Life

Mom had a major stroke last Friday (Jul 28), for which she was admitted to a local hospital. Thankfully it was caught by Kel just as the stroke itself started to happen, and so not only did they get her to the hospital quickly, but secondary physical damage like from falling was completely prevented as well, so her current prognosis seems to be rather hopeful, and while she’s still weak and tired and will have to go through rehab to hopefully get most of her motor skills and physical ability back, her mental ability seems to be all there still (and almost uncannily sharper than before at times, according to Kel and Jon), so we’re very glad about that.

Dad, Jon, and Kel have been taking turns staying down at the hospital with Mom so that she always has someone by her side, while I, being the bad kid, have only gone down there a couple of times during the ensuing week to see her (and the rest of the family), partially since I haven’t taken any time off work. I do feel a bit guilty about this. I have offered to go down and cover for them when they need to go back and rest though, but so far I haven’t been taken up on that offer yet. I plan on making weekly or biweekly trips down there for now.

Partially due to that, while Mom probably doesn’t want to hear about this, I have definitely been considering just scrapping my Sophia plans (since I already got a good chunk of the “study abroad” experience out of the way in Kyoto two months ago anyway) and staying here to be near the family, just in case she (or Dad, who has been a champ, but is even older than she is) needs help or in case something else happens. Partially guilt, but partially also just a rearrangement of life’s priorities. I could definitely do it. I probably won’t because her prognosis for the moment seems great, but we’ll need to see how the next couple weeks go.

I ordered a number of CDs from that Suruga sale that I wrote about last week — mostly because the prices (for their cheaper overstock/”junk” CDs) were as good as being at the physical store itself, plus shipping was free, so it was even better than buying them in person and having to carry them all the way back home — they get really heavy. It was around 25 CDs for around $100, as I’m largely trying to flesh out a couple artist collections (largely Wake Up, Girls! (local)) that I have been working on, and their CDs tend to be mostly $3 to $4 CAD each. Counting the ones en route, I should have about 2/3 of their entire discography now, most of them acquired for a song. No way I can archive them or anything before I leave though, so they’ll be a project for if and when I return.

There was a lot of stuff there I was tempted to get but didn’t, and in the end the promotion ended a week early because the company got really inundated with orders, so my temptation to get anything was entirely removed because the shipping costs are killer — I added another 4 CDs to an empty cart to check the shipping cost for this blog post, and just the shipping alone costs 3,320 JPY ($31.34 CAD) via EMS and 4,336 JPY ($40.94 CAD) via DHL for the four CDs, plus the actual price of the CDs, and then plus customs (and DHL‘s predatory hidden customs fee if I use them for shipping) on top of that. While it’s not completely unpalatable, it’s a once a year splurge thing at best. That shipping cost being waived was what made the deal so good.

Our rental company announced a Resident Appreciation BBQ for next week, and I should be around for it again. They had one last year too, which I quite enjoyed viewing from my apartment. It’ll be a noisy afternoon but I will be looking forward to seeing this again.

I was thinking about a wishlist for my future residences, and noting that while all my childhood homes in SIngapore were high-level apartments, often on double-digit floor numbers, so they usually came with good views that I really liked, I also really like my low apartment here because I get to see and hear the sights and sounds of the neighbourhood, and I’ve been really getting into this recently, as one can probably tell from all the photos on my blog. I think ground floor apartments would still be terrible though, there’d be a lot more bugs and it’s also a lot less safe (and susceptible to weird weather), but one or two levels up would be the sweet spot for me if I wanted a place for looking out over the neighbourhood.

I’ll actually really miss the courtyard view from this apartment once I leave this place. It’s public enough to have a decent stream of people strolling past over the course of a day, while still maintaining an incredible sense of serenity most of the time. It’s pretty and well-maintained, with lots of trees and flowers and walking paths and benches and children playing and cats and dogs and rabbits walking by, all presenting a curated but ever-changing slice of slow, mostly tranquil life to me that I feel like I can partake in to some extent from my computer table by just turning my head left and looking out the balcony door.

I sometimes feel like a princess from one of the old Japanese palaces with carefully-arranged flower or rock gardens set up for maximum zen and visible from their bedroom windows. Except those princesses probably didn’t have noisy neighbours that kept them up playing loud music with bass at 2 am that they couldn’t eject. I sent off another couple annoyed emails to the housing management about my neighbours again this week, by the way.

