My Diary #243

Life

Scanning took a back seat this week as I went out a whole bunch (though nothing that requires an extremely long post or section) and played a whole bunch of games and did some cursory research on other things when I was actually at home. It was a chill week, and that was nice for some mental and physical recovery after last week.

On Tuesday, I went out to the local Safeway for their usual monthly Customer Appreciation Day. 15% off everything. Nothing much of note happened here, except that I also dropped off my old favourite skirt at the local Stitch It! tailor store that recently reopened in the mall. I just now only realized that I had said "this store has opened" in my May post above, but I never actually displayed the uploaded photo in the post. Oops. That's fixed. I also picked up a bottle of umami seasoning from the discount rack at Winners. Hopefully it isn't too unhealthy.

On Wednesday, I first went down to the University because there was a union-sponsored free lunch going on there. That's definitely, totally the main reason I went down there, and not due to mundane reasons such as "work" or " meetings" in the morning. I also went through the Students' Union Building on the way to the CJSR CD treasure chest that I had mentioned a couple of times recently, and noted that they had replaced one of the doors with an automatic sliding door.

Huh, that wasn't there just last week or the week before, it was a regular double door with a push button just like the exterior doors just beyond it. Fancy. Anyway, the treasure chest of CDs was still there, and this time it had a different sign on it that no longer was unclear as to whether we were just supposed to "take one" or if a few were okay.

It just generically invites people to take stuff now. I obviously still don't know anything about any of the artists, so as always I went for weird stuff in paper pockets that look more lost-media-ish than others, though in practice almost everything is still available on streaming in some capacity or other. For now.

I then swung over to the free lunch in the main quad area of campus, and it looked like this:

No one else that I knew and cared to be with was at the University that day though, so I just got my free sandwich, a thoroughly unsatisfying breadslop called "The Stampeder - Steak, Swiss, Roasted Onions and Mushrooms, Garlic Aioli":

There was a lineup for a free can of pop too, but I decided that I wanted to be out of the mosquito swarm that was also having their free lunch, especially since the woman standing behind me at the check-in/sandwich queue had smacked a mosquito dead against the back of my shirt and then apologized about that. No need to apologize ma'am, you're doing everyone a favour. I instead kept the drink ticket (it was a generic Admit One carnival/arcade ticket) and had my lunch indoors, in the Central Academic Building. Which also looks fairly different now from the last time I really looked at the area, and vastly different from when I was a student here. Snap snap.

I hope someone will appreciate all these pictures I'm taking of places in about 10-15 years when they no longer exist or no longer look the same. Maybe by then the Googlebot will even have decided that my site was worth crawling and sent a spider by to capture my blog.

The sandwich was thoroughly unsatisfying though, so I went over to HUB Mall, bought a pack of Singapore Noodles from Hoho's, and then took that onto the train and bus as I zipped over to my parents' place. This was the day that Kel was free and that Jon could also stop by in the evening, so we had planned a family mini-reunion there. These are always pretty great, since we have such a good relationship with each other. I spent several hours there talking with Kel and Dad, helped Dad fix a computer issue, and then once Jon arrived we ordered some pizza and then the three of us left our parents at home and went out to the nearby Heritage Valley Town Centre area to pick it up.

I had eyed some condo townhouses around here in the past when I was looking for a house to buy, but I hadn't actually been to the area to scope it out, and I actually really like this area. It kind of reminded me of a shopping street, but without a covering. Let me amend my last statment. I really like this area except during winter.

In all seriousness it's very pretty. It reminded me of some cool nonbiri shopping places in China, and that's a good thing. And these are the Domino's pizzas that we picked up. Don't ask me what was on them. Something about sausage, pepperoni, Brooklyn pepperoni, mushrooms, and peppers, I guess.

I then got a ride back home from Jon, and I also made Kel come up to my apartment briefly so that I could lend her my Solis Edge, a portable travel router which I had purchased before my last trip -- I don't need it while in Edmonton, and the free 1 gigabyte of data every month doesn't roll over or stack in any way, but Kel doesn't have a local SIM card since she's only back here for a couple weeks, so we figured that this will help give her connectivity while she's romping around town with friends. Early reviews are that it works great (which is good -- I technically never really tested it in Edmonton since I have my own cellular connection in Edmonton.)

Kel also gave me a couple things that she had brought back from China/Japan. One was a cute, blunt box cutter that acts as a keychain, and the other is a thermal paper eraser/blotter (the text on it calls it a Thermal Paper Elimination Pen) that can be used to remove addresses and other sensitive info on envelopes and boxes before throwing them again. I tried both of them out with a package that arrived on Saturday, and they worked just as advertised.

