My Diary #058

Dear Tigey,

It’s Canada Day this week! Canada in summer is so pretty. I love how the evenings stretch so, sooooo long into the night and the skies are drenched in varying shades of blue. Skies Above:

Across the country,
We all stare up at the sky,
United by blue.

Entry #058 (Jul 03 2022)

Table of Contents

Drenched in blue at…
ට  School
ට  Work
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #56
ට  Song of the Week #33
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #40
ට  Last Year’s Entry #9
ට  Dreams

School

I applied for my NUS campus housing this week, a process that I had dragged my feet on for so long that I ended up doing it on the very last possible day that I could have applied, at the end of the second applicaiton period. The first application period was at the start of June, and I had more or less missed that one because i was still in Singapore and was more interested in trying to figure out if I would even be allowed to study there. I still don’t know that for sure, of course. I actually lucked out into this application as well — I was dimly aware of the upcoming date for it but thought that it was the start date for the application period, not the end date. All’s well that ends well though, and even if I don’t get a housing spot I can always just rent something somewhere. I’m better equipped than most of the other students for that, and none of the student housing options were perfect (although they were cheap).

I didn’t make a list like the one I did for Japan this time, partly due to time and partly due to the fact that Singapore’s list was both presented in a more organized fashion, and at the same time had all the potential housing options all equally lack a lot of detail, so it would have been hard to come up with a comparison chart. They were also all in the same general area around NUS, unlike Sophia‘s, whose housing options were strewn all around greater metropolitan Tokyo. But mostly though, I didn’t have time to do such a list anyway.

I ended up going off of this list (local) and striking off the Halls listed there due to bad reviews from my sister, and the Colleges due to many of them requiring 2 year stays instead of 1. Both of those also had compulsary meal plans, and I dislike that on principle (even if the total price would have still been a bit cheaper than some of the other options). I ended up with PGPR type A rooms as my top option, as they’re the only ones with en-suite bathrooms (despite them also having renovations nearby as well as having some floors designated as COVID quarantine facilities), then U-Town as as my secondary and Pioneer Hall as my third choice. And it’s completely fine if I don’t get any of them.

Work

As Friday was Canada Day this week, work was quiet and multiple people were off work, especially near the end of this week (and the start of next week). I was left without all too much to do in the first part of the week, which was good as that meant I was able to finish my school housing application mentioned above. On Thursday, the person who had taken over queue monitor from me was off, so I took that over and spent the day watching the queue like a hawk. That made me feel a lot more fulfilled than I had been the past couple of months. He also has next Thursday through the following Friday off, so I’ll be taking over QM duties from him then too — although it’s possible that I will find out that I’m cleared to go to Singapore by around then and be on my way out as well.

Life

I still have not heard back from the ICA on my renunciation thing, which is holding up my eligibility for the Student’s Pass I need to get to study abroad in Singapore this semester. This waiting tension has long spilled over into my daily life and is making me unable to relax, but even if I don’t end up going, I’ve thought of many little things that have to be done before I go (that I haven’t done yet due to uncertainty, things like buying boxes for my stuff, clearing out stashes of food, clothes, and single-use utensils, and trying to think about what I want to pack and bring along with me) that this would basically be a dry run of the things I have to consider once I actually go. I’ve never been this close to going though, and I don’t actually mind this tension, as it’s made me feel very mindful of things — I’m in complete Canada Appreciation mode right now, just in time for Canada Day, and every day is special and beautiful and unique because it might be one of my last days for a while here in Canada.

That being said, this was a quiet week due to rain and me playing games that I bought in the Steam sale — I only went out three times this week as well, for brief walks. But it was a beautiful week, and I often threw open my balcony door to bask in the fresh air, especially when it was raining (or had just stopped raining). I took a picture at the mall food court on the weekend because I realized that I hadn’t taken any pictures this week yet and that was a rarity with how many pictures I usually take (even if I don’t end up putting them up on the blog):

It’s pretty much back to normal now, and with mask restrictions dropped only about 20-25% of the people walking around the mall still wear a mask. Granted the food court is not a good representative of that since you can’t exactly eat or drink with a mask on.

My parents moved to elsewhere in the city this week, and if I’m going to go overseas this late July/early August, I also have to make time to go over to their place at least once to look at it before I go.

Also, this actually happened last week but I had neglected to mention it — Air Canada gave me a measly $100 travel voucher for my travel woes during the outgoing leg of my Edmonton to Singapore trip in late May. I was dissatisfied with this and escalated the complaint to the central governmental agency responsible for oversight on this, though I don’t think I’ll get any more from that. Doesn’t hurt to try though.

Games

I bought my first bulk purchase of the Steam sale this week, picking up the following games: Starcom: Nexus, Approaching Infinity, Drox Operative 2, Transcendence, Gordian Quest, Chrono Ark, and a DLC for Chronicon. The first four are space games, the next two are deck builders/card battlers, and the last one is an ARPG. I’ve given them all a bit of a shot, and they all do good things, though the game that’s hooked me the most so far is Approaching Infinity, which has nicely evoked a sense of exploration and danger and tactical combat and wonder in my gameplay so far while not being overly complicated and cumbersome (especially when it comes to UI). There’s a lot to play and not enough time to play it all. Chronicon and the two card games are likely going to get a decent amount of playtime in the near future as well.

