My Diary #111

Dear Tigey,

Nice number. Looking good over there. Also, Sophia University‘s semester starts this week, and we’re not there. Are you happy, sad? No idea?

Entry #111 (Sep 24 2023)

Table of Contents

Flatlining monsters in…
ට  Life
ට  Games
ට  Plushie of the Week #107
ට  Song of the Week #84
ට  Writing Prompt of the Week #27
ට  Memory Snippet of the Week #91
ට  Dreams

Life

Mom got released from her rehab hospital this weekend, so she was able to go home for the first time in something like 6 weeks. The catch was that she could only leave after 9am on Saturday, and has to be back by 9pm on Sunday.. so it’s sort of like weekend parole. Her official release date is next Tuesday after dinner if all goes well though, so she’ll only have to spend two more nights at the hospital — Sunday and Monday! It’s a bit of a weird system, letting her go home for this weekend, but then again there aren’t any therapy sessions on the weekend, only Monday to Friday.

She can move around fairly well using a single walking stick now, so it’s been heartening to see her progress. Especially since, on a cosmic destiny sort of level, I wonder if I caused this — if the gods really didn’t want me to go to Japan, two years of COVID delays and then a stroke close to home two weeks before I finally decided to leave anyway certainly drove home the point.

Closer to home, my apartment buzzer box had been broken for something like a month now. Dialing an apartment from the callbox is supposed to make a phone call to our phone, at which point we can buzz someone in from our keypad by pressing 9, but the dumb box has refused to connect to the phones for some time now, which means that package or food delivery services have been forced to bounce back packages or call us directly on our cell phones if they have our number.

I had called the rental apartment about this 3 weeks ago, then 2 weeks ago, then earlier this week, all to no avail — the front desk person each time said that some maintenance person would be by soon to look at it, but that never happened. I was even told earlier this week that I would get a phone call back after they were by, and I never got that call. And it was like the front desk staff were absolutely clueless about the problem each time — even on the 4th call (see below) it started off with a spiel about how the outer doors were locked during weekends and evenings, trying to womansplain how the doors worked to me, who had lived here for over 10 years, instead of taking my problem seriously when I told them that it wasn’t working for me, my neighbours, and I had talked to Amazon Prime drivers, other package delivery couriers, food delivery people, and Canada Post mailmen over the past 3 weeks who had told me the same thing.

Anyway I called them again near the end of the week and finally managed to get it escalated, and a staff member named Loni came by to test and confirm that the callbox wasn’t working for anyone, not even their test device. She reset the box (not something we have access to do) and it started working again. That was all it took! And it took nearly a month for them to do!

I also found out an interesting-to-me side note. I had been aware from living here that the apartment block’s central furnace was turned off during the summer, and most of spring/fall, to save on costs, since our temperatures are nice and balmy and the homes are quite well-insulated anyway. I asked Loni when it would turn on again, and she told me that they put the furnaces on something called Summer Standby, and that it wasn’t actually that they were totally off, they would supposedly still come on if it suddenly got too cold (I’ve never seen this actually happen though). I also learnt that they were going to be taken off Summer Standby “soon” to resume normal operation, whereby if the apartment temperature was 2-3 degrees or more below what the thermostat was set to, the furnace would activate.

Anyway, early in the week on Tuesday, before the 4th call to our rental office that finally fixed the callbox, I had two packages coming in on the same day, one from Amazon and one from Canada Post. The first one was a Kobo Libra 2 cover for Mom‘s new Libra 2, and the second was a package of CDs from Suruga-ya with Dad‘s desired CD on it that I had ordered two weeks ago. I was planning to go down to the hospital on Wednesday and bring those two items with me, so it was imperative that I caught those two delivery vans to get the packages even though our callbox was not working.

