My Diary #253

Life

This week was a very busy week at work, as a work project entered a new phase and a bunch of emails got sent out to our clients, which caused a bunch of work when replies to those emails came back to our team's mailbox. This is the same project as the cleanup project I was working on back in June, just a different part of it. But if it's as busy as the last time, which I expect it will be, then I also expect that just like last time, I'll be exhausted and blah at the end of it all and will have to take a couple days off once the main flood is over. Either late next week or at some point the week after. We also have an in-person meeting late next week though.

Due to the busyness of work, a bunch of things that I wanted to find time to do just didn't happen at all. I never got around to filling in my referendum ballot forms and sending those back, since I need to go down to the library to scan my documents to include in the return package as well, nor did I start on my Singapore renunciation papers as well for the same reason, although those ones I still need ICA to answer a few questions for before I can start anyway. Also I need a notary to complete that set of papers. I wonder if the library has a free notary service. I should become a notary myself, too.

So anyway, hopefully those things will be done next week, otherwise they'll have to wait until the week after. Whenever I have time to finally breathe a bit. The one delayed package I needed to finish winterizing my balcony camera also arrived today, but even though it should be an easy switch, I also couldn't afford the time or energy to change it out this week. At least it arrived properly and in one piece after being severely delayed last week though. For future self-reference, what I got for it was a TrendNet Gigabit PoE+ switch (local) and TrendNet 48VDC3000 power adapter (local). I got them for slightly cheaper than the listed prices in the (local) links there, but it still was pricey, which is why I wanted to make sure the entire setup worked using a cheaper (but not weatherproof) TP-Link switch (local) over the past few months before I committed to this.

My first Tigey-like eBay purchase from last week also arrived this week. This one came from Ontario, so shipping was both cheaper and quicker than the ones coming from the States. He's featured down below in the Plushie of the Week section this week. One also arrived at Jah's place, apparently, and is busy taking part in a friendly annexation down there. I want to get some friendship bands and maybe dream pillows and other interesting accessories for the new Tigey-likes that are coming too (there's still three more on the way directly to me), and will have to look around to source some cheap and decent ones.

In the meantime, Tigey and this first Tigey-like have been bonding together by watching sumo on Twitch every evening and night with me this week, which is the other thing besides work that's been keeping me up and destroying my sleep schedule. While I watched a channel called MidnightSumo (local) last basho, which was my first one, I've since found that they are too "noisy" and too large of a channel for me to enjoy their time there, so I'm watching this basho from a much smaller, and newly-minted, channel called KappaSumo (local).

I like most of the commentators over there for now, even though they're less knowledgeable than the other, much larger channel, since they're only just starting out. It's kind of like hanging out with friends at a bar and watching the game together, and as long as they don't get too rowdy or off-topic like the other channel tends to get, there's a decent chance that I'll stick around long-term. It's also kind of interesting because they seem to be a mix of people from circles that I would never have hung out with in a million years -- a bunch of people from the /r/conservative subreddit's Discord server, and a bunch of people from /sp/ on 4chan, along with refugees from another channel called DataSumo (local) that just wrapped up and retired last basho (I think both those groups of people hung out there too), but eh, who cares about any of that when there's sumo to be had.

I wish I had developed this interest in sumo before I went on this specific trip to Tokyo in the past, since I catalogued entering a sumo pop-up shop there but had no idea about anything or anyone involved at that time, so I just walked in a big circle and went out again. I still don't have any favourites or anything like that though, but it's been super interesting watching all the matches from pretty much 6:00 pm every day to almost 3:00 am in the morning, although in reality I usually go to bed sometime around 1:00 to 1:30 am, miss the entire top division, and watch highlights (local) the next morning instead.

But not a whole lot happened this week otherwise. I went out for groceries and such a couple of times, including a late-night visit to the local Safeway last Sunday just before they closed, which is notable largely because there's a bit of a liminal feel going through the Southgate parking lot and the actual Safeway itself while so few people are around. I should do that more since I like that liminal feeling. But besides those visits, and a walk around a mall on Wednesday during which I picked up some CeraVe Renewing Salicylic Acid Lotion (local) to see if that helps with the mild dryness and white flakes that I notice on my legs sometimes, not much really happened. I've also been plagued by something the past couple of weeks that's given me a lot of what I fondly call "ambient itching", which has made it additionally difficult to sleep sometimes. I've never figured out what caused this, although everything from antihistamines to Tiger Balm ointment to my aloe vera gel to a cold, wet cloth all help to varying degrees sometimes.