These are the sorts of games I usually target in Steam sales though, not the triple A stuff that always gets advertised on the front page, but the little hidden gems made by small developer teams that scratch whatever gaming itch I happen to have at the time!

Plushie of the Week #56 – Oink

Oink is a little pink pig plushie that belongs to Kel, and is basically her Tigey in the sense that it’s a plushie that she brought with her everywhere, even to her high school, and created a little cult following around with her friends, who all knew about him. Oink doesn’t get as much time anymore, since the Jinbe-san whales have now stolen Kel‘s heart, but I have fond memories of this guy hanging around our Edmonton 4012 house (though he seldom hung out with the Main Crew — he would sometimes follow Kel around as she went about the house though).

Oink was purchased from a store on Whyte Avenue in Edmonton called When Pigs Fly — a very apt name considering he was tossed out of the window of Kel‘s high school by a friend once and landed in a mud patch outside the school. We have no idea when he was bought or how much he cost, though it was likely somewhere around 2002-2004. Apparently Kel picked him to buy because his nose was a little slanted and she liked that.

Kel provided me with a couple anecdotes of Oink, including the one above. Other little anecdotes include that she had a friend who really liked him and asked Kel many times if she could have him. He apparently has had several things shoved into him through his back stitches over time as well — including a coin at one point. Tigey has had exactly one bead shoved into him as far as I was aware through all his years of existence, but I guess Oink has had aspirations of being a piggy bank or something. About all I remember of him from our Edmonton 4012 days was that he hung around the other plushies and said Oink a lot.

Obligatory pictures of him follow. Front:

Back:

Side:

Other side:

Underside:

O kawaii koto.

Song of the Week #33

Title: Okaerinasai
Artist: Maaya Sakamoto
Album: Tamayura OST (2011)

Maaya Sakamoto is one of my favourite Japanese singers, alongside Choucho — I used her as an answer to a Japanese oral exam question a couple of years ago when asked to describe my favourite singer and her songs. She voice acts in a number of shows too, and I like her songs because there’s something about her voice and how well it goes with the melodies of the ballads she sings.

That being said, she doesn’t currently have a song in either my top 20 opening or ending anime song lists, but she has had a couple that have been in the list in the past, and several more that I just like in general, so she’s one of my favourite artists more by the overall strength of her compositions than any one particular track. I described her songs as ballads and in that sense they tend to stand out from other typical anime tracks that are more focused on energy and being hyper cute, or rhythm and beat and being obnoxiously loud.

But if there is any one track that stands out to me as my favourite one of hers, that would have to be this song, Okaerinasai, which translates as “Welcome home”. It’s the opening track to the anime Tamayura ~Hitotose~, a show about overcoming grief through friendship, photography, the beauty of life, and of tracking down old, precious memories. It’s a very slow-paced, pensive story that stretches over two TV seasons, an OVA series, and a couple movies, and this song, the theme song for the first TV season after the OVA series, is a perfect fit for the show, slow and mournful and yet hopeful. It’s one of two songs from Tamayura that are beloved to me, and I will likely feature the other at some point as well.

This song holds sad connotations for me because of the show that it’s inextricably linked to, however it also contains strong connotations to Japan and Japanese culture in general, as this was one of my earlier anime that I watched when I was first new to the genre, about two weeks or so after I watched my first show. I’ve definitely cried to this song in the past, but the way her voice brings out the rises and drawn out vowels in the chorus and the way her voice quavers in places also make my heart soar and fill with hope for the future, and I think that that’s the intended effect the show is trying to achieve with its story.

Memory Snippet of the Week #40

Last week I did a list of people I knew from my Primary 1-3 days in Peiying Primary School, and this week I’m doing a list of people from my Primary 4-6 school, Rosyth School, in which I was part of the Gifted Education Program from 1994-1996. As before, one of the reasons I am doing this is so I have hover text information for all the names so I can stop adding them ad-hoc as I run into them in memory snippets or dreams, while another is that I don’t trust that I will remember them forever by myself — some of these in fact I didn’t remember at all until I did some research.

There were two GEP classes in Rosyth, and we were all more or less friendly with each other, and saw people move between the two classes as well as we moved up in grades. Our classes were named/numbered 4D1 and 4D2, 5D1 and 5D2, and 6D1 and 6D2. I have no idea what the normal (non-GEP) classes would have been enumerated as with that sort of naming/numbering scheme that they gave us. I was also in an all-boys class here for two of my three years, I think. It might have been all three years, but I don’t remember for sure. I don’t remember everyone’s name for sure because some people were in the other class and I never really ended up interacting with them, but I do have a fair pile of names (and can always edit this to add more later).

I also have pictures, and I will share and date them to add context and faces to the names. This first set of pictures is from my class portrait in 1996, and it includes a couple of pictures on the front cover of the school, which are actually really precious pictures because the school itself is now demolished — Rosyth School is still around but it’s on a new campus now.

I started with this picture because it actually has names AND autographs listed, and this really helped with putting together names to faces again. From front row to back row, left to right:

Rosyth Students

Minan: I remember him being always kind of frail for some reason but I don’t actually remember much else about him except that I liked him and he had this aura that made you want to protect him. I remember him bursting into tears at some point when something happened, possibly when he got injured doing something or other.