Nonetheless, I decided to pop down to the mall to grab lunch on the day, since it was less than a 5 minute walk away, a 10-15 minute walk through the mall, to place the order, wait for it, and lug it back out, and then a 5 minute walk home. Naturally, the moment I was furthest away from home, making my order at the order counter in the mall food court, the phone rang. It was the Amazon driver, asking for me to come down and pick up my package.

I apologized and said I was about 5 minutes away, and she said that it was no problem — she’d do another nearby delivery first and come back in 10 minutes. I thanked her for that, finished my lunch purchase, and hurried home. The way the road around our apartment complex is set up, if one enters from the south and heads northwest, one would first hit our block’s entrance, then a second block whose entrance is along the same road but invisible from our block’s doorway, then a third high-rise block that takes forever to deliver to, and then a fourth block, and then the road to the mall. I saw the Amazon Prime delivery van at the 3rd block, and waited for the delivery lady to come out (and took this picture of ominous clouds in the meantime):

Once she came out, I greeted her and asked for the package, but she said she had a second delivery to make at my block too and couldn’t get in to do that either since the callbox was broken (and she apparently didn’t have that person’s number or something), so she asked if she could take the van back around to my apartment block and have me let her in. Of course, I said, and we did thus. She said that the callbox had been broken for her last week too. Package 1 done.

Unlike Amazon, Canada Post is a lot lazier and although they will come into the apartment to deliver letters to the communal apartment mailbox, they will not bring packages up to your door, and instead will buzz you at the callbox and ask you to come down and pick up a package. If you don’t come down, or if the callbox hypothetically was broken, they’d leave small packages in a little locker in the mail room, and larger packages would go back to the nearest Canada Post location (there’s one in Southgate Mall) for self-pickup the next day. Annoying, but I knew all this since I had been living here a while now, and they had changed the policy (since they used to deliver right to my door) a few years ago pre-COVID but now no longer did, and I was trying to avoid this one-day delay.

Once I rescued that Amazon package, I had my lunch and a shower, then started preparing food for dinner. I figured that from my new computer last week, I still had plenty of boxes strewn around the house, and it was a good time to start bringing them down to the garbage dumpster one at a time every 15 minutes or so, as an excuse to see if the Canada Post van was anywhere near. I brought down the first package immediately, even though I was only partway done through chopping vegetables, and it was a good thing I did so since I immediately saw the Canada Post van parked around the corner in front of the second apartment block’s entrance, the one that’s invisible from our block’s own entrance, but very much visible from our shared garbage dumpster.

I went to meet the delivery lady there and she said that yes she had already gone by my home, but would be happy to give me my package if I brought her the delivery attempt notice from my mailbox and also some identification, so I went back and grabbed all that and met her in front of the same third apartment block that I had met the Amazon delivery lady at. A few minutes later and I had my loot.

I don’t really understand Canada customs. I’ve bought three packages from Suruga-ya so far, and two of them, for 9.845 yen and 8,500 yen, cleared Canada customs entirely without being charged any fee, which doesn’t seem right. The third one, which cost 13,772 yen, incurred a $16 charge. Oh well, who knows. I certainly don’t understand it enough to care. All I know is that I will keep on using EMS (which turns into Canada Post locally) instead of Fedex or DHL or whatever other options I have to avoid their predatory “brokerage fee”.

In other news, the “nagging headache” that I had last week was a migraine, and I hadn’t had one in so long that I didn’t realize it until it finally broke (or I finally broke free of it?) on Sunday night. I had it for basically the entirety of last week, through the first few days of my new computer’s existence, and I had symptoms like my left eye becoming very blurry and unable to focus the entire time (whereas my right eye was fine) and that taking the bus to Mom‘s hospital gave me a bad case of nausea that almost made me throw up, but I still didn’t put two and two together and blamed vertigo from the new computer (despite it starting before it arrived) or something like that. Dr. Jahandar pointed it out after I mentioned that it (listing all the symptoms) had finally broken on Sunday night though.

Now life is great again, and I can see things and play games on my new computer just fine without any ill effects.