Oh, and this is a personal note to myself to NEVER buy Safeway Compliments Extra-Lean Ground Meat of any sort again. I made this mistake when I was first making my Asian macaroni dishes a few months ago, then I switched to a better but slightly more expensive kind at the time that ran $6.00 per box (down from $6.99 on a months-long special offer). Each packet lasts me two meals, and I think it's actually also from the Compliments brand, just not their Extra-Lean stuff.

But then I saw that the Compliments-branded Extra-Lean Ground Turkey was on sale for $2.99 per box (down from $7.49) this week, and those also last me two meals each, so I bought two packets. But it tastes bland, and the texture of the meat is like toothpaste or some sort of squishy dough instead of meat. It's impossible to partition well and lots of wastage and it feels terrible just handling the stuff. Ugh. Never again until the next time I forget about this self-warning.

Oh well. At any rate, a lot of the week found me poking away at work emails late into the evening and sometimes into the night, and that also affected my gaming time and my time spent on writing for my game. I didn't get much done this week on the latter at all, although I did finish migrating some stuff over to Obsidian, and also ended up doing a bit of work on my Dream Diary, of all the things to get a second wind for. The story-writing stalled because I'm trying to figure out a system for keeping track of what my protagonist and her classmates call each other, and I came to the realization that I need a matrix of names and endearments for what A calls B and B calls A through the entire class for consistency-tracking, and the ones involving the protagonist probably also need actual variables in-game since they can vary depending on what options are picked by the player. What a pain.

There's a nearby house for sale that I'm kinda torn on, the family doesn't like it because its old and has some weird quirks that will need renovating, and apparently no one else really likes it either, since it was listed for $329k a month ago and found absolutely no takers for it, even though it's cheaper than other houses in the same row that sold for more than that last year. Well, the listed price was lowered twice in the intervening month, and is down to $300k now, but when I floated the idea of going to see it, I just got an earful of why home ownership is bad and how much Jon has paid for maintenance on his house since he got it and how I "might need" to replace this or that because it's an old house or it "might get repossessed" if I can't make mortgage payments. Seriously, an argument against going for it was what will happen if the roof needs fixing, and then the sewage tank backs up.

Like what nonsense is that. That is true of ALL houses, aren't you just saying I should never own a house?? This annoyed me because that had nothing to do with the actual specific house, and was fearmongering about home ownership in general. Yes it might not be the absolute best choice (although neither is renting, nor is a condo purchase, none of the three options is a clear winner in the long run), but it's my goal to get one for myself, which was a goal I set for myself as compensation for cancelling my study abroad trip after Mom got a stroke, and it's been a frustrating last year and a half of basically no good options at all because the area that I had constrained myself to (something that would be good for the parents as well as me, in a decent area and in a price range I could afford) was so small.

And whenever a candidate popped up, I have always wanted the family to be involved in the decision too, which is why I tell them about it and invite them to showings, because I've wanted their opinions and extra eyes on what is wrong with the specific house, and they've been great about that for the most part. But this time there was such negativity about home ownership in general that it was very depressing. It is like Mom just wants me to just stay here and die in place where I am without ever doing anything for myself and trying to reach out for something better or different. They're so risk-averse, and seem stuck in the past during a much cheaper time, when I could get a much better house with the funds I had now before inflation (if I had today's dollar amount 25 years ago), and their idea of what I can actually get with how much I have is way too unrealistic.

And now I'm also finding myself having second thoughts about them ever moving in with me at all because they will probably just try to stop me from ever making fun and interesting purchases for myself with my own money, and question every box that gets delivered, and accuse me of wasting money of this and that on purchases for myself when the house or they themselves need this or that instead. It's so going to happen. I wonder if it's too late to try to throw all this away again, quit my job, and go somewhere to study and work there, and stay away like Kel does. Or to go try and find a new job and place closer to home in Calgary or Saskatoon or somewhere else to move to.

Why I'm considering all that at all though is that I actually have a perfect job right now if I just want to stay here in this specific apartment forever and "die in place", but I don't. The ideal houses I do want around nearby here cost about $100k more than the mortgage I can get plus the funds I have, which means I'm never going to reach it with my current job and funds anyway, without some sort of miracle or some additional ongoing source of revenue. But then again, if I get a job outside of the city, I wouldn't need that specific house anymore either, and I don't know how going elsewhere to work would work when I don't have a place there to stay to begin with. It'd also mess up things like pension plans in some way that I haven't fully figured out yet.

I am tired of working here though, on top of everything else. Which is funny because while I was considering going to "spite buy" the house, the busyness of work this week also led to a situation where I plain didn't have time to go request a showing of that house from my realtor anyway! Maybe the week after, or the week after that, if it's still there... or maybe I'll lowball the house offer or something since it's not selling anyway, and move on with that 1-year GIC I was talking about last week if they don't accept. We'll see I guess. There's also a risk of buying so close to the October separation referendum in the province.