Yaoxiang: Very smart person even at this age. Yucheng and him were always really good friends (I think) and were the two most computer-oriented and literate people in class. He was also a classmate in Sec 1-2.

Andy: Our game master! See My Diary #050. He had really good posture, his back was always straight.

Zixiang: Our local troublemaker. He’s awesome though. I became good friends with him through Sec 1-2 as well and met him when I went back to Singapore in May/June 2022. he had a blood disorder where his blood wouldn’t clot and that made even the smallest cut risky business, but that apparently eventually faded away as he grew older.

Eisen: He was a humorous person. I remember him making funny faces and flailing about a bit to make others laugh. Super kind-hearted and good-natured. I always thought he’d end up as a newspaper reporter when he grew older. He also came over to Dunman, but was in the other class that I wasn’t in.

Kezheng: My most lasting memories of him are that he was asthmatic and occasionally got into trouble that necessitated him reaching for his asthma inhaler. This happened several times over the course of the three years we spent together, I think. I also seem to recall that he was good at Chinese.

David: I remember very little about him.

Sasidar: He stood out because he was the only non-Chinese (besides Tris) in the two classes, and I remember him being a nice and intelligent person to be around.

Allen: He gave me Tigey in 1998, two years after we graduated from Rosyth and went to Dunman. His family lived in a bungalow instead of a HDB flat. A good friend all the way through primary and secondary school. He had a serious mode that he could turn on when needed, but knew how to be playful as well.

Chuheng: I also remember very little about him, but I oddly still remember his voice. He was one of our prefects at this time (and thus was wearing a tie in that picture).

Alvin Foo: My math counterpart (see My Diary #050 again), we rocked the nation in math competitions together with Nicholas, who was in the other class.

Shaun: I remember very little about him, other than he was one of our prefects too.

Tris: Tris was from Thailand, but I guess his parents had migrated to Singapore some time ago. He was a very funny person to be around as well.

Sweetiang: I remember very little about him, but I do remember his voice as well.

Zhijun: Like some of the others, I remember very little about him, but I do remember his voice. I remember him being friendly and someone that I interacted with a fair amount.

Leon: One of our designated blur kings, but an overall really nice guy. He came to Dunman too but was in the other class that I wasn’t in.

Xuanjie: Another good friend who came to Dunman and that I spent many years with. Was really good at (or interested in) Chinese Chess. He seemed to sweat a lot more than other people — we blamed genetics.

Enli: Another one of our class clowns, but could apparently be serious when needed to as well, since he was apparently one of our class prefects too.

Justin Kueh: There was a Justin Yip in the other class as well, who also went to Dunman High, so this guy is enshrined in my memories as Justin Kueh rather than just Justin. I remember him being super nice and friendly and relibale.

Chiayi: The tallest person in class, and one of the three people in this class of 23 that were born on July 4th. The other two were Jackson and Leon, both of whom were also in the back row of this picture. I remember him being good at his studies and also very reliable.

Jackson: I remember him being a soccer nut and probably the best soccer player in class, partially since he could actually do headers and stuff. I liked him as he was really nice too but we didn’t bond all that much. He came to Dunman but ended up in the other class. We called him Bee Hoon (vermicelli noodles) at some point because his surname was Hoon.

Yongrui: He also came over to Dunman and also was in the other class that I wasn’t in. I remember that he often joined Andy and I in Andy‘s games, so I think I pegged him as a bit of a gamer as well, but we didn’t associate too much once we went to Dunman.

And then me in the corner. I have a secondary picture likely taken around the time of the 1st one, and this one has an exact date as well as the view of the front of our classroom. It was taken on Nov 30 1996 and was the same people as above, acting all goofy:

I also have a couple other pictures from 1996, this one from the last week of August 1996:

As well as this one, from an unknown date and event in 1996:

A few more students I recognize appear in these pictures, particularly the girls. From top left to top right in the second (blurred) picture:

Kim: See My Diary #050. I remember her being sporty and active but I never actually got to know her well since she was in the other class.

Huihan: I got to know her really well in Secondary school and she’s been one of my closest female friends since, this was her in primary school!

Olivia: Another girl that I didn’t get to know well since she was in the other class. I remember Heidi and her being sort of like motherly figures but that might have been because they were two of the taller girls.

Eileen: She’s in both of the above pictures, and I remember her being good at Science, for whatever reason, I think. I remember standing behind her in a Rosyth classroom as we gathered around a desk and looked on at some test tube contraption that the science teacher had set up for us to demonstrate something or other. Also see My Diary #050. She would be the lynchpin that eventually got me reunited with most of the other Dunman folks in 2021, after I met her in Los Angeles. Back then we might have playfully bullied her a little bit more than we should have.

Heidi: She did come along with us to Dunman High as well but was in the other class too and I never got to know her well. I always had the impression that she was always smiling and always happy. She left Dunman at the end of Sec 3 or something as well I think, and also joined the WhatsApp group around the same time that I did, even though she also did not stay to the end.

Junda: He’s next to Eileen and Heidi, with the green bag straps. I don’t remember much about him (except that he always very visibly wore that singlet beneath his shirt). As I recall he was quite a jovial person too.

Harvey: He loved band and music and things like Green Day and Blur back in the day, I think. He came to Dunman as well and was in the other class. He’s to the right of Junda, from our point of view, in the back row.

