My Diary #049

Dear Tigey,

You know what’s better than a long weekend? An *extra* long weekend!

Entry #049 (Apr 17 2022)

Table of Contents

Brushing off April snow from…
ට  School
ට  Work
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #47
ට  Song of the Week #24
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #31
ට  Dreams

School

School is over, so these sections won’t ever be very big anymore and might even be skipped if there’s nothing relating to going abroad to talk about in any given week. This week though, I was given the email address/contact information of the other students from UAlberta going to Singapore/NUS this Fall semester. I haven’t reached out yet, though, as it came late in the week and well, I’m not sure if I’m actually going yet. There’s one other girl going. I’m definitely feeling my hype building though, and I hope things work out ok in terms of the approvals I need for it.

I alluded to this last week too, but it’s been really nice being able to not worry about actual classes and having time to play games or relax in bed on a Saturday afternoon without work or school guilt gnawing away at me. I do still wake up with some adult guilt or something if I nap during the afternoon though, not exactly sure why, but that’s been a thing for me for a long time. But the levels are definitely lower outside of an active semester.

Work

I was feeling sick early on in the week, with chills and body temperature oddities that made me a bit worried, but that only lasted a day and a bit in the end. I still did take a day off work for that though, and that plus having Friday off for Easter (as well as Monday — our University get a 4 day Easter long weekend every year) means that this week was extremely short.

The main note of interest this week was also alluded to in previous weeks — one of our newest team members was leaving for another job and his last day was Thursday. We’ve only ever seen him online through Zoom, and expressed an interest in meeting up at some point over the spring or summer for a meal somewhere or something. One of our other former teammates, who left last September to lead another team, left that role in our department and accepted a role leading our former Tier 1 helpdesk team, which has been decoupled from our department and moved to another central department under yet another former teammate of ours. We work fairly closely with this Tier 1 helpdesk team, and now their supervisor as well as his supervisor are both former teammates as well so our relationship will probably be even closer going forward. It is interesting seeing where all our former teammates, now team alumni, that we used to hang out and shoot the breeze with, have gone to.

Life

Our weather this week has been so odd. Last week saw a 15 degree and a 20 degree Celsius day, this week (Sunday to Saturday) saw a high of 2.4 degrees Celsius and three days of mild snow, and next week we have two days forecasted to be at least 10 degrees Celsius but also four days with a 30%+ chance of snow — two of the four days being the two days where we’re hitting 10 degrees! Please make up your mind, Mother Nature. There’s also been lots of AuroraWatch red alerts but it’s always been cloudy as always, so there’s been nothing to see. I also was aware of the weather coming up this week and did my shopping for the week last Monday or so, so I’ve barely even stepped outside this week, but the longer evenings are really tempting me. I think evenings are my favourite time of the day in terms of enjoying the weather with a pleasant walk. The blue-purple-orange sunset into dusk into twilight period is so mysterious and magical.

I’m a little worried about some of my friends, I have one rehabilitating from a recent surgery, another one about to go for one after the long weekend, and another one getting a divorce and looking for a new job all at the same time, so things aren’t quite stable in my circle of friends right now. Hopefully everyone gets through their personal tribulations just fine! On the bright side, Satinel is apparently working on some cool game stuff again, pushing forth her boundaries and learning things that have now far outstripped anything I ever did with the Unity engine, and I’m super proud of her. At one point before starting I think she never thought she could get this far, but she has, and even if no game is created in the end, these skills and concepts are totally transferable across to different software and coding languages once learned. And even outside of actual game creation, knowing how things like lighting and collision even work adds a new level of appreciation (and ability to find/exploit bugs!) to even the act of playing games, I think. I don’t dare disturb her too much while she’s working on her projects for (the very mild) fear of breaking a precious thing.