But... are they wrong though? Venting aside, that whole conversation also got me thinking about condos, not townhouses but actual single-level top-floor condo apartments somewhere, and wondering if a good one exists somewhere whose condo fees aren't too pricey. I actually wonder about living around downtown somewhere, somewhat away from the most disorderly areas, in a condo apartment of some kind with a good reputation. It would be a lot cheaper than buying a full-on house and I'd still be building equity, whatever that's worth these days. Hmm.

Also, I wouldn't get scared of weird noises at night if it were an apartment that couldn't be reached from the ground and only really had one main entrance to protect. But an apartment probably won't be big enough for me to unpack all my stuff from boxes and settle down for 10-20+ years. At least, it'd need to be pretty huge. Then again, the house I'm looking at is only about 550-600 square feet per level, times 3 levels including the basement. Maybe I can find a happy medium somewhere that won't let me rage at my parents and won't let me rage at my bills either.

I'd also probably have a nice view from a condo unit like that, huh. This week, like the previous couple, I only took a small handful of photos. Here's a snapshot from Mon, Sep 14, and another from Fri, Sep 18. The daily sunset is now in the middle of my viewport! And will continue moving "left" (south) over the next few months.

Games

I finished Konbini Cleanup (local) this week, and ultimately left them a bad review on Steam because of all the little details in the game that annoyed me, and because the dev isn't fixing stuff and is already instead hard at work on their next game in the same genre, which is about to hit launch in less than a month from now, which is only around two months after their first game just hit launch. That's an asset flip and a money grab to me. Too many dumb people are giving it a positive review from having "No Gen AI" in it, when this game could actually have used some of that if well-done, because the products and stuff here, the main point of playing the game, turned out to be pretty poor and bland and full of errors. But hey! The author specifically stated there's no Gen AI in it, so it deserves many thumbs-ups for that alone!

My next game in the genre is Megastore: Tidy Up Together (local), this one is much beefier than the last one and I think I'm losing interest in the genre as well after going through Konbini Cleanup, so I'll probably just work on this one over time, a bit every day. This is a good thing because it means I can finally tear myself away from sorting things cozily and move on back to other genres, just in time for the final beta access of Petit Planet (archive), which started Saturday evening, Sep 18 2026, at around 7:00 pm local time.

I've missed the game, although I'm not yet sure if it will suck me in as much this time since I've likely played through most of the early game already and progress will (probably) be lost after the end of the beta anyway. We'll see, though! So far, it's like meeting an old friend again. Lots of little progression things have changed since the last beta, and I've already friended a couple of random people I met in the social area. It's funny though, I skip playing cozy sorting games for one evening and suddenly my dream retention cratered.

TCG Card Shop Simulator (local) also hit its 1.0 release this week, and I spent a couple of hours playing that, then looking through mods that I could add to it. It still has minor annoyances that no good mods seem to fix yet though, mainly revolving around the card display table being clunky to use and pack opening being really slow, so I decided to go leave it be and sort things in a big supermarket instead. I'm sure the urge to play this will bite me again soon. Similarly, I played a bit more Hades II (local) and also took a peek back at No Man's Sky (local), which pushed out yet another big update, but neither of them really captured me in the way that could break me out of my work-induced ennui. Perhaps next week, or month, or year.

Plushie of the Week #246

I need to come up with names for these new Tigey-likes, and probably a way to distinguish them apart too, but this first Tigey-like plushie, a light orange variant, arrived this week after Kynji planted the idea in my head last week to get some. This specific one came from Scarborough, Ontario, and its eBay listing is located over here (local). It cost me $18.52 CAD after shipping and taxes to get the little beauty over here, and he arrived on Thu, Sep 17 2026 to his new forever army, much to Tigey's chagrin at first. But within the first 24 hours, they were happily sitting and watching stuff on my computer together, and resting next to each other in bed while I slept.

He first met Tigey, as seen above, and then this larger unnamed Esso tiger from Huihan that I still haven't named but was basically a larger version of this Tigey-like.

And then Tigey and the Tigey-like counted their blessings that their eyes were not loose screws like the larger Esso tiger's was. It was very concerning.

But all's well that ends well in the end.

Unlike Tigey, this tiger still had his tag as well. Front:

Back:

That was Tigey's original tag too, but I wonder where it went and when it fell off. The new tiger also still has fluffy sideburns, and proper stripes on the inside of his left leg, all aspects that Tigey has lost over the years. Tigey has gained one bead of weight over the years though, plus his friendship band and various other less permanent accessories, and has a double black string coming down from his throat like a school tie, whereas the new Esso tiger plushie only has a black knot there.