Nicholas: He was the third guy in our math trio, but was always in the other class away from me in the three years that we were in Rosyth, I believe. He’s the one with a red nametag to the right of Harvey.

I’m not sure who’s right of Nicholas, I think that might be Sweetiang, but it’s hard to tell. Right of that is Xuanjie, who I mentioned above.

Justin Yip: To the right of Xuanjie is Justin Yip, a sporty and active person who was really good at soccer and I think actually did make the soccer team at school. He also dated an older girl or two at one point from either Rosyth or Dunman High, I forget which. One of the girls from a grade up from us.

Benjamin: He had the reputation of being the fastest runner in class, but I don’t remember much else about him. He’s standing to the right of Justin and next to Alvin Foo, who also has a red nametag on.

From bottom left to bottom right, we have people I either already covered or don’t really recognize — Zixiang, (?), me, Enli, Yaoxiang(?), David, Chuheng, Minan, Andy(?), Tris(?), and Shaun. Hard to tell when I can’t see some of their full profiles.

In the third picture, from left to right, we have: Yaoxiang, Minan, Xuanjie, Shaun, Zixiang, Eileen, Leon, me, and Christopher.

Christopher: I don’t remember much about him as well, but his name immediately came to mind when I saw the picture despite the lack of visible name tags. He was one of the shortest people in the two classes.

I also have this picture dated September 26 1994, according to the convenient blackboard sign. This was taken in our Primary 4 classroom:

A few people in that picture that are not in all the other pictures include:

Geeyong: He’s on the far left, reaching over to give Alvin Foo bunny ears along with a number of other people. He was my best friend in Primary 4-6, though he dropped out of the GEP before we reached the end of primary school. We still kept in touch back until around the time I left Canada though, as my family moved to live near his in Tampines, and we would sometimes spend time together on the weekends or in the evenings.

Kent: He is second from right on the bottom row, the one without glasses and staring at the camera with a big grin. He lived nearby and was a friend we hung out with and played L5R with a bunch too. See My Diary #050 as well.

Yucheng: As mentioned, he was a close friend of Yaoxiang, and the two of them were our class “mad scientist” geniuses and computer whizzes. He came along to Dunman with us as well but was in the class opposite from us. He’s located in the bottom right of the picture.

Everyone else is from a previous pic. Alvin Foo is on the bottom left, partially obscured by the camera. The six people behind him are Geeyong, Andy, (unknown), Zhijun, Junda, and Sasidar. To the right of Sasidar is a column of four, from front to back: Yongrui, Tris, Enli, and Justin Kueh. In front of our teacher is Leon. To the right of him is a column of five, from front to back: me, Eisen, Benjamin (left) and David (right), and Chiayi. The next column to the right, from front to back, is: Kent, Kezheng, and Jackson. And finally there’s Harvey in the back right and Yucheng in the front right.

Lastly, there are some names waaaay back in the autographs picture that I haven’t been able to find in any of the subsequent pictures:

Teresa: She was a bespectacled girl that ended up going to Raffles Girls’ Secondary School, I think. I didn’t really get to know her as she was in the other class, like most of the girls were, but I remember wishing that I did.

Jean: Jean was in my class in Dunman and was really good in English and Literature. I liked her, but I don’t remember much about her from primary school.

Antonia: Antonia was in the other class in Dunman, and was in Rosyth here as well, but I don’t think I ever shared a class with her. She was active and tomboyish and great fun to be around, and would gamely harass some of the boys at times too (we probably deserved it), but I never ended up getting to know her particularly well. She was well liked among the girls though.

John: This was Chuheng‘s first name, so most likely him.

Emily: I don’t have a memory of a face to put to this name.

Aaron: I have the faintest of memories of a tall guy named Aaron, this might be him.

Bernard: I don’t have a memory of a face to put to this name.

Kelvin: I don’t have a memory of a face to put to this name.

Shicai: Likewise! Actually I don’t even remember this name at all, compared to the other above names in this “forgotten” category.

Wenyuan: Like Shicai, I don’t remember this person’s face at all. I can’t even tell from the name if this was a male or a female (though there was a gender imbalance, so probably a male).

Zhengyu: Like the above two, no idea who they were.

It’s technically possible that a couple of the names I don’t remember at all were teacher names, but I’m not confident about that. I do see three teacher signatures in that autograph page though, and they’re the three teachers I remember well:

Rosyth Teachers

Mr Grosse: Mr William Grosse was our Primary 4 form teacher, he was our English teacher and a great inspiration to many of us even all these years later, the Whatsapp chat we share still talks about him now and then (even though not everyone in it is from Rosyth). See My Diary #050. You can see him in the Primary 4 photos above, and he’s also the one who wrote the thing about “Barbarians of today, leaders of tomorrow” on the back of that card.

Ms Khoo: Ms Elaine Khoo was our Science teacher in Primary 6, and possibly 5 as well, and I think she was the form teacher of the other GEP class. I remember her quite fondly, she was gentle and kind in general but strict when she had to be.

Mr Shah: Mr Mahmood Shah was our Math teacher and my form teacher in Primary 5 and 6. He was our mentor through our tearing run through the national tournaments in Primary 6, and did all the right things to encourage and nurture our love for math. He was also a super cool and never boring teacher in general, as I recall. You can see him in the third, fifth, and sixth pictures.

Phew, what a list.