I’ve gotten this exact migraine before in the past, although it’s rare. It’s weird how the body is though. I also picked up a rash on my left upper arm this week and it both itches and hurts (due to scratching, even though I know better), and it’s in the exact same spot that I’ve gotten similar ones in the past before as well. Similarly, there’s a spot on my right shoulder with a little cut scab that’s never healed and I still accidentally nick and reopen every now and then, and when I do forget my pills and the eczema starts flaring up again, it’s always in the same spots on my arms, thighs, or lower back too. And when it used to get bad, there’s a particular finger (left fourth finger) and a particular part of my left lower lip that will both start to swell up as well. What does all this even mean?

Here are some leftover pictures from the week. A couple of snapshots of (far too early) Halloween things at the local Safeway:

And a poor plushie I saw just outside of someone’s house:

I also noticed that a nearby house that I was eyeing when I was trying to make the decision as to whether to stay or to go to Japan, and that I wanted to impulsively buy because it met a lot of my wishlist needs and was located in a good-to-me area, but that my parents didn’t like because it was “too close to a graveyard” (five blocks away) and “too close to a gas station” (three blocks away) and “you should not make an impulsive buy” and “who knows how long the house has been there on sale” was now gone from the market. I got sad upon seeing that.

Games

Early in the week, I played a bit of Yakuza 0 and a bit of Ghostwire: Tokyo, but neither game really stuck. I installed The Lord of the Rings Online with Satinel and I hope we can play through the early story a little bit at some point so she can experience some of the similar things that everyone else in Discord has experienced so she doesn’t feel too left out when our Discord conversations turn to Lotro-related things, since she’s the only one in our friends server who’s never played that game. But we haven’t started that either.

I finally beat the third-hardest level in Yamafuda! 2nd station, and have two more of those to do, but they’re very onerous and RNG-based, though the game itself is still great. Satinel and I also did a Risk of Rain 2 challenge run that I could not do on my old computer because it got too laggy late-game. So that was nice.

Satinel, Nak, Jah, and I played a bit of Monster Hunter: World this week as well, a game that Satinel, Jah and I had already completed several years ago when the game first launched. We’re playing alternate characters now to accompany Nak on his first foray through the series. Hopefully in the future we can pick up one of the newer iterations of the game.

Outside of all that, my spare time this week largely went to Cyberpunk 2077, now that I have a new computer that can run it well, and now that their Update 2.0 just dropped, which introduced something called Ray Reconstruction that one apparently currently needs (this might change) an NVIDIA GeForce 40XX series card to run, which I just so happen to have. It looks pretty, but it looked pretty without it anyway, and by and large I can’t tell the difference without cherry-picked comparison shots, although it apparently improves game performance on high graphics too. At any rate, the game is very pretty, and I look forward to exploring it further. Once I’m done writing this week’s blog. I’m probably going to pick up the expansion pack launching next week too assuming it has good launch reviews.

Steam screenshots apparently can’t take HDR screenshots properly though, or at least it’s a combo between Steam and Cyberpunk itself, not sure which one is at fault here. HDR screenshots just get washed out white (like the picture below) as they apparently don’t capture HDR metadata properly, though the ingame screenshot button does work (picture above).

Oh well, I turned off HDR for now since I prefer Steam screenshots (picture below) to be working fine too.

Plushie of the Week #107 – Yellow Catduck

This plushie would most likely have been a late Singapore-era plushie, but none of us in the family have any clue as to her origin, and she never featured enough in our plushie communications to ever adopt a personality or anything like that either. She seems to be a Sanrio Hello Kitty Yellow Duck Costume Plushie, but also seems as likely to be a knockoff version of that, with a suction thing at the end to hang up on a car, a hood that’s sewn on and doesn’t come off, and a twisted nose from wear and tear. One eye is also gone, as is the plushie tag.

And that’s all we know of this plushie! Nonetheless, I wanted to introduce her, battered as she is, to future readers.