Sep 2026 edit: Hello from next week. Here's a picture of this thing wearing his newly-minted friendship bracelet too:

I also mirrored all the eBay listing's pictures that the seller uploaded for posterity here:

Dreams

Sep 14 2026

• Satinel and I were seated on either side of a streamer named RualStorge at a bench in a cafeteria, the three of us with backs to the table we were sitting at as we watched him control a little girl character in a raincoat going through a computer game laid out in front of him without a monitor.
• We were discussing some philosophical stuff and Satinel was trying to teach me the definition of a word or skill that was used in the game so that we could all use it temporarily, even though the two of us were not actually playing.
• The littie girl character that the streamer was controlling died face-down in a passage surrounded by goblins, with one of them still poking her with a spear even while she laid there. He took this opportunity to stand up and go to the washroom, which was at the side of the room behind us.
• While he was gone, Satinel and I figured out from checking the game rules that the matron of the cafeteria, a plump H‬ispanic woman who was about to head off for the day, would say something special in Spanish if you paid her just as she was leaving.
• However, neither of us had ordered anything from the food stalls yet, so we could not do this. We just waved at her and exchanged goodbyes instead.

Sep 15 2026

• I finished a school-related plotline that took place in Singapore and which I don't remember the details of, except that it involved travelling by bus somewhere towards school at one point. I then headed home towards my own apartment building after that.
• As part of the earlier plotline though, I had lost my house keys, which had been thrown off or had fallen off from the corridor outside my apartment door, down onto the grassy courtyard below. I had no time to retrieve it at the time because I was headed to school, but I did now, so I went to the courtyard to look around.
• The rectangular grassy courtyard hosted a small, open-air restaurant on the left side, with a bar and cooking area on the extreme left and then round tables with white tablecloths laid out upon them, and chairs spread out between the left side and the centre of the courtyard. Most of the chairs at the tables were occupied by patrons.
• The right side of the courtyard was empty, and as my apartment was the fifth of six apartments from the left side where the elevator lobby was, the area below my apartment would have been on the empty right side of the courtyard rather than the occupied left sides, so I had hopes that my ring of keys would still be there.
• They were not, however, and I became more and more worried as I walked over the entire area once, and then a second time, without finding it. As a last resort, I decided to ask the restaurant hosts at the bar to see if maybe anyone had found and turned in the keys to them.
• As I approached the bar, I heard one of the waiters chastise another patron for asking them a stupid question. I decided to wait for that waiter to leave the immediate vicinity, and then went to ask the other waiter standing there if any keys had been turned in.
• That waiter looked puzzled at first as he rummaged around behind the counter. I pointed at another set of two keys in a keyring lying on the nearby table and said that it was something like that, except that mine had three keys and a bunch of other stuff attached to it.
• Another waiter, a young boy, came by, and after a couple more seconds, they seemed to find something. The first waiter held up a keyring, hidden behind a wad of paper towels, and asked me to describe my key ring. I told him that there were three keys, with something threaded into the keyring between each and every key. One of the things in between the keys was a triangular, gray University of Alberta keychain fob. He revealed the set of keys, which was exactly how I had described them, and returned them to me. I was flooded with relief and thanked him.
• I went up the elevator and back to my apartment, which was a large and rather fancy maisonette unit somewhere around the 7th to 9th floor. Two other Chinese boys came out of the elevator with me, and there was a slight sense of danger as we walked down the corridor, but they turned off to enter the second or third apartment instead. I entered my apartment, locked the door behind me, and put my school bag down on the floor with a sense of relief, as it had been a hectic day.
• I wanted to take a shower, and shuffled towards the bathroom as I started to slip my blouse and skirt off, but the bathroom was located past a door and down a short corridor that I shared with my neighbour, the fourth apartment from the elevator. Both of us had a door leading into that corridor, and even though they were usually shut and locked when not in use, the neighbour's door was currently wide open. I could not see him, but I could hear him talking on the phone, telling someone on the other side of the line that catfish bites hurt and that he'd love to demonstrate it to her if she wanted. I put my clothes back on and peered into the neighbour's house.
• After a couple of minutes, a middle-aged woman walked out of the door towards the bathroom and stopped as she saw me. We chatted for a moment and I told her I wasn't sure if the neighbour had left the door open on accident, and she said she'd inform him not to do so in the future. She asked if I was going to use the shower, and I said yes, but that she could go first if she wanted, since it was only 10 pm and I was able to stay up well past midnight to let my hair dry.
• She laughed and took me up on the offer, saying that she wasn't young like me any longer and needed to go to bed early. She said that she'd be done in about 20-30 minutes.
• Snippet: In an earlier dream, there was something about 12 types of medicines, each with a light and dark variants, that I needed to sort into a 24-slot tray that looked like a long, rectangular paint palette or egg tray.