Last Year’s Entry #9

My corresponding diary entry from last year is My Diary #011. This was published on Jul 04 2021.

This time last year was an unforgettable experience, what with that heat wave that swung in to Edmonton. It makes sense that this year is a lot cooler — I haven’t found a Scroll of Burnplanet in my dreams this time around, even though I’ve had fairly detailed dreams this week as well.

In comparison, the temperature outside today is apparently 11 degrees Celsius as I am typing this (on Saturday, July 02 2022), and the rain is gently pouring down over the grass yard without any wind in sight. So much so that I felt inspired to go out for a walk and get some lunch after writing this category.

My diary entry last year was a bit of a wreck though, everything was focused toward the heat, which means it doesn’t really leave much for me to talk about a year later. I can really appreciate that No Bugs thankfulness thing I alluded to though, as that really hit me when I went to Singapore — there’re bugs everywhere in that tropical climate.

It’s funny that I came out of that Spring 2021 anime season with a blurb at the bottom that said to remind me never to watch so many shows again, since I just did the same thing in Spring 2022 again, there were so many shows that I overflowed my schedule with them just to fit them all in. It was worth it because I did end up liking most of what I watched, but I ended up watching something like 40 seasonals this time around and that was a little bit insane. It must be something about spring in Japan that influences the types of anime they broadcast to be the types that I like to watch. In comparison, summer contains a lot more shows I don’t care about, which was the same last year as well.