Anyway, here’s a couple more pictures for my scrapbook’s weekly diet. Om nom nom.

Sunday night: It was raining during sunset, and the sky was very beautiful, although I only caught the end bit of it and my apartment isn’t pointed west anyway:

There were some other gorgeous photos taken from other parts of Edmonton though, see here (local), here (local), here (local), and here (local) for examples.

I still liked the colour contrast and wet sheen in my photo though. Although, five minutes later, the wet sheen turned into this mess:

The storm arrived and swept everything away. But the next day, everything was bright and sunny and cloudless again.

I went to the local Safeway store at 8:30 am, and saw the staff holding what must have been their morning standup meeting. A nice little moment to see as a random passerby.

These pictures of the courtyard are from Tuesday, taken two hours apart, one at 6:54 pm when the neighbourhood kids were out playing,

And one two hours later, at 8:51 pm, when they were mostly home but there was still enough light for people to be wandering about and enjoying the evening,

I wonder what everyone’s stories were. I think the rental management installing the benches last year during COVID were a great move though, since it turned the place into a neighbourhood gathering spot.

I went down to the University clinic on Thursday, and I went early enough in the morning that the local mall was still closed, so I had to go around it to get to the station. While doing this, I ran into a DHL trailer around one side of the mall, where I’ve seen a temporary food truck or two occasionally parked in the past. I didn’t know temporary DHL locations like this existed though.

My doctor’s appointment was to get the letter I talked about in the School section above, and even though I went fairly early in the morning and there were only four people ahead of me, there was still a 30-40 minute or so wait time before I could get in to see my usual doctor. On the way out, I helped myself to a couple of snack bars that they were giving away for free, and also snapped a picture of the other free stuff that the clinic had for students to take — one was a basket of condoms and the other was some sort of detergent packet.

I also picked up a free box of COVID test kits from the University pharmacy while I was there. I had no idea they were still giving those out. I also did process that basically no one in Edmonton wears a mask anymore — even visiting the hospital, there were a few remnant mask signs around but not even the nurses and staff walking around the place use masks anymore, never mind visitors. From my personal experience at least though, the few people who do still wear masks don’t get strange looks or anything and I have never seen (or experienced) anyone being yelled at for wearing a mask, though anecdotes of that happening can be found here and there.

Finally, lunch time on Friday outside the mall, whereby I went to Safeway to get groceries but realized about halfway through my trip that I had forgotten to bring along my prescription to hand it in to the pharmacy, even though it was one of my original goals that day. Oh well. Next week.

By the way, now that the soft ban on single-use plastic bags has kicked in for a while, I must say that I hate it for one particular reason — food court stalls are not allowed to give them out too (unless the consumer pays an extra 15-50 cent or so surcharge), but using reusable bags to carry food court or restaurant plastic food boxes is inane because the boxes tilt and leak all the time, and the hapless “reusable” bag I now use for bringing those boxes home has gotten soaked in some form of sauce four or five times already. It pretty much has to be sent through the laundry every week now to keep it clean as even washing it with dishwasher soap doesn’t always fully clean it, and this is with me only eating food court food once or twice a week as is anyway. I can’t imagine how much nastier it would be if I ate there more regularly.

It severely cuts down on the lifespan of those bags though, which defeats the purpose of using reusable bags in the first place since they cost a lot more energy to make, and create more waste than a simple plastic bag (which I used to reuse as kitchen waste bags) when thrown away. Is this really helping the environment?

I finished going through and recycling all my old clothes, shoes, etc this week, I think I have about two plastic boxes left that I am keeping but the rest have been dumped into the clothes donation bin in the recycling depot visible in that last picture above. Hopefully some of those clothes find a better home than what I gave them, and don’t all end up at a landfill.

I wrote a couple weeks ago that the rental company had stopped locking the apartment outer front doors in the evenings and on weekends, but it’s been a couple weekends now where I’ve found the doors locked anyway, so maybe they just stopped doing them during weekday evenings. Or whoever doing it is just inconsistent because who really checks it anyway. Very weird though.