Dear Tigey,
Aaand we’re back. Tadaima. Okaeri. What an amazing experience that was. How do you like your new bowl?
Entry #097 (Jun 18 2023)
School
We apparently will at some point be having our transcript from Ritsumeikan sent directly to our UAlberta school, as Ritsumeikan did send us a note saying the following:
About the Transcripts
Ms. Magda Grzeszczuk, the person in charge of your grades, has informed us to send your grades to the school.
Ritsumeikan University will send them to the University of Alberta around July 10.
Please note that grades will not be sent to each student’s home.
I don’t actually need the credits from this, I’m not 100% sure they will count toward anything in my degree anyway, but I’ve noted in the past that it might, so that would be nice I guess. Even though I know that the Sophia program will knock that requirement off even if this one doesn’t. I obviously know I passed for sure, since I have my graduation certificate, but I don’t know what the transcript/grade sheet itself looks like or if we will ever see a copy of it ourselves.
This is also a quick reminder to myself that I need to write up a 500-word essay before June 20th as part of the agreement for getting one of the $750 awards for going to Ritsumeikan. I mentioned this in my last blog post before the trip, but that’s 41 blog posts ago now, hehe, so I’m bringing that forward here too to gather my thoughts. That’s due in two days but I’m not worried in the least, it should not take me long to do.
I also should contact Sophia to find out if I could arrange/apply for student dormitory housing in the second semester if I feel like it, and what the deadline for that would be. Oh, how this encounter with Zian has changed my viewpoint on what’s important when studying abroad!
Work
I did not work this week — thank goodness, since my sleep schedule has been out of whack again and I would not have been able to do a good job at work.
I believe my workplace did in the end let me keep all my extra banked time that I saved up from all the insane overtime I did back in April, even though I went over the maximum limit, because I was going to use all of it right away for my trip anyway. So I’m thankful for that. I did use it all up and then use up 70 hours of my existing vacation time anyway, so I have about 80 hours left in the bank just in case Sophia somehow doesn’t happen and I end up continuing my job here.
And they still haven’t hired a new body yet! They were supposed to hire someone new (or possibly a couple someones new) before I left, but that never happened. So surely it would happen while I’m gone, right, as that’s an additional 6 weeks that I won’t be in the office. Nope. If they keep delaying the hire, I won’t even be around anymore by the time they finally get someone new…
Apparently we have a team picnic in Whitemud Park this Friday, so it will be interesting to see all my work colleagues again. Though I do get to see most of them over Zoom, since we all work remotely I haven’t actually met any of them since our LAST team picnic, which would have been in August 2022, before last fall and winter. Dang, how time has flown. James isn’t even here anymore this year. And I won’t be at next year’s picnic/s.
I laughed when I saw the weather forecast for this upcoming week though. Check this out:
Odd for Edmonton to have so much rain. There was tons in Kyoto and Tokyo as well… Zian and I joked that she’s a rain magnet, as she also experienced tons of rain in Singapore and Sydney before coming to Japan where we nearly lost a day to typhoon rain (and I still wish we could have experienced that!), but I can’t really blame her if Edmonton is also raining heavily like this as she’s not here! Maybe I can blame.. umm.. err… Tigey!
I also realized that I had not yet submitted my PSA, my Personal Claims Form, for the 2023 year, so I went ahead and submitted it today using the receipt for the scanner that I bought in March. Hopefully that one gets approved. (It should, I don’t see why it wouldn’t.) I also have to think about whether I need a new laptop and/or a new phone before I go to Japan. I probably will try to just survive with my current ones, though.
It will be really, really strange and surreal going back to work next Monday after having been away and experienced so much for the past 6 weeks.
Life
This blog post will be truncated as I don’t really have the time and energy in me this week to do all the side sections — I’ve already written a ton and I need to catch up on other things and prepare for the upcoming week. So like My Diary #096 before the trip, I’m only doing the base sections this week, and all the Plushie of the Week etc sections will probably continue next week instead.
(If there are any new viewers to the blog who happened to start here as your first My Diary entry, and you are curious, check out My Diary #095 for how a full blog post usually looks like.)
I had to sign a new lease agreement with my apartment complex management (Rent Midwest) this week even though my lease is going to a month-to-month contract now. It was previously a 6 month contract, and then a 12 month contract prior to that. The month to month lease is way expensive now, $1,399 CAD a month, but I don’t have much of a choice, and it’s only for a couple months anyway. The 6-month lease has a $50 discount per month, so $1,349, and the 12-month lease has a $100 discount per month, so $1,299. When I moved in ten years ago, the lease was something like $888 or $900 or so a month… they keep raising the prices when the rental market is tight but never lower it when the rental market is weak. I have to give them a month’s notice before I move out, which I will have to do around the start of August. September will be my last month here, and they won’t prorate the rent for me so I have to pay for the entire month even though I plan to go overseas somewhere around Sep 14-18 or so, I think.
Either way even if I wasn’t going to Sophia this year though, I would still probably be moving, I’ve had enough with my two noisy neighbours. Even after numerous complaints from me, and some scouting that they asked me to do to see exactly which neighbours have been the ones making the noises late at night, even though I don’t know why I have to be the one to figure out who is making all the noise, the two neighbours are still there and are still making noise now and then at night. They’ve supposedly sent numerous letters and notices and phone calls to them asking them to cease and desist, but for some reason it still continues and they refuse to kick either one out. Literally the night that I got back from Japan, I had to file another complaint because I could hear the next door neighbour’s radio going boom boom boom at 12:15 am. This has been going on for almost a year already at this point and it’s very frustrating, so there’d be no way that I would renew my lease in this place for another year anyway. Not sure where I’d move to though. Sydney is great this time of year, right? Both Zian and Huihan will be there later this year now so it’s suddenly become very tempting.