Dreams
Jun 27 2022
  • Most of the dream I remember involved me touring a foreign city with a group of people that included Mom and Dad, Uncle Winston (Mom‘s elder sister’s son), and Yi Tiu (Mom‘s elder sister’s husband). Uncle Winston had a camera and was taking pictures of us in places.
  • One of the places was a monument that had a large wall with a plaque on it, and then three columns of long tables and benches in front of it. The tables and benches nearer the back were longer than the ones in front, and the three columns were angled toward each other so it kind of resembled a sliced pizza, with the wall plaque being the crust and the benches being three slices of the pizza. It was a tourist attraction and we tried to find a place that had enough seats for us to settle down so Uncle Winston could take a photograph of us, but were largely unable to find a perfect place because it was so crowded and because some of the people there were not there just for pictures, at least one girl I saw was seated at the table doing her homework.
  • Another place we visited was a Chinese garden with a pond, trimmed grass, and a path made up of individual flat rocks spaced slightly apart. Yi Tiu was old and walked slower than everyone else so he was often a little bit behind the main group, but he would catch up on occasion when we explored an area and then doubled back out because it was a dead end, and this was one of the places, as we had first gone past the door of the area, hit a dead end, then doubled back to this door and went into it to discover this garden. It was a nice place and someone had noticed Yi Tiu hobbling along just as they were entering the door, so everyone gathered in the middle to wait for him for pictures.
  • I don’t remember too much detail about other places that we visited, but I do remember passing a sheltered parking spot for just one car a couple times. Dad initially drove Mom and I to the area in a car and parked there to let us out, and when we roamed by it later on, there was a tiny two-person car parked there instead, looking comically small compared to the size of the parking lot.
  • Another place we passed by was some sort of building where we were looking for an underground school cafeteria or something. There was some object I had to manipulate that would only advance its stage under certain conditions, like if I were asleep or something.
  • We also crossed a traffic light at some point, which had a time-controlled gate barrier on one side that closed a couple seconds after the green walking light started — essentially this was a “one way” crosswalk, and was set up like this because the side that we were crossing from was a school, and it was now nightfall so there was no reason for anyone to be going in the direction toward the school. At any rate, Dad was lagging behind a bit as we started to cross and I noticed this and held the gate open for a couple extra seconds so that he could come through it and cross with us, or he would have been stuck there to wait for the next traffic light cycle.
  • I also had a device of some sort that gave me a list of computer games, sorted by category and with each game listed in tile form, that I could flip through. There were things like Warcraft games (3 of them) and other various franchises, I recognized some of them but not all. Most of them were Steam Deck verified, although I didn’t actually have a Deck with me to install them on. I had the feeling that I could use the device to install the games somewhere else, though.
  • In an earlier part of the dream, I was by myself waiting for others to arrive, and I was in my Edmonton 205 apartment and looking down at the grassy quad below. I saw two people moving out of the apartment block with bags and furniture in tow, and one of them bent down to empty out a tortoise from a box onto the grass, as they apparently couldn’t take their pet with them to their next place.
  • I was unhappy about this and inquired to a management staff member nearby about this, as the scene had shifted so I was no longer in my apartment but in some sort of ground floor room with a large window still pointed toward the quad, but they just shrugged. I looked back and saw a mallard duck or something nesting in the grass next to the tortoise in a friendly manner, and some other bird that flew down to pester the tortoise and force it into its shell. A couple of pink toucans also flew by and landed in front of me, and I gawked at their plumage and beaks and the wondrous wildlife in our neighbourhood.
  • I then realized that I had shifted again into the back seat of a car, but it wasn’t the car I was waiting for, just some parked vehicle with that same huge window facing the quad as the car’s back window. My Dad‘s car had just pulled up nearby as well so I left the car I was in and headed over to that one.
Jun 28 2022
  • I dreamt that I was staying in my bedroom in the second floor of a house that looked similar to my Yishun 723 home, and I had just seen off Debbie for the night, who had stopped by to visit but now had to make her own way home to deal with the kids. I texted her shortly after she left the house to make sure that she was alright and had reached the station without incident.
  • While I was doing so, I heard noises downstairs and froze. Peeking out from the top level, I noticed a man rummaging through the kitchen area near the sink, and realized that Debbie had no way of locking the door on the way out, and because I didn’t accompany her down to the front door, I couldn’t lock the door behind her either. An intruder had slipped into the house and was in the process of looking for anything not nailed down that he could trade for drugs — he looked uncaring about stealth or thoroughness and was just giving everything a quick glance to look for valuables.
  • I shut myself in my room and sat against the door to wedge it shut, while hoping that Dad would be safe — he was asleep in his bedroom across the hall. I didn’t want to wake him up either. I dialed the number for the police on my smartphone, although I knew that they were ineffective as they probably wouldn’t want to risk intervene in such a small manner. I gave them my Edmonton 205 address in a whisper and said that there was a robbery in progress.
  • The intruder did come upstairs but never did enter a room as far as I could tell, he looked around the landing area briefly before leaving again.
  • Snippet: In a different dream much later on, I dreamt I was on my mattress bed on the ground in my Edmonton 205 home, with a number of daily items strewn around the area. I was preparing for a defensive round in a game where ants were invading the apartment from the upper wall/ceiling of my living room, and I had a number of things I could place on the ground that would defend the house and shoot the ants as they came down. Because there were lots of items on the ground (I remember pushing aside my blanket and a wadded up pillow case or bolster case), I shoved back my bed toward the computer table to make some room on the floor to place my defenses. Mom came by at some point around here and asked what I was doing with the bed and living room and why it was so messy, and I said I was just rearranging things. I didn’t want her to find out about the incoming ants.
Jun 29 2022
  • A friend and I were covering for Babita, who had just left work to go on extended holiday. We had access to her computer as she wasn’t going to shut it down for 1-2 days still, and there was a program that she had been quietly running (and had left running) that everyone else on the team used, and that we recognized needed to be copied over and ran from a central machine that was always up, instead of her personal machine. It ran in a little black command prompt window, and through that I was able to understand how it worked. While copying its source code, I had access to two sets of the English alphabet that I could type with, one with regular letters and numbers, and one with special flaming letters and numbers that I could use for important parts of the code.
Jun 30 2022
  • There was unrest in a neighbouring country/zone east of where Mom, Dad, and I were, which affected what we were doing in some way that I don’t remember — I think it affected some choice or route we had to make in a game scenario regarding what we were allowed or not allowed to pick.
  • This unrest was caused by a squabble between what basically were the Palestinians and the Israelis, though I don’t think they were called exactly that in my dream. It was borne out of how the Israelis (or equivalent) controlled their shared country and made English the main language of their country, even though they were a much smaller minority compared to the Palestinians who were living there, who by and large spoke a different language.