I hate the estrogen patches, since they have to be stuck on the skin for a few days at a time, the box highly suggests that you rotate locations each time you apply a new one, but after 3 or 4 rounds or so, I notice that I can still see faint ovallish marks where the old patches were stuck on, all the way back to the first one I used. I’m so going back to a pill during my next appointment with the doctor. Talking about pills, the antihistamine pills (Bilastine) are still working wonders to combat the itches I had. I still go about 1.5 days between pills, so I usually let the effect of the last pill run down and see (generally non-itchy, but rather visible) splotches start to reappear before I take the next pill. Occasionally I get a weird swollen lip or something out of it when the last pill’s effects expire, which is so peculiar. My body is so weird. And also those magic pills. I’m glad I found them. Also you’re glad I found them, so you don’t have to read about any more incessant itching in every weekly journal entry.

I powered through and uploaded all my remaining Dunman High yearbooks this week, you can see them stuffed into shelves at my blog’s Table of Contents. Although I have lots more things to scan and upload, that gets rid of one of my backlog entries that has been stuck for a long time. Next up will probably be my USA trip in November 2021, since I’ve now done processing most of the videos after the breakthrough over the past two weeks. Probably. Anyway I spent three evenings on this this week and wrote down a bunch of stuff on those pages. Between that and the games I played, and the weather being bad, nothing else major really happened that isn’t under another blog category.

I didn’t go out this week so I wasn’t expecting to run into any Little Miracles, but I did catch a picture from my apartment of two Canada Geese in the communal yard down below, facing off against two rabbits. The rabbits lost the staring battle and scampered off, as can be seen in this picture below:

The geese remained standing there for another ten full minutes or so before flying off, which is so weird. Not even wandering around the area, just literally standing there. Like the mafia showing the rabbits who’s boss, I guess. Either way, I’ve never actually seen Canada geese wandering around the communal property yard area below my balcony before, so that was neat. (Mind you, I’ve seen and heard them everywhere else, but this territory usually belongs to the Usagi rabbit gang, come winter or summer.)

I wandered down to the library last week and browsed the shelves until I found a book that caught my interest as an easy, interesting read, and the book I brought home is called Why Travel Matters, by Craig Storti. It talks about the difference between going on a curated vacation and actually going travelling and exploring and seeking new experiences, and while I think most of it is somewhat common sense, it still works well as an inspirational book for me, both to give me a new or modified lens to look back on the things I did on my USA trip, as well as to stoke me for the future. It also somewhat inspired me to open and read the article I talked about below in the Snippets section, and so was ultimately responsible for that whole rabbit hole I fell into while writing that segment up. It also produced my weekly Bad Haiku, which I have entitled “To Tigey“:

My dear grey striped friend
Thank you for staying with me
All over the world

Games

First off, some words of wisdom from Tigey:

Right. That sounds like an Inspirobot (local) saying. That was the Pocket Love game I was messing around with last week, but since there’s actually nothing to do but watch 30 second ads in that, and they don’t even work properly sometimes, I’ve deleted it from the phone. I need a game like that with actual gameplay though.

I played three games this week on the PC. Two of the games were demos I had played during the last Steam Next Fest back in February, and I had ranked them in the top 5 — Epiphany City and Ghostlore.

Epiphany City was a short (about 4 hours) puzzle game but I liked it very much, the characters were oozing with charm and the story was sort of a reverse superhero story that came with a pretty cool reveal in the climax. My full review of it can be read here. But you basically create, push/pull, and rotate boxes to form patterns and things in order to progress in the game, and solve floor tile puzzles where you have to step on every tile exactly once. And later on there’s a bit of a rhythmic game segment. I didn’t find any of it particularly difficult, although there were a couple tricky rooms that apparently stump some people for a couple hours at a time. I liked the characters the most though, with the main character being a bit of a brat but with a streak of goodness and a desire to overcome her depression and do great things, and her best friend who tries her best to support her while also being human and facing her own internal struggles. Also, here’s a screenshot that is obviously talking about me in real life.

There was a hidden dev room with an email address stating that we were free to use to email the creator if we wanted to chat, which I thought was a nice touch, so I sent him a quick email thanking him for the game and got a nice email back. Apparently a couple of their team members are from Singapore, too, just like the game below. Cool!