Sep 16 2026

• Snippet: I remember walking around a university campus, and in particular at one point running into a woman sitting on some steps in a corridor and blocking the way through with a line of prawns and other seafood on skewer sticks laid out upon the step. I looked at her, she looked back at me, and I told her I'd find another way through and not to bother moving them just so that I could get by.

Sep 17 2026

• I followed a silent girl through the streets of a neighbourhood of what seemed to be a very rudimentary tutorial in a game. It was at night but at one point, she just ducked behind a fence and beckoned me to follow her, and after we hid there, a man whom I understood to be a guard ran by us on his morning exercise.
• At another point, we reached a gap between two houses, and she ran into and up some rope netting that was set up there. I followed her and noted that the game did not have animations or separate keybinds for climbing, so it looked like I was just running up the rope netting. Huge ogres as large as the structure that the netting was attached to suddenly appeared, and their hands followed us in slow motion, trying to catch us, but we ran up the netting to about the height of a three-storey building, and then back down the way we came to avoid them.
• Later on, I hung out at the edge of a large grassy field with some friends. We watched two or three groups of sports teams practising in the distance on the other side of the field, and pointed out to each other that some of the boys seemed to be not wearing any clothing at all, though we couldn't tell for sure from this distance. It looked to me that they were first year boys that were forced to be that way, so it was probably some sort of club hazing.
• I was also at work at some point after that, but it was near the end of the day and I was hanging out in a room full of tasks. Most of them were largely complete though, and I had already scored a full 12 points for the day, so I spent the last hour before going home time sitting on some steps and reading a book.

Sep 18 2026

• I was living in an apartment building and the next door neighbour was a party girl that occasionally played some kind of dance music, and whenever she did so she would leave her front door open and I would go out and stand in front of her door to listen to it. One time near the end of the dream the door was closed though, and when I went to knock on the door a Chinese guy opened the door instead, looking puzzled. I told him that I used to have a friend that lived there but that I guess she had moved away now.
• This dream came with many snippets, at one point I was assembling or sorting coins between two boxes in front of me, moving them from the left one to the right one. I was fourth from bottom in some list but out of the relegation zone, so I was not worried.
• In another snippet in the same dream, I was having tea with a rich man in front of me, and because he was rude, I had some multiple-choice options as to how to react. The polite option would have given me some sort of reward or ranking boost in the end, but there were options to make his tea invisible, put some weird salt in it, or spill it over top of his head, too.
• In yet another snippet, I was copying buildings from the world and pasting them somewhere else digitally. I had a selection tool that would let me select buildings in the world that I was looking at on a three-dimensional grid while I was in first-person mode, so when I was copying a tall white apartment building in front of me, I made sure to encompass the base, then drag the grid netting up 12 stories to the roof, then 6 more stories to capture all the antenna and wires on the roof too.
• Snippet: In a separate, earlier dream, I was working on importing some video and had two screens in front of me, the left one let me remove some black vertical marks that sometimes snaked downwards from the top of the screen in the video, and the right one let me remove some UI overlay that the video sometimes had.

Sep 19 2026

• I received a number of clues to the locations of items that I needed to retrieve, as a new chapter of a game in the world that I was in started. These item locations varied, for example one was by some docks, and one was behind a school not far away from there.
• These clues needed to be processed before they could be used, and I used a laptop for this, although the laptop capacity was measured by a tank of liquid that it was in and at one point the tank completely filled up, rendering the laptop unable to work. To fix this, I had to shut down and reboot the laptop. After that, I started with the clue that had crashed the laptop and it worked this time, even though I had to restart the processing.
• The item behind the school was concealed but the path to the item was flanked by a couple of old ladies who stood along the outside of the school wall. I went past them and nodded to them in a friendly manner as I went to get the item, and then thanked them on the way back.
• One of the ladies had picked up some items that their owners had completely abandoned, and was trying to sell them back to them at very high prices, basically all that those people owned, and her offers were all getting rejected. One of the items she was trying to sell back was an empty photo album with a reddish-pinkish swirly cover, and the woman on the other side of the line just flatly said she could easily get another photo journal.
• Walking back to the front of the school, I caught a bus to leave the area and went to have a meal, which was a combination of three-quarters Chinese food and one-quarter Indian food mixed together.