of it when I interact with the kitchen counter too, since  it’s meant to be stored out at room temperature.

It’s now been over three full weeks since I saw an ant on or around my main kitchen cabinet counter, so that’s good. I did see one ant on Friday this week on the back counter, which has nothing on top of it anymore. It seemed to be confused and dying so I helped it along. I’ve slacked on cleaning the house lately though since there’s powder and gel and traps here and there, and maybe I should enforce a resolution to make me clean the house better. I also need a new vacuum at some point soon, again… I go through those things so fast. Or I’m bad at cleaning the nozzle. Or the vacuum in general. Sometimes I feel like all my vacuums end up at a stage where all they’re doing is just redistributing dirt and not actually sucking much of it up. Not sure how to solve that.

I did look for the poison gel product that the pest exterminator brought in to deal with the ants the other week, Maxforce Quantum. Apparently it’s a controlled substances that is prohibited to be sold in Canada for some reason though, and you can only really get your hands on it if you are a pest company, although there are other offbrand variants that consumers can get. That’s so weird. It’s like some sort of Big Pest conspiracy forcing us to go through them instead of being able to handle pests ourselves. I guess I know what to request from the next friend or family member who goes down to the USA. There’s a lot of idiotic, nonsensically-banned products up here for some reason.

Also, that pest control specialist said he’d be back in two weeks to see how things are going and to remove the trap. He hasn’t done so yet and as far as I know there’s no scheduled appointment. I must bug my rental office about this.

Also, another interesting sidenote from the events of three weeks ago is that now that I know what the entry point for the fibre cable into our apartments looks like, those little white boxes on the corner of the ceiling and wall above our doors, I looked up and down the row of doors outside in our apartment hallway and extrapolated from there to definitively conclude that about 8 in 10 households are wired for fibre in the building now. I almost want to go knock on the other apartment doors and tell them to go save money and upgrade to a better internet at the same time.

I also mentioned winning a coin in a giveaway from a streamer, KumaMonster, three weeks ago, while watching his Japan walking streams on Twitch. He’s back in New York now and I don’t watch him much anymore because I don’t really like New York and his community felt too cliqueish to get to know people to talk to and I rapidly got tired of being ignored (this happens a lot in larger Twitch communities though), but the coin did finally arrive in the mailbox after the Christmas break, making it to me on Dec 30, just before the new year hit. The coin, name stylized as the KumaKoin, is really cool, really heavy, and has a number on it signifying its position in the print run (there are 300 minted, I think, and I have number 74).

I’d also like to give a shout out to the Thai Express store at Southgate Centre. Despite my recent misgivings about them raising their prices, I met the store owner cheerfully taking orders and helping out with the cooking, on Dec 29, and he ended up not only charging me the old price instead of the new price but also giving me a free container of chicken pad thai that they had wrongly made for a different order a bit earlier. So I got two meals — that one and my usual tofu pad thai — for the price of slightly less than one. I’ve been friendly with that guy for some time now, as I have been for most of the longer-term staff there, but even then it was a very nice and unexpected gesture. I tried to pay for the extra meal anyway but he was having none of it. “Nonono, I don’t want to see that,” he said while gesturing at my $20 bill.

And lastly, but not least, it was really foggy on the evening that Jon drove me home from the parents’ place. I took a picture after I arrived home, my final balcony picture of the year, Dec 30 2025 at 9:12 pm. The phone cuts through fog a bit, so the actual visibility was a little lower than this. There was a car stuck downstairs in the snow (not pictured) that I walked by on the way into the apartment.