The second game, Ghostlore, was also pretty fun, and I bought it partly to support the devs, who must be Singaporean, since the fictitious country in the game is obviously based off of a mystical, historical version of Singapore, and there are many yummy pictures of Singaporean food in the game and several uses of local slang. I really hope I get to go back to the country, I miss it, but if I can’t eat the food there, at least my character here can. Anyway, it’s an Action RPG and a fairly long game, and I found and submitted a number of bugs in the first few maps for them to fix, but I am nowhere near the end of the game, and I’m not sure I ever will get to the end, but I’m fine with that.

I’m looking forward to some of the other games that I liked from the demo festival though. I skipped Hero’s Hour because it was unoptimized and lagged out my machine and wasn’t at a good enough price point at launch considering that, but I’ll probably pick up Jack Move and Fishing Paradiso, my other two top 5 games from the festival, and possibly Puzzles for Clef and Stardeus too if they’re at a good price point, and if I’m still in Canada and have free time when they release.

Lastly, Thrandor tempted me into playing Minecraft again, since he (or possibly Darkseize, since they often play together) paid for a Minecraft server and put a modpack named All the Mods 7 on it. It’s been a while since I’ve played, so all my curiosity and interest at checking out various odd mods and figuring out how their implementations of technology and magic work bubbled to the top again, and the next thing I knew I had a seaside farm with an orchard of fruit trees next to a world-generated brick tower with a sprawling dungeon full of loot beneath it. Maybe this time I’ll even figure out how to build a proper house without having someone give up and exasperatedly build one for me (which has happened on more than one occasion with different players..)

Plushie of the Week #47 – Druggy

I had to feature Druggy this week because he appeared in my April 12th dream, so I wanted to provide a picture to accompany the dream diary entry that went along with it. Druggy is a Chinese Dragon with a really uncreative name.. it obviously went from Dragon to Draggie to Druggie to Druggy from there. He’s usually a bit addled and has his head in the clouds a lot, as though he were high on something, but I don’t think we ever established exactly what banned substance he was high on. He is a fairly old plushie, Kel got him as a birthday gift when she was in Grade 9, so May 13 2003 would have been his approximate date of arrival into our household.

He’s nice and squishy and filled with beads, so he was very “bendable” despite his long form, and I remember his unruly whiskers (which thankfully were made of fabric and not stiff bristles) sticking out everywhere like permanent bedhead. I seem to remember that he was a rather powerful magic-user or had magical beast powers himself during his lucid moments, but that most of the time he would just not care and would rather wander off somewhere to have a nap or imbibe some stardust or something instead.

Here are many pictures of him. Firstly, from the front. Look at those “whiskers”:

From the sides:

Back:

Underside:

And finally what remains of his faded tags:

The tags don’t help identify him at all, but a quick reverse image search shows that he’s a Ty Zodiac Dragon plushie (local), which makes a lot of sense since my sister was born in a Year of the Dragon. He apparently was retired from production in 2001 though, so not sure if he was actually a 2001 gift or if he was just floating around the world cultivating his qi until 2003. Here’s a picture of him taken May 15 2003, which would have been right after he joined us, if our dates are accurate:

Song of the Week #24

Title: The Carnival is Over
Artist: The Seekers
Album: Introducing the Seekers (1963)

This week’s Song of the Week is an old song with not a whole ton of strong memories, but has one really specific and odd memory tied to it. This song is one of two songs (this is the second, that I might or might not feature sometime) I always link together in my A-Tier playlist on Spotify, my playlist of beloved songs, by virtue of being the two “circus” related songs in my list. It’s a mournful, wistful song, and I do remember crying to it in the distant past, though I’m not even sure why anymore. It just has a general theme of sadness and saying goodbye, I guess. It does remind me of Singapore a little bit, specifically Dad and his mountain of records that he would play on his record player at home, as well as the Oldies radio station in Singapore, but it’s one out of hundreds of songs that both Dad and the radio station would play, so it doesn’t really stand out in that regard. It also reminds me of an ebbing evening sun, the last vestiges of light fading away as dusk falls.