  • We were travelling somewhere by train after our game/scenario, and as we passed through the turnstile of our destination train station together, Mom blamed the Liberals for this mess somehow, but Dad surprisingly took their side and said anyone would do what they did if they were the ruler of a country, and besides that English was a better choice anyway because it was the most common language in the world (or at least the surrounding countries/zones).
  • I found or grew a key from a potted plant that would help resolve this situation somehow, but had not found a way to safely get it over to them yet.
  • The scene then shifted to a group of University students in a neighbouring border country to the south of us, who were watching both us and the conflict through a pane of glass that made them omniscient. The teacher pulled out the Quran and was quoting bits of it to her students to explain the situation in the eastern zone, noting that among other things, the name of the place was in dispute. The holy book also stated that the Holy Lands were where the gods were born and was a name that could not be reused by anyone to refer to their country, not the people of the religion nor even the God (who had a two word name, something Abdullah) himself.
  • There was also a significant day coming up, it was marked in a calendar where the world plot was going to be advanced or something like that. This day was July 17th, and one of the students sitting on the ground hugged his knees and rocked back and forth gently as he noted that that day was his birthday as well and he hoped that everything resolved peacefully.
Jul 01 2022
  • I asked Mom for a map of a Singapore neighbourhood that we used to live in, modeled after the Yishun 723 area, and asked her to point out where the hawker centers and food courts on the map were. I remembered one of them, but I think she was able to point out another nearby one. I then teleported to Yishun 723 and headed toward the largest hawker centre to check out if the food stalls were still open, even though the time difference meant that it was nearly midnight there, and sure enough several stalls were still running.
  • I offered to teleport Mom and the rest of the family there as well but she declined, saying that she hadn’t had her COVID-19 booster shots yet and so she didn’t feel safe being in public. I checked the Internet at some point and saw that Singapore had 20,000 active cases.
  • I was at a bus terminal area at some point and police arrived and politely asked everyone who just stepped down from one of the buses to step to one side because the bus driver had requested them to check something or other. Everyone who just stepped down from the bus had their passes glow or something to distinguish who they were, and they complied. I wasn’t in that group so I made my way past them and past some automatic glass doors.
  • At another point, I was in the /r/tipofmytongue Discord server and looking through the requests in one of the channels and noticed that there was a request to discover where a pixellated picture came from. I ran a reverse image search on it and found that it came from a screenshot of a combat map scene from Heroes of Might and Magic 3, so I answered that one. The person had left the server by then though so he didn’t get the answer, but that was alright as it was also the last unanswered question in that channel, and I was happy to finish it up.
  • At yet another point, I and some friends were playing some sort of building and siege war game in real life, I had a little rectangle on the ground next to my base where I could select a quarry building to be built, and it would then start producing stone over time that I could then convert into other things. I built three Asian pagoda-like buildings with jutting out shingled roofs next to it, each one about a foot to a foot and a half tall.
  • All my other friends, about five of them in total, all decided they were going to send their units by to attack me in coordination, so I built some units to defend myself as well. I built two tanks and a catapult, each one around the size and height of a brick, and placed them in front of my buildings. They had about 12 or 14 vehicles and infantry lined up in two rows, but none of the units dared to come too close to my base, so it became a long range back and forth pelting between the vehicles as I chatted amiably with my friends who had stopped by. It was a very social game and I wasn’t worried at all, and for their part they said they attacked me because I had too many resources and they wanted to keep me in check, and I said that I didn’t really think that I’d lose regardless.
  • I was seated next to my four buildings in a cross-legged stance, slightly off to the side so that I wasn’t getting in the way of any of the tanks, while also casually building another catapult in the background. I also had a couple infantry secreted among the building, as well as weird things like a berry I found that did damage to anything I threw it at. I placed it next to one of the buildings for later use.
  • Snippet: Later dream memories were made out of snippets. In one, I was helping someone plan a weekly dinner menu based on the menu leftovers from the week before, so January’s menu went something like soup for the first week (as a blank template and to clean out any remainder leftovers from December), then adding crab meat in the second week to the remaining soup, other seafood in the third week to mix with the leftover crab meat, to adding something to make seafood broth in the fourth week, to adding rice to use up all the remaining broth in the fifth week.
  • Snippet: Another snippet involved me looking through a poetry anthology book because a poem by Paulene was buried in there. The book featured poems mainly from four different selected student poets, and then a scattering of poems from various other individuals, and Paulene‘s was one of those. The blurb beside her picture said that she was now working in civil engineering but had written this poem near the end of her University career, and the poem mentioned something about 41 stickers that the government had given out representing different industries in Singapore or something, and how they were colourful but were just symbols on a piece of paper representing her possible futures, and the uncertainty she now faced when having to choose a career to aim for. The blurb accompanying the poem noted that the government added four new stickers the following year but also retired four older ones to make the number remain the same, so the poem didn’t become outdated. It was unclear on whether this was done on purpose for the poems or not.
  • Snippet: Related to the above, Jon and Kel were standing next to me while I was reading the book, which itself was taken from a large pile of books on a table at a bookshop. When I finished reading it, I noted that Mom seemed to be waiting for them while they waited for me but I had no idea what they were up to. I told them about the poem and said that I was thinking of purchasing the book — Kel said she thought she had bought a book like that, perhaps that very one, for me already and it might be on a shelf at home, but I said that that was unlikely as I was passingly familiar with most of the books in our spare room at home and this wasn’t one I had seen before. For some reason, I was also furiously trying to blink back tears at this point.
  • Snippet: Mom was also standing nearby, and the story was that she was planning to go back to work at a banking job now, over 30 years since she last worked, because all the children had moved out and Dad was now unable to work as well due to being old and having bad eyesight. As part of this she had somehow gotten a $70 bookstore voucher, and she and Ah Ma and another distant relative had looked at books in the store, but the virtual shopping cart was already full of my books from a previous shopping trip that I had ended up not purchasing, and they also looked at those books but were not sure what to do with it. I told them they could just empty the cart, I knew what was in it even though that was from a previous week.
  • Snippet: There was a scene where I was in a high rise condominium next to Dunman High and could look down from my balcony at the school doing their morning assembly in a courtyard, followed by the students breaking up into their ECA groups for some reason after assembly. Apparently there was a “new” 30 minute period right after assembly for compulsary club activity, that was not there when I was a student, and I was glad that I was no longer there for that. I saw the Scouts group that I was in assemble by some sort of playground, with the leader snapping everyone to attention with a distant but audible “Scouts scouts alert!” and salute. I noticed that the first years when I was there were now fourth year leaders, and I deduced that this scene must have been from three years after I left Dunman High.
