Life

This was a relatively quiet week. Animethon is going on in the city right now, as well as the Edmonton International Street Performers Festival, and the Calgary Stampede is going on south of us, plus there’s the Taste of Edmonton and K-Days going on next week in our city, and I’ve been to all those events before.. but not this year. Firstly, I only have a limited amount of time left in this place before I go overseas, and secondly, at least late in the week, there was also a blanket of smoke over the city so everything smells like burnt wood. Which I really like the smell of, but don’t want to go out too far and too long in. Also, I was wishy-washy about going to Animethon last Sunday, as that evening was the last day to purchase discounted tickets for the event, and Satinel rolled some dice for me and told me that the dice said not to go. Which was probably a good thing once the smoke settled over the city later on in the week.

On Sunday, after submitting last week’s blog entry in the morning, I went for an early morning walk around the area. The weather, wind, skies, and neighbourhood were very nice. So here are some regular pictures of the cloudless skies.

And a 200 MP picture. As usual, the detail at the sides of the picture are very bad, but the middle area is quite good. There’re a bunch of people doing something way in the background, I have no idea what as I didn’t even notice them when I was walking around, but apparently my phone did. Well, they’re in the baseball field there so they’re probably playing baseball.

On Monday, I went down to the Asian supermarket, picking up some groceries there. Among other things, I picked up some cheese ice cream in a fit of inspiration that I regret, as I probably won’t be able to finish it before I go to Japan if I’m eating at my normal pace. But at least it’s interesting and sort of reminds me of that sweetcorn flavour that I really like. I also wondered what part of these Squid Fish Balls, front and center in the picture below, was actually ball-shaped to the manufacturer:

At some point, aren’t those just fish cakes? I also eyed some snail on sale:

And was reminded of the snail noodles that I tried last year in My Diary #052. The Asian supermarket sure sells some weird things.

On the way back, I took some hi-rez pictures of the main road bordering one of the sides of my apartment complex, with one shot semi-focusing on the tree with the cottony/woolly aphidy/dandelion fluff that I commented about last year in My Diary #057. This time the tree itself was mostly fine and the fluff was largely on the fruits/pods on the ground though. The other picture was pointed the other way, toward a major intersection (though you’d never know it from the lack of cars) and a direction I never really do much walking toward because it’s all residential. I should though. And I should bring my video camera.

On Tuesday, I finally sent in my poor old Google Pixel 5 phone in to Samsung for my trade-in rebate. I actually took it to the local Canada Post store in Southgate, before being told that the pre-paid mailing label that I had was a Fedex only one and that I had to go to a nearby Fedex facility to drop it off as Canada Post wouldn’t/couldn’t do it. Annoying, as Fedex and all the other courier services do not have a convenient dropoff location around my area, the closest one was about a 25 minute walk away. But I did want to get this final part of my new phone purchase squared away, and the weather was still excellent, so I did that walk anyway.

I’d walked in this direction, northeast of my home,  before, but not this far, so it was nice to see some new scenery. The inside of the shop itself, which accepted drop-off parcels from Fedex, UPS, and a bunch of other courier services, looked like this:

After dropping off the phone in its padded envelope, I bought some lunch from a somewhat seedy Chinese restaurant (Calgary Trail Noodle House) that seemed to be run by one person and thus lacked a staff member to clean up after patrons, so there were dirty plates everywhere on the tables closest to the kitchen, even though the restaurant itself seemed clean. It was very weird. They also provided me with a single-use plastic bag for free even though that wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, but their food was rather expensive anyway ($15-16 per dish and I bought two) so I’ll just assume the plastic bag levy was baked into the price (but then shouldn’t I have gotten two bags?). The food was just average in the end too.

Anyway, while I followed the main road there, I followed a more residential path home afterwards, as there was a cemetery that I liked nearby and I had hoped to pass through it.

I passed by some guys working on top of a roof as I walked, and found it endearing enough to snap a discreet picture, since while they were “working”, they were obviously also just chilling out and chatting to each other:

Before running into some road work signs that told me the roads toward the cemetery were closed:

So I had to pass by that and content myself with taking more random pictures of scenery and houses:

It kind of struck me that the city is very green and I take that for granted sometimes.

Basically every evening this week, and over the last couple weeks, there were a bunch of neighbourhood kids outside playing and making noise every evening. And I love it — it’s a different sort of noise than my noisy neighbours who (used to, though they’ve mostly ceased, though I still hear things once in a while) play loud music audible through walls as endless thumps. This sort of noise makes a neighbourhood feel more lived in and authentic and I fully support it. There are also so many kids that take part in this that they must come from several different households. But they’re all making memories together that some of them will hopefully remember for life. How great. Here’s 7 of them on Monday at 9:30 pm, meeting up together after a play session before heading home:

And here’s like 11 of them playing on Friday around 6:45 pm:

I wonder what the catalyst was for them starting this this year — there was nothing like this in the prior ten or so years that I’ve been living here. Although it’s a little concerning that they’ve been playing through the smoke and bad quality air that we’ve been having. But as long as they’re okay with it and their families are okay with it, who cares? I like the smoke smell myself and it’s not THAT bad.