But the unique memory that this song reminds me of is a zone in a MUD I used to play, called Medievia. There’s a nightmare carnival zone in the game called Lyngaeli’s Nightmare (local), which wasn’t there when I initially started playing the game but which was introduced at some point. It wasn’t a particularly hard zone, as it was basically a mid-level solo zone, but as I wasn’t really into running endgame content and very much preferred to explore and map zones (I have an entire large folder of paper maps I should upload sometime), this was one of the zones that I really enjoyed and spent a lot of time in, mapping it out to the extent of my ability. Especially since it was actually level-restricted, so higher level heroes past a certain level couldn’t come in and ruin my day, since it was also a PVP zone. It was one of my two or three favourite zones in the game. The zone itself was, as the name suggests, a girl’s nightmare zone, and there was a dark carnival filled with evil clowns and bouncing coloured balls and spiders and animated dolls and such that you had to defeat to free the girl and complete the zone. Creepy.

It really evoked my imagination though, and this song got indelibly linked to this zone as its theme song for me as I went through it over and over to map every inch of it out. Even now, hearing this song takes me back to those days, that of my early gaming career, before I got sucked into the world of MMOs, when I and various online and offline friends played these free MUDs to while our online time away, solving zones and gearing up and roleplaying as necessary, depending on the exact game. Even my Dunman High friends from Singapore played MUDs, though I don’t believe that any of them ever played this one, nor do I remember if I ever actually played a MUD together with them (we might have dabbled in a couple before I left in 1998, I’m not sure, but I certainly don’t recall them), or just talked to them about it afterwards.

Lastly, because the zone itself is about finding and rescuing a girl trapped within a nightmare, and the song also talks about dreams and separation, the song reminds me a little bit of friends that I’ve made and lost in my dreams. But just a little bit. I feel fairly certain that I’ve dreamt about this song before in the past though, and woke up feeling rather sad about it, though it’s not actually in my dream diary as it would have preceded that by many years.

Memory Snippet of the Week #31

This was originally in the Life section but I pulled it out to here because I climbed down a bit of a rabbit hole while writing about it. This week, I found this article (local) on the Pocket recommendations list, Firefox’s rotating news carousel, and it stuck with me that I really want to spend a weekend or week sometime out in the British Isles somewhere, in a quiet cottage or cabin near rolling hills, sheep, and low walls made of stones piled together, maybe even a small, quaint village, away from the madness of real life. Some house from here, which includes the cottage mentioned in that article, or here, an Irish version of that above site, or something like that.

There are cabins and stuff I can do that at in Canada, but the idyllic rolling hills and sheep aesthetic (if you can call it that) specifically stems from a childhood experience, a website I bookmarked back in the late 90s/early 00’s called Mad About Mountains (stylized in lowercase, mad about mountains). It had tons of information and pictures about hikes in England and possibly the surrounding countries in the British Isles, or at least links to similar fan sites that covered those trails, and while I was stuck in either the late Singapore or early Canada phase of my life at the time, this new-fangled thing called the Internet allowed me to explore distant countries and imagine myself far afield in a foreign land. I believe that this site was one of the points of inspiration that led me at one point to be really interested in things like Irish mythology and new age music, and more generally in nature and beautiful views. While I visited it less than once a month at most, it was so impactful to my younger self that I remember the name of the website to this day.

The site is gone though. The main search engine match for Mad About Mountains these days is a site with a slightly different URL that just sells hiking gear and has nothing to do with pictures of hikes. However, the original site can still sort of be seen on archive.org, specifically here, before it expired and eventually got picked up by some URL squatters. Poking around reveals that that was an alias for the person’s webpage, and the original webpage has a lot more archive.org snapshots here or here of it too. Not all the photos are saved, but a bunch are, though they can be difficult to browse through.

Anyway, I discovered today (Saturday night) that the owner of the page, a hiker named Ann Bowker (local), passed away in March of 2021. She’ll never know that her UK hiking blog on a little corner of the internet managed to inspire and instil wanderlust in someone halfway across the world, even if I am more of an urban wanderer. I would love to somehow walk the hills she walked someday. Her (archived) webpage mentions a CD of pictures, I wish I had that in order to archive and upload/preserve them.