  • Snippet: There was another scene that apparently was a rerun of a previous dream I had sometime in the past couple weeks (but had forgotten), which took place at a small University campus at night. It featured a PHD student who was some sort of art genius who slept really erratic hours, his advisor had asked him to get some proper rest at some point but he said something like most humans needed only just two hours of rest a day but he got as much as twelve hours whenever he collapsed from exhaustion so he was good! Anyway, he was normally up at night painting away and carving on his painting using some sort of hand scraper tool that made a noise that carried quite far.
  • Late at night, no one else was really around except two other people, one was a criminal who was carrying out some benign illegal activity in a room next to his, and at some point the two of them had bumped into one another in the corridor outside. The criminal was about to attack the artist before figuring out that the scraping noise actually really helped his cover as his activity also produced a little bit of noise, so he let the artist be and they settled into a sort of symbiotic relationship. There was also a one-eyed cyclops of a policeman who came by now and then to check on the artist, and eventually he must have stumbled upon the criminal as well because he had been brutally beheaded by the time a later scene rolled around. And there was a Wikipedia article about the criminal that I found which stated that he eventually turned over a new leaf and became a really successful writer (he became Jeff Grubb, apparently) and even wrote a book about his criminal past.
  • Snippet: Lastly, there was another scene where a movie star sort of superhero was escaping from two criminals pursuing him, and ended up in a carpark next to two trucks. He managed to briefly get out of sight from his pursuers by rolling under the first truck, and the two of them stopped and pushed the truck forward and over the side of a cliff in case he was still under (or inside of) it but he was nowhere to be found. They quickly got into the second truck, as using the truck would immediately tie it to their possession and reveal if anyone was hiding under/around it, but he was nowhere to be found as well, and they used the truck and drove down the road linked to the carpark, looking for the superhero. He apparently had invisibility powers, so they were looking for anything that looked like a strange shimmer.
  • What actually happened though was that he had rolled through two trucks, and had gotten onto a scooter parked on the other side of the second truck, which luckily still had its keys in its ignition for whatever reason and was already pointed the right way for escape, toward the connected road. He revved up the bike and pretended to be a normal citizen commuting his way through life, which worked to fool the two pursuers because they were only looking for the invisibility magic. There was a split second when they got into the truck where they could have realized this if they were more open-minded, because the bike was still just pulling away from where the truck was parked and was not out of the carpark yet, but they did not realize this. The narrator then talked about how if the superhero had not escaped, he would have been forced to jump off the cliff, which led to a river surrounded by valleys and which had only one exit where a maximum security prison was built, so he would have had to serve 80 years before becoming free again.
Jul 02 2022
  • I was heading home on the East-West line of the Singapore MRT train, except the camera was reversed so it looked like the train was heading west instead as it went from the middle of the country and down the east line. There were a bunch of people on the train, whose seats were laid out like a cramped shuttle bus with two rows of seats and a narrow passage down the middle, but there were several sets of doors laid out through the vehicle like a normal train would have.
  • There was some sort of English Literature lesson being dispensed through the train loudspeakers, it basically involved the telling of a story and then interactive discussion on what the story meant or what the characters’ motivations were. I listened to a group of Chinese businessmen dressed in business suits talk excitedly about the plot. The person next to me also tried chatting me up and, while I was slightly unwilling to partake in this, I did return some polite replies.
  • This distracted me enough that I missed my train stop — in fact, I almost missed the stop after my train stop as well, when I looked up, the train doors were open at Kembangan (E6), one stop further east than my intended stop, Eunos (E7). I excused myself, saying that this was my stop and hurrying out with my school bag, then turning to look back at the train as it pulled off to see my seatmate gesturing something or other to me with sign language. I didn’t understand him and didn’t care to.
  • I crossed the platform to wait for the train headed in the other direction, which soon arrived. I was only going to take this train one stop, so I stood by the exit door instead of taking the seat. To my surprise, they were playing the same English Literature lesson over the train speakers, but they were a lot more gung-ho about general participation and everyone had a piece of paper where they wrote down what they thought the characters’ motivations were, and they even had a leader in each train carriage that the train driver appointed to collect the papers so they could see what the overall collective vote was. Our leader was a grey-haired woman situated in the middle of the train carriage.
  • I had no idea how this would work when most of the people on the train were coming and going at every stop, but I managed to escape having to do this since I was pressed right up against the door and the train station reached its stop before the woman could reach me and ask for my vote. I did find it interesting though that the prevailing opinion of the people on this train (in terms of what they thought the character motivations were) seemed to be opposite that of the other train I was on.
  • Upon hopping out of the train, I started to head toward the outdoor exit that would eventually take me home. However, I passed by another exit that led to a shopping center that I had visited before in a prior dream, and I had the vague feeling that Nak was also there and/or heading that way, and I knew that there was a slightly longer path I could take through that shopping mall that would also eventually lead me home, so I turned around and went that way up the escalators instead.
  • Snippet: I had some sort of device or game that consisted of three rows of lights, spaced quite far apart horizontally and vertically from each other, where each light represented a train station. It was kind of similar to a punch card, and I Could either trigger each light at its station or go home where I could use the Internet or something to trigger them all at once, but I was largely doing it the former way. Each light I did trigger either did something or gave me some sort of non-physical reward, though it was random and I forget what kinds of things it did.
  • Editor: The Eunos/Kembangan thing was where my homestay house in the Singapore trip I did in June was located. Also, the mall that I had visited in my dreams before was the three-level one from my Jun 02 2021, Feb 23 2022, and Mar 20 2022 dreams. Likely others as well that I didn’t find on a cursory scan. It’s a three-storey shopping mall with retail shops and a food court on the bottom two levels, dusty school classrooms/work offices on the top floor, and a train station in the basement. It’s an entirely fictional mall, though.
Jul 03 2022
  • I had a robot companion of some sort and was controlling it on a top down grid that was five squares wide and many squares long. On that grid were a bunch of concealed squares arranged in three long columns, and then a one-square wide path around the outside surrounding the three columns of concealed squares. My robot could traverse along the grid and trigger squares that he came across, each concealed square had some sort of a point cost and would reveal something that me and a friend then commented on in a cutscene. There was some overarching goal about ten things we had to find in the grid.

Previous Entry

My Diary #057

Next Entry

My Diary #059

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments