My Diary #072

Dear Tigey,

I wonder what you’d look like if I tried to scan you?

Entry #072 (Oct 09 2022)

Table of Contents

Talking to Tigey about…
ට  School
ට  Work
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #70
ට  Song of the Week #47
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #54
ට  Last Year’s Entry #23
ට  Dreams

School

I forgot to mention this in a previous week so I might as well put this here so the School section doesn’t get skipped again this week, but the Singapore rental thing that I did (NUS/Prince George Park Hostel Admission) did finally refund (most of, minus some processing fee or whatever) the reservation fee that I paid about a month ago. It took them slightly over a month to process the repayment, after giving me only 5 days or so to make the payment in the first place when they initially made the offer. Imagine if people were held to the same standards that they imposed on others.

Work

Our boss as well as one of our team members was away this week, so by and large this was an operational “keep the lights on” week and nothing major happened. It was at least a busier week than the last month or so, which was good for the soul. Next week is a short week as well, and then the week after that I’m leaving on vacation, so I don’t expect too much to be going on. I will be working while I’m in Japan, I’ll just keep odd hours (either working at night there, which would be early on in the work day Edmonton time, or working after I wake up, which would be in the afternoon/evening here) and complete my work daily and use strategic vacation hours as needed as a buffer if I’m travelling or otherwise at some event.

The daily team meeting will be at 2am Japan time though, so that’s not happening.

Life

Three things consumed a lot of time this week. The first was planning out my Japan itinerary. I’m not sure if I’m going to make a separate post before I go, but I have a pretty decent idea of some landmark events that I’m going to try for that will define (or not) certain legs of the trip. There’s still a LOT of malleable time in between though, which I will probably just spend travelling and walking around randomly. Sounds fun huh.

The second was signing up for a new credit card and bank account. I went with Scotiabank, due to signup bonuses and a No Foreign Transaction Fees thing that a couple of their cards have. They seem to be the only major bank in Canada that offers this perk, and there’s a good chance I’ll be spending large chunks of my next 3 years or so abroad, so it was something I really wanted. I signed up for the bank account too because having a bank account negates the $120 annual fee on the Visa Infinite card that I decided on, and keeping $5000 in the account negates the fee on the bank account itself, so that seemed to be a nice, no-cost foundation to support the card. It’s just weird getting the bank account to $5000 because the most convenient way to do the money transfer from my current bank account is through Interac, but that only allows me to transfer $1000 a day.

My current bank is RBC, but neither their interest rates nor their cards are great, especially since as a long-time user (20+ years) of the bank, my loyalty reward is that I cannot get signup bonuses when upgrading my card because I’m already an existing customer, and their “card fees waived” program is a lot more complicated than Scotiabank‘s on top of that, so screw all that. I still have my base RBC credit card which acts as my longest line of credit for credit score purposes too, and trying to upgrade that would have ended that card, sooo… it’s weird, but after doing a bunch of research, it was better to go with another bank. Also, the RBC points rewards redemption system, Avion, is a lot more annoying to use than the Scotiabank Scene+ one.

Due to that though, even though I know my desired flight and return dates and the cost (which will be subsidised by Avion points), I haven’t actually booked my plane ticket yet even though the cost is slowly rising, because I’m still waiting on my new credit card to come in so I can put the purchase on that. It also comes with nice insurance plans that only trigger for a trip if I buy the trip through that card. Hopefully this comes in early next week.

Lastly, I was talking to a friend and got introduced to some guides on how to scan CDs, particularly the booklets that come with them, well. The guides I used are here and here, although I adapted a few of the steps to my own preference, and I ended up spending a good three days on this scanning an autographed ChouCho CD that I had acquired from Animethon 2019. It came out quite well, I think.

I did this because scanning the CD booklets and stuff is part of my overall preservation project that I want to do as well. This ties into several things. Firstly, there’s the box of childhood CDs that I mentioned five weeks ago that I would like to scan and preserve sometime before I have to dispose of the box. Secondly, my Dad also has hundreds of CDs (and records) that I would like to scan sometime. I’m pretty sure the actual number is close to a thousand. And lastly, I plan to visit some music store places (and maybe even a convention or two) while I’m in Japan, both to look for stuff that I like as well as rare, indie, or other random stuff that catches my interest, so I’d like to scan all that as well afterwards. I needed a workflow to be able to process CDs and their booklets into digital copies, so that was what I concentrated on this week.

It took me three days to perfect this but I think I’ve worked out a lot of the kinks in it now. I also semi-learnt how to use a Photoshop variant program called Affinity Photo. I’m using the trial of it right now but am probably going to purchase the full thing because it’s cheap and a one-time purchase, like any sensible software. This 8.6mb PNG file is how my autographed copy of the CD (booklet) that I scanned looks like:

What a pretty signature. (It matches the signature printed inside the booklet too.) I can’t fathom how much practice that must have taken.

I am not sure if I will do a My Diary entry next week, it might be too close to my trip for me to do so since I have a lot of things I can always use the time to prepare for instead. My current plan is to blog once a day while I am there in Japan though, similar to what I did with Singapore. That travel blogging process is something I need to refine too, and the only way to do that is to keep practicing it.

A couple of my Singapore friends, Eileen, Kaiting, and Yaoxiang, have expressed interest in taking a trip somewhere early in the new year to try to see the aurora borealis. I expressed interest as well. This might be Iceland, Alaska, somewhere in Northwest Territories, or some place else, we haven’t quite decided, nor have we decided on when. It would be fun if this happened though, but it’s not anywhere near confirmed yet, and I should concentrate on one trip at a time!

The new anime season started this week, and so far my most anticipated new shows after their first episodes are Do It Yourself! and Bocchi the Rock!, while my most anticipated sequels are Yama no Susume S4 and Spy x Family Part 2. Anticipation here relating to how much I need to have the next episode in front of me, right now. There are a whole host of shows behind these front-runners so far though and this promises to be a fairly good season for the sort of stuff I watch, although I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I go to Japan for five or six weeks and miss a whole bunch of episodes. I should be able to find some nice tie-in merchandise or photos or something though I’m sure! I also finally finished a couple leftover backlogged shows from last year (actually from just before my USA trip last year) this week, and that felt good.

I ventured outdoors several times this week and have some random sky pictures to show of it as usual. Here’re some patchy clouds from Monday afternoon that remind me of a crumbly cookie:

And a dragon on Tuesday afternoon that ate up all the cookies:

Thanks to the dragon, there were no more clouds in the sky on either Thursday:

Or Friday:

Despite the lack of clouds, the temperatures are definitely dropping, and it’s starting to feel a little chilly out. I wonder if I should bring along a jacket or pants for Japan.

A nice lady seated on a bench that I walked by told me that she loved my outfit on Friday. What a nice surprise and little miracle that was. She wore a white toque that I liked and I told her that as well. Even though it’s a bit early in the year for a winter toque. I didn’t tell her that part.

I also bought a nice notebook for $3.50 from the local dollar store (Dollarama) for my trip to Japan. I like a paper book along with me to fill up with “traveller’s notes” while I am travelling, and this one will do the trick for Japan. It’s pretty, isn’t it? Never mind that the words on it are Chinese, not Japanese, but map back to something to do with Japanese katanas or swords when I try to Google them. I don’t understand what they mean despite knowing a smattering of both languages.

Games

I didn’t play much of anything this week, we had one round of Gloomhaven with Tes on Thursday and one round of Deep Rock Galactic with Tes and Kay, his friend, on Saturday, with Satinel and Nak alternating for the last spot. We didn’t play Deep Rock this Wednesday with our usual group. I also played the beta of Extremely Powerful Capybaras with Satinel, as part of the Steam Next Fest Autumn 2022 Edition, which runs from Oct 03-10. It was okay, it was meant to be a co-op version of Vampire Survivors, and that ilk of “reverse bullet hell” game, but co-op was terrible due to latency issues with Steam Remote Play, which is what that game relied on to make co-op work (or not work, in our case).

Jah hit his 400th Jah Stream Night stream this week and spent it playing a childhood favourite of mine, Heroes of Might and Magic III. The stream ended up being nearly 5 hours long and consisted of a bunch of backseat gaming by me, especially later on when he was just trying to finish the level before the stream ended, oops. Even though I was trying to avoid that early on to see what the game looks like to a newbie. It lacked a proper ingame tutorial though, providing a weird wall of text in PDF form included in the game folder as a “beginner’s tutorial” instead, and that really hurt the game. Still, Heroes 3! What a great game. Lots of old memories. And the gameplay still more or less holds up even in modern day gaming.

On the phone, I started a game called The Battle Cats last week, basically a side-view “tower defence” game (even though its just one tower that produces troops running toward the one opponent tower that produces troops to try to destroy it) where all your units are various cats. It’s mildly cute, mildly interesting, and more or less a decent time waster. It has a gacha system, is rather grindy, and they obfuscate stats too much for my liking though. But cats. I guess. For now.

I’m not really feeling like games right now though, for obvious reasons.

Plushie of the Week #70 – Polar Bear in Igloo

I never gave this polar bear a better name than Polar Bear in Igloo, but at least it’s a descriptive placeholder most of the time. Polar Bear in Igloo was purchased at the Telus World of Science Gift Shop on Oct 17 2020, when I went to the Telus World of Science (Edmonton’s Science Centre) with my Japanese 301 class’s Teaching Assistant student volunteer, Maki. You can read more about her and the event here, as well as see a picture of Polar Bear in Igloo from back then, reproduced below here:

His “birthday” is coming up in nine days, but since I’m not sure if I will be making a post next week or not, I decided to feature him this week instead. He cost me $26.20 CAD, and his best feature is that he can come right out of his igloo and sit around like a normal bear plushie. According to Tigey anyway, for obvious reasons.

Polar Bear in Igloo Front:

Back:

Upside down:

Igloo without Polar Bear:

Polar Bear without Igloo Front:

Back and underside:

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And finally, Tigey in Igloo:

Something something cultural appropriation.

Song of the Week #47

Title: Have You Never Been Mellow
Artist: Olivia Newton-John
Album: Have You Never Been Mellow (1975)

Ah, the “chill out, life is much, much bigger than you and your immediate problems” song. I like Olivia Newton-John quite a lot, and this song is the crowning jewel of her catalogue for me. Yet, despite knowing the song since the mid 90s, I didn’t really fall in love with the song until the mid 2010s or so for some reason or other. When I read that she passed away in August of 2022, I played this song on Spotify that evening and listened to it somberly.

I consider this song a “lucky song” of mine, though I don’t have one particular lucky event that I link it to. It’s just always given me good vibes. Not in the sense of happiness — it’s actually a rather sad, or at least wistful, song to me, but in the sense that something fortunate happens to me when I listen to it, or something I want to happen does tend to happen when I listen to it. Or perhaps it’s the subconscious effect of following the song’s advice — don’t be headstrong, don’t be rash, step back and chill out and think of a solution to your problem, or appreciate what you already have in life. It’s a song I play when I stare up lazily at the clouds, watching it go by, while I walk into a lamp post and rub my nose in pain because I’m not paying attention to the world around me. And it’s a song that ties in to this random article (local) I read on Pocket this week about Ukeireru, or to accept.

Or perhaps it’s just an old person song, thumbing down their/our noses at the young and brash and wondering if they/we were really once this way (the answer, of course, is a resounding yes). Regardless, with such a large part of my life revolving around various types of music in one way or another, I particularly love the line that goes “Have you never been happy, just to hear your sooooong.” I have, I definitely have! I hope you rest in peace wherever you are.

Also, being mellow reminds me of the main character of the Do It Yourself! anime that’s currently airing and that I (so far, after one episode) adore, so there’s that. This is probably her theme song or something.

Memory Snippet of the Week #54

This week’s memory snippet consists of two different scans of remarkably similar things — Valentine hearts that my class apparently did at two separate schools. In addition, as far as I am aware, both of these were done near the start of my tenure at both schools, as I joined both schools in January of the year that this was (assumedly) done in February. So let’s compare and contrast!

The first one was from Feb 1997, shortly after I had just entered Dunman High in Jan 1997. It was a bunch of hearts that were stapled together, and each heart was filled in by different people writing nice things about you. I know this is 1997, as opposed to in Feb 1998 before I moved to Canada, because the person who wrote on/signed my first heart (second picture) was Zhuquan, who dropped out of our class after the first year. He called me Great Old Wise One here. Rude.

The odd thing about this heart booklet is that there are two girl names, Anne and Miaohui, on the 3rd and 4th scan respectively, that aren’t students in Dunman High. At least not in our two GEP classes, and my yearbook scans tell me that they weren’t from the class above us either, nor the other non-GEP classes (not that we ever interacted with the non-GEP students for any event). Best I can guess was that this heart thing was part of a four-school GEP event, so those girls were from the same GEP cohort but studying at Raffles Girls’ School, since the other two GEP schools were all-boys schools. I also couldn’t figure out what Anne wrote as the prefix before her name, PSL or something like that, as well as the weird e with an accent mark on top in place of “the”. Perhaps that would have given some clue as to who she was, if not an RGS student. I wonder if I could some day get yearbooks from 2000 for the other three GEP secondary schools.

Yet, nearly everyone else on the hearts I recognize — it goes Zhuquan, Anne, Eugene, Miaohui, Yaoxiang, Valerie, Paulene, Kaiting, Gillian, Debbie, and then a few blank pages, and then I believe the last unsigned one was Zixiang (it might have been Allen or even Huihan or Eileen though. Can’t people sign their names normally?!). I’m not sure what sort of combined event that would have been that would have left me with a set of hearts from largely people from my own school with only a couple from other schools.

That being said, while I had known some of these people (Yaoxiang, and whoever did the last one) from our time together in our primary school, Rosyth School, everyone else would have been new to me as of 1997, so maybe that was the true method they used to divide people up for this “social mixer”. Debbie, Kaiting, Valerie, and probably Anne and Miaohui were from Raffles Girls’ Primary School, Zhuquan and Eugene were from Nanyang Primary School, and Gillian and Paulene weren’t from a GEP primary school at all so they were new to the program. Documentation about who was from what school is in one of the pictures from My Diary #040‘s MSotW segment.

Anyway, this scan is extremely valuable to me because it contains handwriting from several of my childhood friends, especially from Zhuquan, who left the program far too prematurely. We were basically told to write nice things for the recipient of whatever booklet we were given, so there were so many people commenting on my Math prowess because that’s probably all they knew two months in to our friendship and classmate time!

Wait, I was considered quiet back then?

Anyway, my second set is a lot smaller, it’s just four hearts, but this took place in February of 1999, after I had moved to Canada and joined Vernon Barford Junior High in Jan 1999 for the last 6 months of my class’s Grade 9 year before we all went our separate ways. Like the Primary 1/Grade 7 version, we were given hearts to fill out, but we weren’t assigned people to write to or whatever, we were just told to write to whoever we wanted to. I have no idea if I wrote any outgoing ones since I didn’t know anyone, but I did receive four.

The first one was from Dave/David, one of the really nice guys in class who reached out to me several times. The second was from a girl judging by the handwriting, but I’m not sure who. The third was from Ellen, who was really nice as well.

The fourth requires some explanation though, as this alludes to a relationship that a girl in class, Becky/Rebecca, had with Dave/David, who had sent the first note in this collection. But this note wasn’t actually written by Rebecca, it was written by one of the trilogy of troublemakers in the class, either Lee, Patrick, or John, pretending to be her in a rather over the top fashion. I had no romantic aspirations for her though, and saw through this right away when I read the notes in the morning after coming in to the classroom, as did Alexei, who apparently received an almost identical note from them as well. My Diary #060‘s MSotW segment talks a little more about these folks.

Last Year’s Entry #23

My corresponding diary entry from last year is My Diary #025. This was published on Oct 10 2021.

Tigey needs a bath before we leave for Japan, and another once we return. I washed his little carry pouch this week though, so he at least won’t become stinky when I stuff him into that. Well, any more stinky.

I wonder if I could make a decent living doing personal travel writing (like what I did with my Singapore series, but more refined and less all over the place) and video chronicling. That’s what I’d really like to do at this point, as long as I had a semi-permanent “home base” place in Asia somewhere to keep my stuff and buy a computer for. Or maybe do a semi digital nomad thing. Pipe dream?

My Song of the Week segment started this week! I’m not sure how good that segment has been, some weeks I find it great and other weeks I find it a chore, but it’s at least made me been more aware of my music, and rediscovered some old favourites along the way as well, neither of which are bad things.

Dreams
Oct 04 2022
  • I and a couple others visited what was supposedly a former school of mine, although we were there as adults and as part of a larger work team, not as children. Our goal was to go there and run some console commands (basically a localized git pull) on a floating black screen that would update some data files that a client at work had made. This would then run diff checks on the files that she had and convert and update files that the client didn’t have so that she’d have a backup of those files.
  • I saw that she had an earlier existing backup of most of the same files and that a comment on it said that they had requested that we run the backup command then because “they wanted a backup”, but this time it was because “they were worried they wouldn’t be able to locally browse the files” or something like that, the reasoning was somewhat different.
  • Still, the backup process was the same, so I went there with two others, and then remotely got in touch with Babita to get the command needed to clone and process the files. There were about 10 large files in total.
  • There was a larger modern “Singapore” zone that we had to get through to get to the school, but once we reached the school, we stepped into what essentially was an older version of the school. There was a 3 level canteen filled with hawker centre-like shops and NPCs seated at many of the tables, and a store where I could order snacks and supplies.
  • I pulled out a 10 cent coin from my purse while digging for a bigger coin and the vendor immediately gave me a pack of cigarettes for the 10 cents, but I declined it and pulled out more coins so I could buy some bananas, 5 of them (out of a bunch of 10) for 50 cents in all, and then a drink on top of that as well.
  • We then waited around an outdoor hallway on the ground floor and watched as students in uniform ran by other hallways that surrounded a small grassy courtyard with a Chinese pavilion in the middle of it, toward their next classes. This looked really familiar to me and I got really nostalgic and felt a wave of sadness come over me.
Oct 05 2022

Dream 1

  • I remember meeting Mom on the second floor of an MRT station and hugging her, then taking her over to the escalators that led up and down from and to the first floor. There was a long horizontal marble handrest situated a foot or so above where the outer handrail of each escalator went horizontal at the top of the escalator’s path, and I sat on it as though it were a long bench, with my legs dangling over the moving part of the escalator, effectively blocking about half the escalator itself so anyone who was coming up it would have to scoot to the left side. There was no one coming up, though.
  • Mom sat next to me and I inched over a bit to give her room. A couple other people seemed to like what we were doing and came over as well, two girls sitting on the “bench” that I was on next to the up escalator, and three boys sitting on the “bench” opposite us, their legs dangling over part of the down escalator. I noticed Kim from my Rosyth School days on my side, next to Mom, dressed in the navy-blue Raffles Girls’ School pinafore.
  • I was about to ask her how her new school was, when Justin from Dunman High struck up a conversation as well asking about her courses. Yaoxiang was next to him and pulled out a textbook the size of our Dunman yearbook for a class on Uzbekistan that he was in, and Kim exclaimed in surprise that she had no idea that our Dunman school also had a class on Uzbekistan like theirs did. All four of us came from the same primary school so the conversation seemed natural even though we had all not seen each other in ages. I felt a bit left out because I was taking a different option class, and not the Uzbekistan one, though.
  • A little later on in the same dream, I was waiting on the second floor of the same MRT station, where I was seated on a toilet in a small washroom with a flimsy, ajar door leading directly out to the actual station. and listening to the conversation just outside my door. I had to pull the door shut now and again so people couldn’t see in, but I could certainly see out and among other things saw a naked boy changing his clothing in the middle of the walkway, his body bared for the entire world to see.
  • There were a bunch of people gathered just outside my toilet, about 50 or so in all, and one tour guide taking attendance for two groups of people that she was about to lead at once on a tour. The crowd consisted of people from Group C and Group E of some larger group, and she said that after drawing lots, this tour would be considered Group E’s tour for records keeping purposes, even though we were both there for the same tour, and it made no functional difference which group the tour “belonged” to. Nonetheless, I was in Group E so that was fine with me.
  • She said to keep pace with the two group leaders as she led the way away towards the start of the tour. I wasn’t quite ready yet, but I also knew the rough path the group was going to take anyway, starting with a visit to the signpost just outside the station on the bottom floor, so I was confident about keeping up with them.
  • Somewhere around this point, I also looked down at two small envelopes, folded in half and creased along the square outline of some sort of plaque in each one, that I was holding in my two hands. Each plaque contained a poem written by a Canadian author who had passed away a few years ago, and I had sent in two of her poems on plaques to the Government of Canada, beseeching them to allow her poems to be given free postage status when sent to other people through regular snail mail under some sort of application process for a weird cultural heritage promotion that they were doing.
  • I had sent the first request in February 2018, and it had been rejected with a note from a minister with a French name that the quota for the time period had already been met. Undeterred, I sent the second plaque and poem in June 2018, only to be rejected again for a different reason. I thought back and determined that I must have given up at that point as I could barely remember the applications any longer, never mind the actual poems.
  • Later on, I was at someone’s house with a small group of friends or acquaintances, and we were prepping to try to find something or other as a group. The leader, named Kenichiro Sarasa, held up a piece of A4 paper with a certificate or list or something printed on fancy card stock. I don’t remember much detail about this snippet except the guy’s name.

Dream 2

  • This was my second last day of vacation at some place, though I thought it was my last day at first and was hurriedly packing, thinking that I’d miss the last connecting ship or bus or something back to the city from the remote country house that Jon and I were living separately in.
  • Downstairs, I could hear Mom talking to Jon and asking him what the hurry was though, as we weren’t leaving until tomorrow, so I realized that we still had one day to go as I was brushing my teeth and wondering how I would have time to pack up all my things and get ready before the 9am bus came to the house. There was now no worry, so I’d just take the 10am one instead.
  • Jon had already left somewhere for the day, and I went back to my room to dress up. There was no school that day, but I put on my school uniform anyway, noting the Dunman High school badge on my chest with pride. I started to pack up some of my things as well, there was a little dog plushie on the floor that I didn’t recognize among other things, but I decided to wait until tonight to do so.
  • I wondered if I had paid the landlady yet, and was pretty sure that the answer was yes, I did so when I first came here. There was also a computer monitor on the floor next to the wall, it was the secondary monitors of the computer that I had at my Edmonton 205 house, and even though I had left it unplugged after moving it there the day before, it still showed the picture of the last signal that it had received, basically a desktop with a cursor on it, so I reached over and turned off the monitor with the power button.
  • Dad came down from the third floor to sit next to me as I sat down at my computer desk, and chided me for not greeting him after a short pause. I apologized and said that I thought I had, but had just realized that I had only actually thought of doing so when I saw him coming down the stairs after standing up from the monitor. I was going to greet both him and Mom together but Mom wasn’t actually there so the thought had slipped from my mind.
  • We looked at the computer screen together and saw a webpage which featured a recent chess game. The page took quite a while to load, and featured two tiny videos the size of passport photos focused on the faces of the two men playing each other at the top of the page, and then a large feature section in the middle with the board and all the pieces of a particular position in the game laid out in black and red instead of black and white. Each of the 64 square tiles that made up the board was cut in two, from top left to bottom right, and each triangle had a slightly different pattern on it. On the webpage, this was represented by a new picture file for every triangle.
  • The first paragraph of the article below the chess board mentioned that this page took a while to load, and Dad pointed at that and said that he agreed with the newspaper or writer for once. I touched the screen and said that they could certainly have saved a lot of space by making just two red triangles and two black triangles and tiling them that way, since no one reading the newspaper would actually care about the exact intricate carvings that made up each triangle in real life that they were trying to accurately represent.
  • Dad mentioned something about how he and Jon had woken up at 6am every day over the past month in order to catch the early morning chess match, and how nostalgic seeing this article made him anyway now that that competition was over, even though it was tiring at the time to do so every morning. I was glad I hadn’t been caught up in that insanity.
  • Getting up, I then prepared to leave the house and spend the day at a South Korean/Japanese mall that I knew, although the dream ended before I even left the house.
  • Snippet: At an earlier point in the same house, probably on a previous “day”, there was another washroom that Dad said to stay away from because they had found wasps or hornets there and would be calling someone to come fix it. There was a cabinet jutting out through the wall of the bathroom and I saw some clumps of dirt against its side, and when I peeked into the washroom, I couldn’t actually see any of the wasps or hornets but could see a good part of the interior cabinet, floor, and the toilet bowl itself with caked dirt strewn all over it, and figured their nest was somewhere in there. I idly wondered if flushing the toilet and drowning the dirt in the bowl with water would help, but figured it would agitate them, so I left them alone.
Oct 06 2022
  • Snippet: I dreamt I was scanning a booklet that Mom had made for me before she passed on in my dreams, it was a financial-themed notebook with handmade coupons (one per page) or something in it that I could also add pages to.
  • Snippet: Possibly in the same dream “world” or segment as above, there was a scene where I was stuck with Dad at a petrol station situated near the 4-way intersection below our Yishun 723 home, he had been driving us home on his motorcycle but it had broken down at the station. There was a repairman in residence at the gas station but Dad refused to use him and was going to seek out someone else instead because he had just had that repairman look at his motorcycle a few days earlier, and here it was broken now. He pulled out a vehicle that was literally a bucket on two wheels with a long vertical stick attached to it and a horizontal handlebar attached to the top of that stick, and gave it to me, telling me that I needed to get back home as quickly as possible in the meantime, so I did just that. This vehicle, only large enough for one person to stand on (in the bucket) at a time, was propelled by pushing the handlebar forwards and downwards, and then releasing it to let it return to an upright position, back and forth over and over again.
  • Snippet: I met an Indian boy named Sasida who apparently was from Peiying Primary School, where I had spent my Primary 1-3 years, and qualified for the GEP from there four years after me. He was chatting with a mutual friend at first, but once they stopped, I took over and chatted with him for a bit, becoming friends with him. I asked if he was related to Sasidar from my Rosyth class but he said he wasn’t, and I realized that that would have been odd anyway since there was a four year gap between us.
  • Snippet: I was working in an office when one of the higher up execs poked their head through the open doorway to greet me and a colleague in the same room as me, while he was on his way to a meeting. He asked us if we had seen a number of young women pass by our doorway dressed in suits, or knew why they were here. I had apparently seen a departmental schedule earlier on and knew the answer, so I told him that they were here for a chemistry grad student presentation in a room on the 6th floor, three or four levels above our office.
Oct 08 2022
  • Snippet: All I remember is standing on a glass-enclosed patio on the front deck of a house, with a bunch of potted plants in it so it kind of looked like a greenhouse. There were 5 or so paintings mounted on the glass wall, and I learnt that the owner had not put them there — instead, a burglar had come in and rearranged the house like so so that if he needed to come back on a subsequent day to fulfil a daily quota, he could just grab whichever paintings he wanted to as they were arranged in order of value, from cheapest being nearest the exterior door to the most expensive being furthest away. The owners figured that to prevent this theft, they could not all be in the basement at the same time, so that at least one person had the chance of catching the burglar in action. I idly wondered if there was ever a burglar rummaging through our things too when we were all in the basement during a hot day in our old Edmonton 4012 house.
Oct 09 2022
  • Snippet: All I remember about my dream is that it was heavily gamified, with tasks to do and the ability to rewind and redo things. At one point the character I was controlling or watching ran out of a narrow room and fell victim to a bunch of enemies from outside, and at another point we were trying to optimize something to make a rectangular upgrade grid with tetris-shaped pieces on it that represented a dog’s skills as complete as possible.

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