What I do have are a handful of pictures that I did find saved in my images folder, with creation dates ranging from Feb 13 2000 to Dec 04 2001, which was when I saved them to disk. They’ve followed me around ever since. Most of them were probably from her site, since many match her filename scheme, but a few of them were probably from similar hiking club or enthusiast sites that she linked, as I occasionally browsed out to them as well. I’ve left the original filenames intact in the gallery below that I’ve stuffed them into. Most of the pictures on her site were fairly low res, but they got the point across. While I’ve been to London, England, I’d love to visit some of the rural parts of the isles someday, and maybe even find a fairy or gnome.

Anyway, here’s a gallery of pictures from either Mad About Mountains or her neighbouring sites. They’re by and large fairly low resolution, probably a product of the state of the internet and webpages at the time. The last four are panoramas. These sorts of scenery photos evoke a mystical, romantic sort of sensation for me. Especially if there are sheep in them.

By the by, talking about visiting places I have in old photographs, I noticed that one of the oldest pictures in my backup archives today is this picture, which I (or someone in my family) apparently saved to disk on Dec 13 1992, when I was 8 years old:

That file was labelled LKLOUISE.BMP but it’s actually Moraine Lake, in Alberta! And not Lake Louise, although you practically have to pass Lake Louise to get to Moraine Lake and most people visit the two lakes together (or just do Louise and skip Moraine, depending on time of year). Anyway. I’ve since visited that place, and took pictures that looks fairly close to that one. Most of the trees in the foreground are even still there 30 odd years later. That’s pretty cool. I thought our family first acquired (dialup!) internet access in 1994, but I guess if I have photos dating to 1993 and 1992, that must have been the time I started. Especially since this isn’t the only folder of mine with saved pictures from 1992 and 1993. I should do another post highlighting the absolute oldest files in my personal backup archives sometime.

Dreams
Apr 11 2022
  • I was in a lecture theater-type building with other international students in a foreign city where I didn’t know the language very well (so probably Japanese), playing games and/or being entertained by some teachers or chaperones. There was something about recently defeating a giant monster, and something about listening to English songs, where the teachers were worried that people would not recognize the songs because the students were from many different countries, but the songs they chose were popular and nice enough that most people did like them and stood up to dance on the spot.
  • After the class, I talked to another international student, a girl who was taking the same class we just did next week, and who had bought some gloves made up of loops or rings to somehow help her do well on it, and she wanted to thread the loops through the holes on her belt. She asked me if it was aligned and I said yes, and she then put on the belt as though everything were normal even though the belt looked really bulky.
  • Later on, I boarded a bus headed to the University. I wasn’t 100% sure the bus went there but was fairly certain based on what I could read/understand and I took a seat at a double chair on the left side of the bus near the exit in case I was wrong and had to disembark in a hurry, and stared out of the window.
Apr 12 2022

Dream 1

  • I remember being in a game-like environment where me and my friends all had two category of player combat skills, something like normal and special skills, but that I also have a personal or perhaps guild skill to summon a dragon that looked like a large version of Druggy, the plushie. He was going to accompany me to Japan but was going to head there ahead of me to check it out or something.
  • At another point I was exploring an abandoned building in a wheelchair that I didn’t actually need to use but used anyway for convenience. I found a second-hand bookstore on the third floor, and entered it to see not only a bunch of books, but also some sort of class going on that I should have attended and actually did attend a couple weeks ago.
  • Everyone had received an essay and that another student had written and was grading it and leaving their comments on it (someone gave someone else’s paper a 45, and I couldn’t figure out if that was a great score or a failed score). I remember doing something similar — writing an essay 3 weeks ago and having it graded two weeks ago, and as I didn’t know what happened last week, I had no idea if they were grading the same essay again (which would have made it the third week of doing so, just with a randomized essay each time) or had written a new essay in the week that I was gone (and thus there wouldn’t have been enough essays for me to join them that week anyway). A couple friendly female school advisors were there and I chatted to one of them a bit too, she said she was leaving for overseas soon.
  • Elsewhere in the bookshop, I ran into a martial artist girl and got pulled into a 3 versus 3 street fight in the aisle of the shop, with five people that I didn’t recognize. One of them fought with umbrellas, a couple of them used sticks and such. I wasn’t bare-handed, as the only bare-handed person was the martial artist girl, but I don’t remember what I used. I do remember not having/using a movement skill and largely just standing there taking hits and retaliating now and then, as I was built in such a way that the hits didn’t do much, in return for my attacks also not doing a ton and having very little evasion. The girl was surprised that her attacks were rather ineffective on me when she tried to engage me.