My bathroom sink drain was slightly clogged when I returned from Japan. I’m not quite sure why. I’ll have to monitor this to see if it clears up by itself or if I have to call someone in. Or pour some acid down the hole. Or just ignore it for two months.
Zian and I managed to talk a couple times this week after I got back home, and that made me very happy. We had a long 2.5 hour chat on the morning of the 16th, this last Friday, and we had a 20 minute chat while she was queued up at the Okinawan airport waiting to check her bags in on the 17th, which was Saturday. I really appreciated so much that she felt comfortable enough to decide to reach out to me when she was bored. That’s what friends are for. I even gave her a special notification tone on my phone. Well, technically, I gave WeChat a special notification tone, but she’s the only one who messages me on that. Her trip has also now concluded and she’s now back in Beijing with her family for a month. I wish I could visit. And I also want to show her all around Singapore. One day.
As mentioned above, my sleep schedule has been really messed up. I arrived home on Wednesday, the 14th, and I slept very well on the night of the 14th, as well as the night of the 16th. However, I couldn’t sleep at all on the night of the 15th, and ended up napping for a couple hours in the afternoon on the 16th before our group watch anime time instead. Similarly, I couldn’t sleep at all on the night of the 17th, until about 5am or so, when I finally caught one hour’s worth of shut-eye. Zian joked that my sleep schedule is perfectly synced for a planet with a 48 hour day cycle. Rude.
I have an updated Tigey‘s Tea Tasters guild report list after my trip to Japan. I don’t know why I’m doing this, but this is a scrapbook-style blog, so why not.
There are some changes I’d like to work on for my blog, the first being to change my old theme and see if I can simplify things, for right now it’s tied to some demo version of a theme which I cannot actually update. I also want to work on seeing if some parts of it can be made to work better in mobile mode. I’d actually love to remove the Elementor plugin from my site as well but I think I rely too much on it at this point to convert away from it. I might give it a shot if I have extra time though. Finally, I want to create a new page called “Why I write”, because I have come across a number of quotes over the past couple years that actually perfectly capture my viewpoint of why I keep this daily blog and why I think it’s important for me to continue writing. For example, this one was one that I came across while on my trip. The part that goes:
Many many years ago I worked in the council archives and it’s amazing how little human interaction is recorded and how important ‘normal peoples’ diaries are to getting an idea of historic life.
This is exactly why I write. My inspiration for starting the blog in the first place traces directly back to the diaries of Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon, both Heian-era Japanese noblewomen who I like very much. So I want to capture quotes like the above somewhere, so that if my inspiration ever flags, I can look back at them to gain my focus again.
Besides all that, I also have a billion advertisements and brochures and things that I have scanned but never did upload before the trip. There’s a whole new pile of things to scan after the trip too. And many old pages that I need to work on, like guestbook scans (especially for Chihayafuru/Omi Jingu now) and my dream diary. Also, I have a lot of seasonal anime to watch and catch up on, as the current anime season is coming to an end but most of my shows are still stuck at the halfway mark from before I went to Kyoto. I think I’m around 100 episodes behind now across all my shows.
I ordered a new USB external Bluray drive off of Amazon.ca on the last day of my trip, and it came so quickly that delivery was attempted less than 24 hours later, before I was even home. So the delivery bounced and the delivery person had to come back the next day, when I was actually home. I mean, if the package’s guaranteed delivery day is on Thursday, arriving “faster” on Wednesday is still not meeting the delivery promise! Back before COVID-19 when I had to go in to work, I had to take days off of work or arrange for a special work form home day to be able to receive packages, and it irked me when packages arrived earlier than promised because I was taking the next day off instead of the previous day and would miss the package that way.
I sent Mart‘s CD to him on Friday. Since it was just one CD, we opted to not use tracking, as the CD itself only cost $15 (well, 1,500 yen) and the shipping options were basically $12 CAD for air delivery and no tracking, or $35 CAD for air delivery and tracking. From Canada to Switzerland. Still cheaper than from Japan to Switzerland though, apparently. He’s going to reimburse me for the full cost so I’m happy with how that went.
Here are some pictures from the week to close out this section. Firstly, here’s the rain-soaked view from my balcony the night I came back.
Home sweet home hey. One thing I do love about the place is that it’s beautiful, and doubly so when drenched in rain.
The next day, I went to Southgate, the mall next to my house, and they had this neat display in the middle of the mall:
Very nice, I like it. Those boys on the left were trying to throw some beanbags into a hole as part of some minigame that was set up.
I also went to Safeway that day to pick up some groceries and picked up some pills from the pharmacy too. It’s nice that they automatically fill my prescriptions when the prescription comes with X number of refills, and then text me to tell me it’s ready to pick up automatically if my prescription comes with refills, even without me going to the store to request it, but it’s weird when that triggers while I’m on vacation and then they keep sending me repeated messages to go pick it up, and I can’t reply or anything to tell them that I’m overseas and it wasn’t going to happen for another month. Then the text notifications abruptly stopped, and I was left to wonder if they had tossed away the pills or something. Anyway they were still there, and I rescued them back home, safe and sound.
The next couple of pictures are from the day after that, Friday the 16th, as I decided to take an early morning walk to the local Safeway because I couldn’t sleep, and wanted to get some cereal for breakfast. I had picked up milk the day before, so I had that, but I had this cereal craving for some reason. Anyway, I’d been to Safeway just before it closed at night once or twice before, but never in the morning just after it opened until now. Like me, the sun was bleary-faced in the sky:
And it was extremely pretty. Prettier than the photographs could capture, really. The grocery store itself was also nearly deserted, of course, but there were easily half a dozen early worms who had also come here to try to grab something or other right as the store opened.
For me, I found a new cereal variation I had never seen before, so it was a no-brainer for me to get it.
As cereals go I tend to like Reese Puffs anyway, and the rabbits were cute enough to entice me without being too overly cute to the point where I wouldn’t be able to eat them. I don’t actually eat cereal very often — I think this is actually the first box of cereal I’ve bought in two years (since before I started my blog!) so maybe they’re not new at all, I just might never have wandered past the cereal aisle to look at it, but nonetheless that was what I picked for this time. Drown in milk, little chocolate bunnies!!!
Games
The two games I played while I was on vacation were basically Honkai Star Rail (local) on the phone and Persona 5 Royal on the Steam Deck. I was basically on “maintenance mode” on Honkai while I was abroad, so I spent a bit of time finally progressing some quests and stuff once I got back. Still no new world, and not sure how long more I’ll play it, but it’s a good in-between time filler for now, and I know that the miHoYo/HoYoverse games will give me a good number of very meaningful and emotional scenes and quotes over time. Their RNG system for getting new characters is so terrible though and always makes me frustrated.
For Persona 5, I’ve long pushed past where I last stopped playing on the PS4 version of the game, so I’m well into new territory by now, but I’m not sure when I’ll actually have time to continue playing it now that I’m home. Maybe it’ll sit until the next time I go back to Japan in three months!
Satinel and I also started playing Barony, and while the long-term viability of the game as a good co-op game still remains to be seen, I do like that it’s scratching my itch of playing a first person co-op dungeon crawler sort of game that I’ve had ever since watching Jah and Satinel play Dark and Darker on Jah Stream Night. We also played a round of Streets of Rogue, which was chaotic fun but I was bad at it as always. It was nice connecting with Satinel over co-op games again. Next up, building cobblestone huts in Minecraft with me.
Dreams
In order to “catch up” this blog section to the current day, I will list all my dreams from after my last blog post on May 07 2023, to today, Jun 18 2023. While that’s a long period of time to cover, I don’t really dream that much while on the road, probably because my sleep is more interrupted and I’m not as comfortable in another bed that isn’t my own bed. However, I had a few amazing dreams in this time span, on May 21 and 22, that were so good that I even talked about them in my travel blog, and they will eventually be getting 9/10 or the very rare 10/10 scores when I get to putting them in my actual dream diary page, as some of the most amazing and profound dreams I’ve ever had. That page is still an ongoing project that I only occasionally devote time to though.
The Jun 06 dream, while short, is also very interesting, because that was the night after we had decided to go skip class and go to Osaka but before we actually went on Jun 07. Zian actually did end up asking/informing Ms Nishioka of our plans to skip the Jun 08 class, during lunchtime on Jun 07, before we actually went there in the evening, so this was slightly prescient (or just a sign of my guilt). It also is a little significant in one other way that will be apparent in a couple of weeks from now when I get around to writing about it.
May 12 2023
- I was working at a company investigating rogue AI incidents, with one particular interesting case that I remember being that a company had used AI to process bears into bearskin floor rugs and then teleport the rugs into a storage room. For some reason, the AI entity in the room malfunctioned and recognized one of the woman employees at the company as part of the storage room, and dropped bear rugs on top of her, trying to pile them up on her. Individually, they weren’t particularly heavy so she mostly ignored it at first, but it started to be a problem when four or five of them were on top of her at once, and while she could wriggle out of that, she couldn’t completely escape the AI entity.
- She tried calling for help but was unable to reach any of her coworkers at first, though she eventually managed to get the attention of someone returning home with a lidless cardboard box of groceries worth $39.60 or something. There was a bit of discussion between the coworkers outside on who was going to use a machine on the outside wall to disable the AI module inside, as the woman got buried in rugs yet again. Eventually someone did it and got her free though.
- In terms of our company’s investigation, I noted that this was the second time today that this company had had an issue with their AI. Ronnie agreed and said that a court case would have to be opened so that an investigation would be done, though it wouldn’t be a full court proceeding with witnesses and all that. This was because Jeremy, due to his personality and as part of his job as a fellow coworker at the investigation company, would also be on the roster of the preliminary jury and would definitely vote to close the case before it came to trial.
- He nodded to this and told Ronnie that he was going home directly for the day after the vote instead of coming back to the office, and Ronnie gave him the OK for that.
May 15 2023
- I dreamt that both Zian and I were students at some school, and we were both staying on the dorms, though we had different rooms, possibly even in different buildings, far away from the actual school itself. I might even have had two rooms, one at campus and one off-campus, as I recall finding and hugging my bolster at some point, which I had left at the other room, as well as some thoughts about how some of my clothes were in the current room instead of the other room as well. This clothes bit involved both socks as well as a PE shirt or some other shirt that I was going to wear today.
- Zian helped me bring a box of things to my room at one point, and I told her to please ignore the mess of items, mostly washed clothes that I had not packed away, on my bed. There were even more clothes in a laundry basket on my comforter. She stayed outside, and then I heard the noise of a toilet bowl located just outside my door being flushed, while I changed my clothes inside the room. There was also a shelf just outside my door, on which was a metallic gadget which wasn’t mine but that I had brought into the room. It was about the size and shape of a small metal tape measure with the measure part retracted, and when I pressed the button on the tape measure, a little bent wire protruding from the device straightened up in the air, and a little sawwheel at the end of the wire started whirring and spinning. It looked like a really dangerous shaving device or something.
- There was also a part of the dream about four different roughly parallel streets connected to one street that was perpendicular to them all, and one main quest with two compulsary objectives and a few optional ones that had to be completed on each street. Each street had things like houses, villas, shops, and so on. The quest only popped on screen when I approached the street that it was based around, and I saw that most of the quests were partially completed but in a very haphazard, random manner.
- I remember a gated villa at the end of one of the streets with enemy red dots on the minimap inside the villa. I also remember an old couple in a shop inquiring if it sold CDs, and I and another student told them that it did not, and I added that there was another shop down one of the other streets that did. Also I remember some of my team mates saying that they had no idea that one of their friends, who was an NPC, had a secret job investigating someone on behalf of some teacher or other authority figure, even though they had known said friend for years. They thought that that was cool. I also saw a quest circle around a house on one of the streets, and a main quest objective to find some documents hidden inside of it.
May 19 2023
- There was a soccer match that seemed to be the final match of the World Cup or some similar international soccer tournament. I believe it was between Italy and Germany. However, it was also an aggregate match, and Germany had won the first leg 2-0 or 3-0 or something like that. For this second leg, Italy outscored Germany and had even equalized the aggregate score four times, but each time they did so, Germany scored again to pull ahead on aggregate even though they were behind in the match. In the end, Germany lost the match 6-5 or 5-4, but did win the competition.
- In the dream world, there was also a contest tied to this that I was also taking part in. The competition involved a combination of fantasy league bracket points, plus points based on watching the actual games, or at least having the TV tuned on to the correct channel for days. Our group of 3 had guessed the final winner correctly, and we had all received a nice score bump for this, so our group was now tied with two other groups for the top spot, and about to overtake them because we were all able to leave our TVs on during the day to rack up points, despite the competition itself now being over. There were other mechanics tied to this as well but I do not remember them.
- One of the other two people in my group was Melbourne, and we weren’t completely sure if his TV was set up correctly because he hadn’t registered any TV activity points with us in some time.
May 21 2023
- This dream took place at and crossed between specific locations on various planets — Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. I don’t remember a lot of specific details but it also involved lots of people who were friends and had a rather wild, couldn’t care less, cartoony vibe to it. Several scenes also took part overnight or at least past midnight.
- At one point, I was bouncing around between canyons on the surface of Jupiter and Saturn, past the soft curfew that we had, with one female friend chasing me as I playfully tried to avoid her while searching for another friend on one of the planets’ canyons. One of the two friends involved here was a fox spirit, I think. I felt like a fish jumping up and above the surface of a pond, and then back down into the water again, and it was a fantastic and very grandiose feeling.
- At another point, a friend and I were trying to decide which planet to meet up at, which was as easy as teleporting between them. At this time each option we had was basically sponsored by some sort of anime idol franchise group or something, which gave us assurance that it would ultimately be fine no matter which one we chose.
- At yet another point, an Earth girl was trying to find me but it was her first time going between planets and she was broke. She took a cashier job at a supermarket on Mars and asked an alien coworker how many credits she needed to save up before she could come find me, the alien was confused but when prodded, eventually gave a ballpark figure of 100,000 credits, which would be good for at least 4 days of spending. But the job only seemed to pay 97 credits a day due to what the store manager said was a salary and funds pinch, and the girl got frustrated at this.
- The manager offered to train her on tax forms and rules so she could maximise her money, and a guy coworker who had started work a couple of weeks ago but had been slacking off a lot asked why he never got trained on this and wanted to join the training as well. The manager said that he hadn’t even read the tax form booklet yet, had he? The guy said that he had indeed looked at it, when he accidentally blew up his employee desk the other day.
- At another point, I was on Mars with Zian and we joined a group of remote controlled car racers who needed more people. They had 8 people and needed 10, so we completed their roster. Zian and I joined different groups, as we were split into 5 groups of 2. We were each given control of an old car, and one person had to drive the car to a designated location, which would trigger the other matching car located there, which the second person would then drive back.
- My partner was in charge of the first car, but the roads were suspended high above the sky and at a weird angle so it was difficult to control the car properly, and going offroad, as my partner accidentally did early on, would immediately cause the car to tumble off the track and the team to fail. Two of the five immediately fell off in this manner, a third was moving too slowly and got crushed by a vehicle, and the fourth and fifth were racing each other before the fourth one purposely knocked the fifth one, turning it sideways and causing it to careen sideways and off the road as well. As the fourth car was the only car left at this point, they were declared the winner and the scene jumped to where their matching car for the second part of the event was.
- The return car was a real car, and eight of the ten of us got into it, with the two winners in the two front seats and everyone else squished in the back seats. The car was barely at capacity at this time, but there were still two players outside — Mom and someone else. I was in the middle of the back seat and beckoned them in anyway, even though it would put our occupant count over 8. However, because Mom was somehow considered a ghost, that apparently counted as a negative person, so both she and the 10th person managed to squeeze in to the back seat as well, and the dashboard still read only 8 ooccupants.
- Much later on, there was another overarching plot about trying to stop doomsday shots with a machine. It was on some planet to start, and the machine, which looked like the drill digging vehicle from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, would summon the doomsday shot to itself once the doomsday shot was fired, and then shoot and nullify the energy ball itself. It needed to be operated by two people, an anthromorphic lion and a forest spirit girl, and it worked fine. Later on, the scene shifted to Earth, and someone summoned the machine there (much to the amazement of a couple of Earthlings who had never seen magic before) and tried to recruit a lion and tree spirit as well, but got a tiger instead of a lion. It wouldn’t work this way though, so the tiger was dismissed and dejectedly walked away, and they picked up a proper lion to do the job.
- There was also a scene involving turning on the TV and trying to watch an episode of some anime, but then realizing that I had already watched it last week, so I was able to skip it this week. This also involved a bathhouse of some sort and someone trying to take a picture of something with his phone, but it wasn’t working too well so I brought him a camera. At one point I was also partially undressed and had to get out and close the bathhouse door properly, but accidentally slid it almost fully open instead. No one was outside though, so I quickly shut it again without incident.
May 22 2023
- This dream started off in some sort of bustling communal cafeteria that seemed to be part of an army barracks. I had a big pile of noodles on a large plate but had to set it down on a corner table because I was called upon to help someone with things. Near the end of this segment, I was returning toward my bowl when I saw someone pouring dishwashing detergent onto my noodles, in a circular pattern over the food. He was some sort of spy, and I tried to catch him, but there were too many people in the way between us, and by the time I reached my food plate he was gone out the back door toward the toilets.
- It was past midnight and past curfew, so no one was supposed to be outside. I was part of the administration team though, an assistant to a prominent female character in my dream that was basically a Goddess, a tall, beautiful, and prideful woman who took care of us all, and that we could always absolutely rely on, though I cannot pin down her specific identity or if she was modelled after an actual character from real life, from Honkai Star Rail, or somewhere else. Anyway, I reported this incident to the Goddess, who came out and looked around the backyard area alongside me and a couple other female scouts, but the man was long gone.
- The backyard area had a campfire with a small alcove beneath it for disposing of stuff, as well as a couple shacks that acted as backup outdoor bathrooms for the barracks of the Goddess’ army. One of the scouts dug beneath the campfire and made the 2×2 square alcove there deeper, from about one square deep to about ten squares deep, with the reasoning that if the man returned, he was sure to use that place as a storage place and would toss his things into the hole without realizing that it had been deepened, and thus might lose the tools of his trade in there.
- The scout also said that she would go off and look for the man, and would keep in touch via one of the Goddess’s helpers, the leader of the scouts, a quiet girl whose special skill was being a telepath who could monitor the wavelength of any of her scouts and would know if any of them ran into any trouble. I told her that the man had blue hair and a 5 letter name starting with B. The scout nodded and left.
- Right after the introduction of this scout leader, a major incident happened. The scout leader alerted the Goddess that one of her scouts, March 7th, was in trouble, and the leader invoked her other skill, which was to teleport herself and one of the people that she was psychically linked to, so that they would in essence exchange places. She vanished, and March 7th appeared, her face streaked with tears. She looked surprised, then figured out what had happened, and quickly made her report to the Goddess and me.
- March 7th said that the neighbouring country, ruled by Hitler, had just launched a surprise attack, and she had been attacked by four men at the very northern edges of our country, near the border with this now-enemy country. She was currently running away from them through the forest, but one of her abilities was a limited sort of prescience, and she knew that she was going to be caught by them and taken prisoner. Another of her abilities was being really lucky and always finding the best way out of bad situations though, so she was confident that she would eventually be able to escape, and she couldn’t let her leader face the four men herself as she had no combat or escape skills, so March 7th apologized to the Goddess for not being able to help out in the upcoming war effort (which she knew about due to her prescience), and said she wanted to thank her scout leader for giving her this brief respite and chance to report in, even though they would not be able to actually meet up at this time. With that, March 7th triggered the return portion of the teleport swap spell, which swapped the two girls’ positions back the way it was, returning the scout leader to the camp.
- The Goddess was very angry at this turn of events, and the next few scenes involve me walking with her as we flitted and teleported between random enemy locations, causing a bunch of havoc and death. Among other things, we flitted to the edge of a cliff by an enemy barracks with tall pagodas made of straw, and she casted fire spells that toppled the aflame straw down to the camps below. We also went undercover into places like an enemy weapon cache where blacksmiths were working, as well as a battle scene near enemy soldiers in some very shallow water, and a murderous glee was on her face as she tossed hand grenades out, killing a bunch of people with them. At one point, someone grabbed one of the hand grenades and tossed it back at her feet, but these were smart grenades and would not explode if she were within their vicinity, so she bent down, picked up the grenade, and tossed it back again, at which point it properly exploded.
- Several more scenes played out here on both sides of the conflict. One further scene that involved just our side was that the goddess was complaining at one point that Asta, another scout, was nowhere to be found at the start of our war. Asta eventually arrived, except I realized that she was actually Debbie. Her face was streaked with tears too, and when the Goddess asked what happened, she said that she had been watching a sad movie with her hubby and had only just saw the summons and the call to arms.
- One scene that involved the enemy side was them marching in to a large lake on the northern sides of our country’s borders, and vastly outmatched locals trying to do what they can to slow down the army. Hitler‘s troops were mowing down all the locals they can find, but three of them, a local commander and two of his young troops, hid beneath a pile of leaves or something just underneath ground level, as Hitler‘s army walked on overhead them. One of them was about to be stepped on when all three of them burst forth from the ground and opened fire, killing an opposing ninja dressed in traditional robes, as well as several ground troops, before being taken out themselves. There were fisherman boats on the lake too, and the invading army took those out as well as all the surrounding native villages. I was there briefly during broad daylight on an island in the middle of the lake, pressed down against the ground and the black and white natural stone in the hopes that no one could see me from the shore.
- Someone wowed at the size of the lake and said that the entire shoreline around the lake could easily accommodate eight battalions, one at each of the eight points of a simple compass rose. Hitler said that he was going to draft and summon until he had at least 50. The invading army also had several scenes where Hitler tried to root out spies in his army or amongst a certain group of people. We definitely had spies but he never caught any of us.
- There were also scenes involving both sides meeting together. The main one that I remember was another spy unmasking scene, which took place in an extravagant ballroom, in front of hundreds of people, mostly women, of high society. Hitler was disssatisfied with the information leaks on his part, and had gathered several of his aides here to essentially kill one off as a warning. I was in this group of suspects, as I was working for him as a messenger as part of my spy duties, but I was very quickly dismissed as a suspect because of a reason that was something like “she’s a good messenger, always very punctual and never wastes my time when she requests to meet to relay a message, always keeping her requested time short and never wasting my time”. So I was let go.
- He narrowed it down to two young suspects, both androgynous-looking helpers of his, then picked one as the victim to die, an apprentice glasssmith or something whose only crime was born to a lousy country and working for a poor boss. I idly wondered at this point why he would select a guy, even an androgynous one, since pretty much everyone working directly for the Goddess was female. Anyway, Hitler left him on stage as he prepared for the execution, and I looked around from my seat near the back of the ballroom, and saw quite a few girls I recognized, and knew as “spies”. Kaiting and Rachel had two side by side seats in the audience and were leaning cozily against each other, I believe Debbie/Asta was somewhere in there, and Zian even came in later and sat down on a vacant chair at the back of the room near me as our eyes met and she smiled at me. I shook her head, wondering why we had so many spies in here risking their lives with impunity. Even the Goddess herself was in the room near the back seats, I realized, and Hitler just had no idea. She was there to ensure that if any of her girls actually did get in trouble, she’d get them out to safety.
- While waiting, Hitler came by to entertain some of the high society ladies, and asked a question about who the most beautiful lady was. A lady asked if he meant who the thinnest lady was, in which case it was some plain-looking girl at the back of one of the columns whose name started with G, but if not that, then it depends on what the woman was wearing and how lucky she was to catch Hitler‘s eyes. One of Hitler‘s favoured women near the front then stood up and said that oh, if this was an issue of luck then she was doomed, as she was always just so unlucky. Hitler said that he always had lots of bad luck too and could never find the spies in his army. The two of them then chatted for a bit, with that lady talking about a new tattoo that she had just gotten or something.
- In the meantime, the condemned guy on stage had decided that if he was going to die, he was going to create a mess of things and try to take out some people with him. As his last request, he requested to be given a microphone and wanted to lead a song for the room, and this request was granted. Being a glasssmith, he had noticed that the ceiling and some of the walls were made of glass fractals, and there were chandeliers hung up on those ceilings as well. He started a specific song whose pitch got higher and higher, getting the crowd to sing along with him as he went along. At the peak of the song, he had the crowd sing something of a certain frequency that shattered the glass ceiling, causing shards of glass to rain down everywhere and the chandeliers to come crashing down. In the chaos, he tried to escape out the door, but Hitler himself pulled out a revolver and shot him in the back as he fled.
May 23 2023
Dream 1
- I was in my Edmonton 4012 house preparing to go on a solo trip somewhere for a vacation, when I heard the news that someone I apparently used to know and who used to be a math teacher had recently passed away, and had inquired about my transition and wellbeing with one of his dying breaths before he went.
- But the news only came with a first name, Michael, so I had to puzzle it out, and thought maybe he was my grade 9 teacher or something. I felt bad about not knowing who exactly this was, and I wasn’t on best terms with Mom and Dad at this point as they didn’t want me to go on my trip alone, so they were pestering me about how I could possibly not know who this Michael was even though I seemed to be important to him.
- In the end, I eventually saw a newspaper clipping — he was someone named Mike Charad or Charod, who happened to be a Math lecturer at the University but had also worked at IST, or its earlier incarnation, AICT, back in the early 2010s, and sort of knew me from there before my transition. But he had long since moved on, and had also been arrested and charged with sexual assault three years or so ago.
- He was freed and had moved to the University of Portland for a fresh start, where he was up until his passing, but just as a normal lecturer, he was unable to get any research grants due to his past criminal record. He had seen my old name on a list of former high school math competition students, recognized my name from that list, and had thus inquired about me.
Dream 2
- I wanted to go on a 2-week Singapore trip from Japan, where I was currently. I had even already even booked the plane tickets, and the first plane ride was later today. However, I had been having doubts about going, partially because I had a test today and partially because I would be alone. I could wait until after the test to go, but then I would still miss nearly two weeks of school and wouldn’t get the test results back. I wanted to ask Zian if she wanted to head there during the upcoming 1 week semester with me too, but she had already been to Singapore so I didn’t think that she would.
- I realized that I had booked my flight but not my lodgings, so I went to the basement of our Edmonton 4012 home to use the basement computer there, which had been relocated to near the laundry room door. Kel and Jon kept coming by and peeking over my shoulder despite me repeatedly asking them not to though, so I eventually just said that this was a disaster and shut off the computer, then headed upstairs to turn on and use the other desktop computer in the main hall instead.
- A bit later on, I went to the airport anyway, where I saw five of my friends who were travelling together — this group included Lauren, Allen, and Eileen, as well as another guy and girl. They were stuck in an endlessly long and outgoing umoving customs line meant for those heading out of the country. I had decided by this point that I wasn’t going to go, and I invited the five of them back to my house to rest and relax in. They agreed, though Lauren stayed to keep their place in line for now, and the other four followed me past a much shorter customs line leading back out to the city. I also texted Mom along the way to let her know that I was bringing some guests back.
- When I got home, I saw that a bunch of bookshelves had been set up all over a side room adjacent to the main living hall, with books and board games packed onto them. Apparently my family had just finished setting this up. The four others with me quickly settled down in the living room with their luggage and a nice book to read each.
- Jon said that I was right about the basement area being a disaster, a water main had broken and partially flooded the floor near where I had been using the computer. That wasn’t quite what I had in mind but I didn’t tell him that.
- Snippet: There was also some weird dream snippet about being part of a procession of three cars being driven in a line, and a police officer flagging us down. He was promoting some sort of mirror addon for the car, and while he had three mirrors and attached one to each car, he only had enough screws and glue on hand to finish setting up 2.5 mirrors, so he said the second and third one were both about 3/4 done each and those cars would have to stop by somewhere at some point to get their last screws.
- Snippet: I also remember a game scene at some point from the point of view of a player-controlled lizardman character who was low on health and was attacking a village. He went into an elven hut, at which point the elf inside the hut shot a fire arrow that set the front door of his own hut on fire, but which also immolated and eventually killed the lizardman.
May 26 2023
- There were some juniors belonging to whatever group I was a member or type of, and today was their first time using their transformation powers. Some of us seniors hung around and pretended to be busy while we waited for them to essentially “get changed”, then clapped as they slowly came out in their new outfits. One of the juniors remarked that everything looked so clear — she had glasses in her transformation even though she did not in her regular outfit.
- Wandering outside a little later on, I stumbled upon an Indian wedding, where an Indian woman was visiting and meeting her groom, a Pakistani man, at the foot of a flight of stairs leading up to the front door of a two-storey house that was on stilts, so it looked like it was three storeys high in total. There was a path looping all around the base of the house and three other Indians were standing around on it, watching the couple, and I did too as the woman declared that she was offering herself to him. Everyone clapped.
- Specifically, she offered to become his familiar, and wished him the best of luck in perhaps even becoming the next Emperor. Two of the nearby Indian onlookers wondered if her name would be suitable for her to be his wife if he did indeed become the Emperor — she had a repeated name, something like Zani Zani, and that didn’t sound like a suitable princess’s name. They figured that they would figure it out if he got that far though.
May 30 2023
- I don’t actually remember the contents of my dream, but I have a vivid memory image of taking an elevated train, as well as meeting up with some people who represented classmates and Buddies from my RSJP program, in my dream. We were going somewhere that was somehow time-limited.
Jun 02 2023
- I was discussing different routes my school career in Singapore could have gone, and something about doing a three year program in one year in either Nanyang University or Nanyang Girls’ High School came up. Mom said that only really smart geniuses could finish an accelerated program like that in one year, and namedropped some student whose 3-word name started with A (possibly Ang something something), but I said that I didn’t necessarily need to finish it before moving to Canada, it was just for the experience.
- The dream also involved watching an army leader guy dancing, with a picture backdrop of the road intersection between Yishun 799 and Yishun 723 behind him. On that picture was superimposed images of other students dancing, recorded from 20 years ago, and it cycled in and out between various pictures of guys and girls doing silly dances. I was watching this intensely because this was the same cohort of students that my Dunman friends were from, and indeed at one point I saw Eileen, Paulene, and a few guys on stage and alternating trying to time their claps with the music and trying to make twinkling star gestures by opening and closing their fingers. They were rather out of sync with each other and the music but having a great time.
- The whole dream contained lots of music and rhythm segments in all. There were also mathematical components, like a poem whose number of syllables had to be divisible by 3, 4, 5, and 6, so that small groups could split up the poem when doing performances with it on stage.
Jun 03 2023
- I dreamt that I had a large TV in my apartment overseas, and Kel installed a camera feed in our Edmonton 4012 house’s upstairs dining/living room, so that I could see what was happening at home even while I was away. When I turned the TV on I saw Kel playing some computer game or other on the upstairs computer.
- Somewhere along the way there was also a train scene, where Zian and I were in a long queue waiting for a train. We were standing several spaces apart in the queue, but the queue snaked back and forth so we passed each other several times, so when we got near the front, I cut the queue and joined her. The train carriage in front of us was packed to bursting point, but we couldn’t fit in it, so the train trundled on a few steps so that the door to the next empty carriage was aligned with the front of the queue. I was worried that we would be crushed and unable to make our way out later if we went in near the start, but surprisingly the remaining queue wasn’t very long, so even though the other carriage was packed overly full, this one still even had leftover seats after everyone had boarded.
Jun 06 2023
- I dreamt that while wearing a backpack, I had asked permission from Ms Hara to skip her class, telling her that we were going to skip her class in order to travel to a neighbouring town. Though it was less about asking permission and more of a courtesy note telling her of our plans. She pursed her lips a litte and asked us to find some original butter while we were there and to see how much it costs.
Jun 07 2023
- I was let go from work around the end of April, though there was a sort of feeling that indicated that the feeling might have been mutual too. The workplace turned into a tavern that I then logged into and visited now and then, with a character name that had both a first and last name starting with M. Brad was the innkeeper and was running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that involved storylines about the tavern, and he obviously knew who I was, as he held a symposium about starting new jobs and called on me specifically to invite me to talk about the process of finding new work at one point. I balked and panicked and hit the reset button on my computer, immediately logging me out as my computer went through the reset process. I sat and used that time to think about what had just happened before steeling myself and deciding to actually log back into the game and answer the question if I was called upon again.
- Upon launching the game and logging back in, I received a couple mssages from old workmates which seemed to indicate that outside of Brad, they had no idea who I was. They had wanted to apologize about my client crashing as they said it was probably triggered by there being too many people. Brad was now ignoring me as he had moved the story on and everyone was having a banquet after defeating what turned out to be a giant worm that had attacked the tavern. I sent Brad an apology message, then mused that I needed a new and better computer but that that wouldn’t be a priority in the first year even after I found a new job.
Jun 13 2023
- I was living in a dorm room with Zian and a bunch of other girls, and she invented a clever block farm that could be used to farm resources that were needed in some sort of game or some sort of day to day life event. In this block farm, you could put down a special cube which would then generate a whole bunch of random cubes connected to one of the remaining open faces of the connected cubes, usually making up a weird diamond or zigzag like formation by the time it was finished generating. Those cubes could then literally be picked up and added to the player’s inventory.
- There were a couple bugs with it, like sometimes the cubes would be registered under another player’s nearby name instead of theirs, but it was so much more useful and convenient to farm cubes like that, especially since it could even be used in the safety of our dorms, that no one really minded. Even a newspaper interviewed Zian at one point and featured the device. It was so popular to the point that she was constantly inundated by other girls who wanted to be her friend, and I was gradually left out of things, I couldn’t even get my hands on a cube to try it until late in the dream so I just farmed some cubes whatever the more tedious “normal way” in the dream was, and watched over them to make sure everything was ok.
- At some point, we got together for lunch, and got into a minor argument together as some of the other girls were inviting her to Singapore via boat and I was going to be left behind. For my part I apparently had committed some sort of friendship sin too, perhaps not using the blocks enough or not inviting her to something else either. I brought my bowl of miso soup to my lips, drank it all down, and then left the table in a huff.
Jun 14 2023
- It was the last day of Mr Tanaka‘s class, and Jon and I were jogging together through the hallway of Hub Mall to try to get there as soon as possible as we were already slightly late. I told him to run ahead if he wanted and he nodded and did so, accelerating into a speed faster than I could run at, even though it felt like I was running at full speed. My jeans were a little baggy though and needed adjustment around the waist now and then and I thought maybe that was why I was a bit slower.
- Everyone in class was divided up into groups of 4 or 5 — Jon‘s group was doing an updated version of a skit that they had done on a previous day, which was why he had wanted to run ahead. He got there just in time to meet his group mates offstage (as offstage was also just outside the classroom door) and jumped right onstage and into his lines once he arrived. I waited outside and watched until there was a suitable pause before I ducked my way in and went to join my group at the center front table, which was a long, sandy brown wooden table.
- I was seated on the rightmost seat of that table, and the person in the leftmost seat of the table to the right of me, from another group, leaned in and whispered that if I didn’t have a copy of a handout that contaned feedback from my group’s presentation, then I should get it from Mr Tanaka later. I nodded. I only had a single informational sheet on the table that was completely unrelated, so I definitely did need to get it later. I did try to copy (via highlighting and using the copy/paste function somehow) part of the relevant handout from the groupmate to my left, but the paragraphs had hyperlinked text in them that did not copy properly.
- I also got my grade back, and got marks between 70 and 80 — another girl who said she did rather terribly actually got a 90, so I frowned a bit at that, but oh well, in the end the class was just a pass/fail class anyway.
- Zian was in another group too in the same class, and I went up to chat with her and heard her say that she was glad that she was going home and would be finally cutting her hair once she did, basically trimming its length by half, since she hadn’t been able to cut her hair while overseas for a long time now. I liked her long hair and preferred it that way but didn’t tell her that.
- The class was then split in two — half the group got to go to a nearby museum and exhibition and they cheered. The other half, which I was in, got to watch a road and look at the leaves of the trees near the road. Mr Tanaka said the two groups would swap in two hours or so. I crossed a zebra crossing and then stopped halfway to look at the leaves on a branch that was bending down from its bough and hung just above the crossing.
Jun 16 2023
- My little brother, Jon in his 4-6 year old form, had asked to borrow my sweater jacket from me while I was wearing it, so I took it off over my head and gave it to him. He wore it to class. Later on, after class, I met a more grown up version of both him and Kel, and asked for my sweater jacket back. Both he and Kel started giving me other jackets that I did own and that they had, but they couldn’t find the exact sweater that I wanted back. Jon said he remembered wearing it to class and remembered taking it off for something and was struggling to remember what happened to it after that.
- That scene and several other scenes in the dream happened in a classroom that was essentially from a Singapore school, with a front and back door, a stone floor, single desks and chairs arranged in a grid, and windows with shutters on both the external side and corridor side of the classroom walls.
Jun 17 2023
- A bunch of students from a school that I was in had come to a school campus for karaoke. It was a general school outing, so it was mostly people I didn’t know. Some people I did know took over the karaoke hall but I didn’t really want to karaoke myself, so I wandered the rest of the school instead.
- Many other students were wandering around the hallways and up and down the stairs, and there were groups of people loitering around, for example I found a bunch of delinquents, all guys dressed in black uniforms, occupying the foyer space at the bottom of a foot of stairs that led into a hallway that I wanted to head into, so I decided to go back up and go another way to get there.
- Jonathan from Dunman had Tigey with him because I had lent Tigey to him in an earlier scene, I noticed that he had brought Tigey along and that Tigey was seated on his shoulders, and I was happy at seeing that. Later on, someone passed Tigey to me and I was reunited with him just before all hell broke loose.
- A bunch of humans dressed in some sort of hunter camouflage outfits came along and attacked the school, as did a group of trolls and cyclops. They were not allies, and were killing each other, but were both also killing students as they ran across them, though many of the students, including me, managed to run away. Eventually something like four trolls and two cyclops fought each other in the school courtyard as the hunter group stood in a nearby building, watching them from their vantage point, ready to attack whoever the victorious group was. I watched all this happening from the school gate.
- Snippet: In an earlier dream, I was also at some sort of school festival. It was the last day of the festival and I was sharing festival food with some friends.