On Thursday, I went out with WingBenny for lunch as he was in town for a week or so. We had originally scheduled a meeting for Friday, but Friday turned into a work meeting day instead, so we moved it forwards to Thursday. We went down to Whyte Avenue, to a double store named Friends & Neighbours Cafe / Pho's Delight Noodle Soup to eat. Even though they technically have different storefront addresses, they use/are the same physical store, and not only did they have two different store names serving two different cuisines (one western, one Vietnamese), they even had disparate menus.

I had the vegetarian Buddha Pho, while he had one of the other variants of the pho, which was pretty tasty. I also picked up an ice tamarind drink just to try it. It was very fancy and sweet and came with sesame and other things in it, but was probably not worth a whopping $7.25.

Benny insisted on paying for it all instead of splitting the bill, much to my aghast. We then went to Chayan, a newly-opened tea store a street east of where we were, and he let me pay for our combined tea order there, but that was nowhere near the cost of the meal here. Damn it, Benny!

According to its Instagram (local), that Chayan store apparently had a soft opening on Wed July 08, and then a grand opening on Sat/Sun this week, Jul 11-12.

The tea was okay, but it wasn't great, and the store was very cramped, but we found out afterwards that they were supposed to give us (well, Benny, cause he signed up for it to get the 10% discount for the both of us, and then I paid for it) a free jasmine tea air freshener for signing up as a new member, but there was no mention of it and we did not get one. Oh well. The ambience was nice enough, though the upstairs area was cramped, and the ceiling felt incomplete. It was aggressively decent.

Oddly enough, neither store that we visited had a local flyer distribution table or anything like that. A lot of stores along Whyte Ave do, as part of a community support thing, but maybe Chayan was too new for it or something, although it didn't seem like it had a planned out spot for that. No excuse for the Friends & Neighbours Cafe though, especially with a name like that.

Anyway, we (Tigey and I) also picked up a new friend there, visible in the selfie picture above, and he's featured down in the Plushie of the Week section this week!

After this, Benny drove me back to Southgate Centre and I went inside to meet Kel. Her Pebblebee had run out of battery at some point and stopped working even after it was recharged, and just like when I ran into this issue with Dad's Pebblebee back in Nov 2025, it needed a factory reset and then a reconnection to Google's Find Hub before it would work again. I also gave her some tea samples to try from my Harney & Sons stash (plus a bonus sachet of Alberta Rose Sencha from Jolene's Tea House, my favourite tea of theirs. We met up in the Uniqlo store there and both bought a couple of things -- I walked out with a pair of airy shorts and four pairs of coloured socks to mix and match.

As a side note, I've been looking at fast fashion and sustainable clothing a bit recently and trying to decide on my stance on that and what lengths I'm willing to go to to move the environmental needle a little bit towards the sustainability side. Price and convenience are a factor too though, and it's also silly to go all-in on protecting the environment with every aspect of one's life, as that isn't much of a life worth living. Everyone has to pick and choose their battles and see how they can and want to help.

For clothing, most of my clothing lasts me a long, long time, except for failures where I buy something and then find out down the road that it doesn't really fit me or doesn't work for my situation due to something or other. This happened a lot more often when I was in my gender transition, and not so much these days, but some of those mistakes still stick with me and shape my decisions these days sometimes. And while I'm not 100% eco-friendly, sustainable, and ethical clothing only or something, it is still something I want to get better at looking at and using as a compass to guide my macro-decisions when I'm at a store looking to buy something. I have consulted Gemini a couple times on this about shops and brands and how sustainable they are (and that comes with its own set of ethical and eco-friendly controversies, but that one I do not believe, agree with, or care about as much -- see paragraph above about how everyone has to pick their own battles and should not have to be obligated to fight every one), and in this case it said Uniqlo was somewhere in the middle with good and bad points. Good enough for now, I guess.

Moving on, on Friday, I went down to the University again for a work meeting. This time most of my teammates were on-site for the meeting too, and I showed them the CJSR treasure chest when we went to SUB for lunch, and grabbed more CDs to scan while I was there. I ended up with ten from the week, five per day that I was on campus. On the way home, I stopped by the Indigo store in Southgate Centre to check out their sales, and ended up grabbing a cute mug that wasn't even on sale at all in the end.

Booookshop. Dang it. It doesn't help that the cashier complimented the mug on the way out as well.

Outside of that daily cadence, I bought a couple other things from online retailers this week as well, the first thing being a stainless steel pot to replace the tragedy on my stove. The pot I settled on after a lot of indecision and analysis paralysis and a glut of Gemini recommendations was this All-Clad 4-quart, 5-ply, brushed stainless steel pan (local), and hopefully it turns out fine and will work as a forever pot for me and my soup needs. Though Gemini says that it's not a good idea to cook my morning eggs and ham in that one, and that I need to let it cool off before washing it after cooking (I always do this organically when making soup anyway though.)

The pot was discounted from $579.99 to $299.99 in the screenshot above, but the discount price was overstated because I saw that the actual price of the item on the manufacturer's webpage (local) where they were also selling the same pot was just $449.99. Despite that lie, the actual deal itself seemed to be a legit one, and I even found a coupon that brought it down to $267.74 CAD, so I made the order. I then found out that despite the website saying "Availability: ships within 24 hours", the UPS shipping label was created within 24 hours but as of three weekdays (and two weekend days) later, the tracking info was still "Shipper created a label, UPS has not received the package yet.". Hmm.

I also received encouraging news about the balcony camera idea that I'd been tossing around since last week. I had emailed my rental management company to see if they'd install a balcony outlet if I paid for it, and they surprisingly called and said yes, and that their electrician quoted them a price of about $265 plus tax for it. I said that I was perfectly fine with that (the safe alternative, a sodium-ion battery, would have cost me easily $900 CAD and still involved downtime), so the girl on the other side of the line said that she'd arrange it and get back to me with an invoice.

This hasn't happened yet, but due to this, I actually went ahead and bought the camera that I mentioned last week as well, and looked at the various other pieces that I'd need to make this work. After a lot of figuring out a network layout and connection needs with Gemini, I learnt that to make it fully winter-proof, I'd still need to spend about $1,100, including the camera but not including the electrical socket. That's a lot to spend when I didn't even know whether it would work out though, so for now I just went for the camera, a cheap switch, an AP access point, a weatherproof box, and some nice cables from a cool Canadian site that it told me about, Infinite Cables (local). Apparently they cut the cables to order and then ship it, so there's a whole variety of lengths that one can request for different incrementing prices that seemed much cheaper than mass shopfronts like Amazon.

To make it fully winterproof, I'd have to replace that switch with more expensive things and purchase a separate power brick or something similar as well, along with an extra plug or two, and that balloons the price. If it works and I like what I have, I might go for that, but even if I do this, the current IP camera might not be the camera I end up with, so the setup requirements might be different in the end, and thus it didn't make sense to fully invest into this now.

I'm kinda excited about this though, this hobbyist "new project" energy has been fuelling me the past few days. I've also learnt way too much about weird things like active vs passive Power Over Ethernet, and I looked at so many different routers and power options along the way. I don't know what I don't know though, and Gemini is too sycophantic to fully trust, so I'm sure there'll be a couple gotchas that I only figure out about once I think I have everything with me.

There was also a big, if brief, wind/rain/hailstorm on Saturday that was so strong that water was blasting in through the mosquito netting of my balcony door even though that's a full five feet or so away from the edge of the balcony. It was still being pelted by semi-horizontal hail and rain! I did wonder whether my camera setup would survive something like that. I mean, the balcony looked like this immediately afterwards.

It was crazy! I brought both my phone and the DJI Pocket 3 to record the storm, and was holding them at chest level INDOORS, on the INSIDE of the bug netting that runs between the balcony's double doors in my apartment, and they both still got soaked by the rain.

There were two more minor online purchases that I made this week. The first was the Pro version of the Independent Analytics WordPress plugin that I use for my blog analytics (and again, like I've said before, please be aware that I use this analytics tracker, but this is the only tracking/metrics plugin I use on my site, and it is completely local to my WordPress installation and does not phone home anywhere else). It was on sale, so I figured why not. The second one was a discounted 40-ticket sheet of early bird tickets for the Taste of Edmonton (local) event happening next week. Overpriced food, but fun event, and the early bird discount makes it a little less overpriced. I haven't gone anywhere to pick it up, but I can do that at the event itself anyway.

I had been talking to Benny about going down to the Royal Tyrrell Museum (local) in Drumheller as a day trip from Calgary, and maybe even doing an IRL stream while there to record us going through the galleries of dinosaurs, but when I reached out to the museum to check, they said that livestreaming was not allowed due to guest privacy reasons. Which is absolutely nonsense, by the way, because photos and videos are absolutely allowed, and in the same email they invited me to take videos and use that instead, which does not in any way make a difference for "guest privacy". Whatever. We might or might not still go later in the summer, or maybe next year, it just isn't really a high priority.

My two balcony pictures for the week include this one, from Wed, Jul 08 2026 at 10:26 pm:

As always, I like the gradient flow between the two halves of the photo. And this one, from Fri, Jul 10 2026 at 7:31 pm:

It's similar to one from Jun 16, where half the sky was still a proper sky and the other half was being devoured by a rainstorm moving in. If I do get this IP camera set up properly, and it produces videos of decent enough resolution, maybe I can get some more neat photos for the blog too.

Games

Like the previous month or so, the early part of the week was spent playing HITMAN World of Assassination (local), but then I did my second round of game buying from the Steam summer sale. I went for another Kairosoft bundle of four games for $8 that they released (the eighth and final one!), a bunch of DLC for Euro Truck Simulator 2 (local), of which I want to play the Project Japan mod (local) that Gemini informed me about near the start of the sale and got me tempted by this DLC, and then a game called Football, Tactics & Glory (local), which combines a football (soccer) team management player trading and raising simulator with a grid-based tactics minigame for each match that I can play, simulate and watch, or just simulate off-screen.

That game's a lot of fun! I dumped about 70 hours into it this week, although that apparently includes some time when I was at my parents' place too and not actually at the computer, since it doesn't always close smoothly or something. I just wish the game used proper rosters and team names, and while there are mods for that for the larger countries, those don't exist for smaller countries like Singapore. Oh well. I'm on my eighth year now I think, and I've gone from the fifth-tier league to the top-tier league in my country so far, with a lot of high potential players on my roster, and a scattering of heroic memories along the way. One thing bad about the game though is that I've had to throw a season twice already so as to not end in the top three slots in my league at the end of the season, which would have gotten me promoted too quickly and slaughtered in the next league above me. But once I reached the top league that became a non-issue since there's no more promotion from there on in.

There are still at least five different games that I actively want to play though, which is a nice feeling to have. I'll probably switch over to ETS2 or something else at some point this weekend or early next week and see what catches my interest.

Plushie of the Week #236

When Benny and I went to Chayan on Whyte Avenue to have tea at the end of our lunch outing on Thu, Jul 09 2026, we saw a table promoting Fantuan, of all things, set up in front of the main entrance of Chayan in some sort of collaboration promotion thing.

Fantuan is one of the local food delivery companies, specifically the Chinese-based one which can be used in both English and Chinese, but which tries to cater to the Asian diaspora and some of the Asian restaurants that might not be comfortable enough with English to sign up on the larger western ones like SkipTheDishes or Uber Eats. I guess here they were piggybacking off of the soft opening of the Chayan tea store behind them to try to get people signed up on the app. And the deal was that in return for downloading the app, they would let users pick a free gift!

I already had the app on my phone though, so I showed it to the guy (who had plenty of mosquito bites on the back of his legs, poor guy -- I hope he got compensated well for this) and asked if I could take one even though I already had the app and was a (regular, non-premium) member. He said yup! Just go into the app, search for "free gift", which turned up a hidden storefront called the Fantuan Gift Shop, and redeem that, and then I could pick one item that I wanted. It seems that gift shop thing is searchable from anywhere but is a redemption tracker and doesn't actually do anything if someone redeems it out of context.

Anyway, I redeemed it, then eyed the stuff on the table. I knew I was going to take a plushie for sure, but there were two of them, and I did also like the look of the notebook and the mousepad and the pack of cards and maybe that keychain... argh. I mildly regret not taking the pack of cards in particular, assuming that's what that box in the middle was, but plushies do take precedence and I came away with this guy.

Front:

Back:

Kel laughed when I showed it to her later in the day. It's a Fantuan Labubu! She said. A literal fantuan (sticky/glutinous rice dumpling), it's where the company name comes from onigiri labubu! She reverse searched it on her Taobao app and found that it was worth about 4-5 Chinese Yuan, or about one Canadian dollar, although of course the product existing on a Chinese online commerce site is very different than it being shipped all the way to Canada. Still, welcome to Tigey's Plushie Army!

Dreams

Jul 09 2026

• Snippet: I was in a classroom with rows of stools near the front of the class. There were at least three rows of stools lined by seated students, and I was seated in the front row near the left. The teacher was playing video clips on a screen set up in the front of the class, and was taking votes for the next clip at the same time that the current clip was playing, which was really distracting to me as I couldn't concentrate on both watching and voting at the same time.