Dream 2

  • My family attended a.. school festival, though it was more like my family and school classmates attended a festival together. I remember being proud that my Mom and siblings were there, and wanting to show them off/introduce them to some of my school friends, but I couldn’t find any of them, though there was a scene later on that indicated that one of my classmates who had really good eyesight saw them from far away, zoomed in to look at them, and put two and two together as to who they were.
  • Kel had brought along a dog, she said that they had adopted him because one of her friends was visiting from Singapore soon and she wanted to give him to her as a present, but was going to make sure he was trained properly in the meantime. I knelt down to pet him and he rolled over and I ruffled his fur and said he was super cute.
  • Mom at one point left the group to go back through a tunnel to a previous room to get something. Another one of my friends saw her, and tried to hit on her, but she was suave as a master spy and outfoxed him (asking him something about why she would go along with him unless she could come back to a house and immediately relax and have dinner every night, making him stutter and stammer), a gentle way of turning him down without outright saying that she was already married.
  • Dad was at home and sleeping due to old age, he was supposed to drive down to meet the rest of the family after he woke up but there was doubt as to whether he would remember that. But that was fine because if he didn’t, he’d just get more rest.
Apr 13 2022
  • I had some extra time after some sort of weekend activity or class session. It was about 6pm or so, and while I could have gone home, I checked Google and found that the zoo, a few stops away, closed at 9pm, and I wanted to take photographs of the area, and buy a plushie from there, so I took the train there. The train ride took an hour or so, as the stop was the last stop at the end of the line and was actually located partway outside the city. There were several train tracks running parallel to each other, some trains we overtook on the way and some others overtook us.
  • I reached the zoo without incident and the dream progressed. At one point within the dream, I either was part of, or was viewing, a group of young boys that was there on an excursion just as the skies started to get dark due to nightfall. One of the male teachers was patrolling a wetlands zone full of tall grasses but with a circular path that stretched around the entire area. The children weren’t allowed in, but two boys snuck in, one of them reluctant and wanting to escape while the other one wanting to press forward and see a wolf, which was apparently roaming the area. He got his wish, as one of the wandering wolves found them and attacked them, but they dodged and ran in and eventually the male teacher plus another female teacher defeated them. They ultimately ended up at a small ramen or soba shop hidden in the northern region of that wetlands area and had a meal together there.
  • At another point in the zoo, I took part in some battles myself. These battles were 3 versus 3 with minions that some people could summon, and a timer of a couple minutes or so per fight, and I remember one 3-way battle where our leader, a tall female mage, asked us to support her while she casted a firestorm upon an opponent fairy from maximum spell range, which was a spell which stunned its opponent as long as it was being channeled (with an induction casting bar that I could see slowly shrinking as it was being channeled). She had to take a breather at one point between channeling that spell as its casting induction bar drained out, and because I had wandered too near to the fairy, the fairy shot an angry sun ray at me and reduced me to 1 hit point. However, I escaped, and ran back to my team where I quaffed the health potion. That distraction gave the mage time to cast the firestorm spell again though, and she finished off the fairy this time. We then hid in the northwest corner and waited for the countdown to hit 0 so that we would advance to the next round since we had all three members still alive, as we didn’t want to tangle with other teams when we could be ganged up upon.
  • In another battle, I remember three nagas side by side and slowly slithering toward my group, and I casted some sort of poison or fire cloud upon them to injure them all and place a ticking damage over time effect on them. The nagas approached my two other companions, fighters who were bracing for a defensive combat with them, but the nagas ignored them and slithered past them, heading toward me. The two companions were surprised chased down the nearest naga while I kited them around obstacles so they couldn’t hit me.
  • Snippet: Earlier on, I had a dream where LittleStranger, whom I was co-modding a public game or Discord server with, was fed up by what he perceived as my inactivity on the server, so he created or restored a game account with the same login name as my character name that he had let expire in the past in a setup for this trick, then reported me for impersonating his account since my character name was similar to his login name. This put my account into some sort of under-review status which was slightly lower than the mod status we shared, and so he took that opportunity to demote me and basically reduced me to a regular user. However, a mutual friend and the head moderator of the place figured out what happened, restored me, and booted him out to a regular user status instead. Somewhere mixed into this was a shopping center like place where there were Singapore-like food courts, particularly a noodle booth where you could buy bowls and sit at tables next to the booth to eat them.
Apr 16 2022
  • I was getting ready for class, and it was a special day because for some reason this was the first day that I was allowed, or being forced to, or deciding to wear a really short, frilly black skirt that only went partway down my thighs and brely covered my modesty, even though I had on a white button-up blouse and some panties that were both school regulation anyway. I was figuring out how to put on the uniform, whether the blouse should be tucked into the skirt or not, then into the panties or not, etc. I think it was suggested that this was my first day to school as a female and that I had the rightmost seat in the front row of the classroom/lecture theatre reserved for me.
  • I was in my Edmonton 205 home, however it was implied that the classroom I was going to, where a music lecture class or concert or something was taking place, was downstairs, in the same building. I was 4 minutes late, but not too concerned about that as i could just barge in late and it would be fine. Besides, the lecture was being blared out on loudspaeakers everywhere. Mom and Jon were in the laundry room, fixing the washing machine — there were tools and rags and stuff around the floor and I went in to ask if they needed any help. Mom just had eye surgery as well and she said she couldn’t see what was on the ground very well and to help Jon clean up. I moved a few things back into my house and helped Mom come back in.
  • I also met Dad and he said that I should go down to Uncle Droy‘s house later that day to pick up some dinner that they had cooked for our family to help out Mom. Apparently our apartment building was located in the Edmonton 4012 neighbourhood and their house was just down a nearby street. It was also in winter and I would have had to go in my really short black skirt. Still, I said that in theory that was fine, but the problem was that he had refused to tell them about my surgery and transition a year ago, so if I went now it would not just be a simple pick up, I would be stuck there explaining why I was suddenly in the other gender and why we hadn’t told them anything. He had to call them and clear that point up before I could ever meet them again.
  • There were also a couple classroom scenes and possibly a detective case somewhere along the way. In one of the last classroom scenes, people were split into groups to work on some sort of programming project and I was hanging out with the teacher around her desk at the end of the class, as though ready to help her carry some items back to the staff room. There was one last group of male students that hadn’t left the classroom yet because they were rowdy and hadn’t completed their assignment, but they were finally busy working on it, and one of them yelled out a subfolder name that they were supposed to make. The teacher was glad that they finally seemed enthusiastic about finishing the assignment.
Apr 17 2022
  • The dream was half a detective murder mystery case and half some sort of shooter game or action RPG. I don’t remember the detective portion except that it involved attempts to locate and capture a target within a map, and might have involved an actual detective in a tweed coat. For the shooter portion, I remember having a friendly battle with Jon and Kel and a few other people at once.
  • I was hiding in a clothes closet really far away and shooting out grenades from a grenade launcher, whizzing at a high speed along the ground to the other side of the large arena, where they bounced off a wall, landed next to where Jon was holed up, and exploded. THey were duds since we were friendly, and did 1 damage per explosion, so it largely just annoyed him more than anything as he was shooting something else. Eventually, he noticed where the grenades were coming from, and shot back at me, with some sort of weapon that sent a white spark zooming across the floor in my direction.
  • I ducked further into the rather large closet and, after a while, buried myself in a pile of clothes at the back of the closet, wanting to hide there and go AFK to phase out of my character and into my normal real life body again to go take a shower in our family home where we all actually were. Before I could do so, Jon came up and poked his head into the closet, looking around for me. He didn’t see me and left. A few seconds later, Kel came up and poked her head too and instantly saw me. She said I picked a really, really obvious hiding spot, and I explained I was done with the game and wanted to go AFK for some time, and wasn’t too bothered on whether I was found or not or I would have dug further into the pile of clothes. But Jon said he wasn’t able to see me where I was hidden, so the two of them had a bit of an argument over that.

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