But I mention all that because sometime during the week, after Monday and before Thursday (inclusive), someone drew little chalk patterns all over the sidewalk:

I wonder what the story is behind these. It’s a LONG stretch of chalk doodles, across at least 100 of those cement pavement “tiles”, and would have to have taken quite some time. It’ll all wash away the next time the rain comes anyway, but did the kids do it? Amazing.

My last set of pictures come from Thursday, when I did a run to my local Safeway mall during lunchtime. I saw this guy standing on a cement divider on the carpark while trying to tie something down on his car:

Took another picture of our glorious sky and wished there was a way to also capture the feel of the wind on my skin and the excellent temperatures:

Saw a new service that Safeway was apparently offering:

And then took a picture of this apartment on the way back home. A very pretty mini-garden, though I have no idea what Starlight Leo is.

During that Safeway trip, I also noticed for the first time a shelf of baskets with small bags of slightly bruised fruits in them — bananas, oranges, tomatoes, and more, all priced at 50% off. I was delighted and bought three of the five or six small bags that they had displayed. This seemed to be new — I’d never seen this section before and the cashier also projected surprise when she was trying to cash the bags out for me. I was very glad to see this though as it helps promote less food waste and saves on my budget as well, so it’s a win-win for both sides. I hope this is a trend that they keep doing permanently, and that it wasn’t just a one-time thing with extra stock that they had.

The week has just been so calm and relaxing altogether, and even the little bit of smoke from a wildfire wafting into the city late in the week has helped with this a bit, since it’s helped block the sunlight to some extent so everything is just, as I described it in Discord, a diffused yellow glow rather than sharp sunlight. The sky’s just a pale film of dull yellow instead of bright blue, it’s a little bit surreal, and a little bit magical, like I’m inside a painting. Though I’m not sure the yellow captures very well on camera.

I also noticed that the evening and weekend locks on my apartment building’s front doors are gone — they had enacted a change back on March 13th this year where they said they’d lock the outer apartment lobby doors from 6 pm to 8 am Monday to Friday, and all day from Saturday to Sunday. The inner lobby doors are already locked, and the apartment call/phone box is between the inner doors and the outer doors, which also already have cameras monitoring them, so while this was probably done because of a homeless person or two that had taken up root in them during the winter (I had actually seen one at the very end of my Kami Watch Over Me trip, my first trip to Japan, when I arrived home), it was also very inconvenient for anyone who was expecting any sort of delivery, and likely universally hated. So now that it’s spring and summer and the homeless no longer have a reason to hang out there, I guess they quietly rescinded the policy.

(That being said, whether one considers the homeless problem and the people trapped in that vicious cycle to be “dangerous” or not, there generally aren’t any homeless around our neighbourhood, to the point that the Starlight Leo apartment above and other nearby homes have no issues openly leaving things on tables just outside their balcony, and parents have no issues sending their children out to play in the very open and totally public courtyard in the evenings. Nor have I ever felt any danger wandering the neighbourhood and looking for aurora at midnight. Apparently like anywhere else we do have occasional car catalytic converter thefts though, since those warning posters are everywhere.)

I was considering getting an AncestryDNA test kit (local) this week, but I couldn’t find any sort of sale or even referral program for Canada (the only referral program they have works for the USA only and does not apply in Canada) so I’ve held off on this for now. It would be nice to do before I head off to Japan though, so we’ll see how I feel about it over the next month or so.

Zian was on the train home this week when she called me for our weekly chat, so I got to hear train and subway noises as she headed home from her grandparents’ house with her Mom. That was amusing, although we sadly found out that either WeChat or her phone did a lot of background muting that could not be turned off, so I couldn’t outright hear most of the announcements that were being made over the loudspeaker. It seems that next week I might walk around the neighbourhood a bit in the early morning to show her the area during our video chat, but we’ll see. It might be our last chat for a bit too since I think she’s headed back to Sydney afterwards.

I also found this clip of scenes and pictures from Singapore in 1984 that made me a bit nostalgic, so I wanted to record it down here (and then save it locally for future backup, as I do with all videos that I link to on my blog). Though I’m more of a 90’s kid than an 80’s kid, in terms of what I remember of the country anyway, that was the year I was born and it’s neat to see video going back so far, as I’ve found that video documentation of life in Singapore in the 80s and 90s seems rather hard to find online. Though it’s a little weird to think that many of the people in the video have likely passed away or are on the verge of doing so now, 40 years later. I miss my home.