Seated:

Front:

Back:

Song of the Week #84

Title: Avalon
Artist: Diane Arkenstone (Enaid)
Album: Avalon – A Celtic Legend (2002)

This song by Diane Arkenstone, or alternatively by Enaid (which is supposedly Diane and her husband, David Arkenstone), is another of my favourite tracks in the New Age/Celtic genre, following in the footsteps of previous songs I have posted on my blog like Valley of the Giants and The Shine of a Shane. Like the others, it brings me back to a time period (2012-2015) where I was heavily following and looking for New Age music, and while I don’t currently actively seek them out anymore, I still have a number of them in rotation on my various list compilations of favourite songs, this one being one of them.

While not related to the song, watching the video made me wonder if I could start making music videos like that too just by patching pictures and music together in something like DaVinci Resolve. I certainly have the hardware for it now and I also have tinkered around in it while processing my DJI Pocket 2 videos to be passingly familiar with the software, just have to actually look up what workflows to use and what buttons to press where, and actually collect some nice pictures or clips to use with it. Hm. I could also apply this to anime, or other types of music. One week when I have free time, perhaps.

Also, I wonder what the best place to buy random CDs like this from would be. Hmmm… one week when I have free time, perhaps.

Writing Prompt of the Week #27

This week’s writing prompt reads:

“When you were young, what was your favourite thing to do, and why? How did it make you feel? This can be a hobby, a sport, an art, anything you were passionate about.”

My favourite thing to do was to compile music charts. I did two kinds, one was a record of Top 20 and Top 40 charts that I saw on MTV or heard on local radio in Singapore, and the other was a personal top 20/40/100 list of songs purely based on airplay that I had heard in a given week or month. I also had a personally-curated list of top 100 songs that I liked, but I considered that a little bit different from this activity, which was more along the lines of chronicling what I saw and heard than what I personally felt about them. I even roped my two younger siblings and my Mom in to help track now and then, especially since data like these were sometimes/often not available on the Internet due to it being the early days of cyberspace back then.

One of my goals is to one day scan all this and put this up on my blog too, but I took some pictures to show, as part of this writing prompt, why this task seems so insurmoutable. I did this for several years and so there’s hundreds and hundreds of sheets to scan. I am going to cheat a bit and combine this week’s Writing Prompt with the Memory Snippet of the Week, because I need to formalize this next part in order to track it properly in my spreadsheet and link back to it in the future.

Memory Snippet of the Week #91

As mentioned in the Writing Prompt above, one of the major things I did while I was younger (1997-2002ish?) was to track and chronicle songs that I had heard, on the radio as airplay or in malls and restaurants as background music, and try to compile and highlight top 20 and top 40 music lists based not on what I like, but on what I, as a representative of the “general public” listening to generic popular music and going to somewhat generic places, would hear. I only eventually stopped doing this because we stopped listening to radio and following modern music in general.

For me though, this was likely a big reason why I consider the 1997-1999 music era so formative for me, because I became very intimate with many of these songs and got to know virtually all of their names (although I’ve forgotten many of the lesser tracks, even though that made it into the lower parts of the top 20 or 40 back then, over the years).

This is a snapshot of some of the sheets in my personal “songs ranked by frequency of what I heard and then compiled into top 20/40 lists” folder:

I would walk around the house and even to school, to shopping malls, etc, holding sheets like these ones below, in order to write down (often using the song initials, or some sort of other invented shorthand) what songs I heard on radio or out in public.

I would also chronicle weekly “official” top 20 and 40 lists — MTV Asia had an Asia Top 20 and a USA Top 20 list, and I would write both down if I could and compare them. I was also a big fan of Rick Dees’ Top 40, which would play on Singapore radio stations on the weekends, and would spend hours writing these down while doing my homework or painting my shoes or something. The local radio stations, especially FM 98.7, had weekly top 20 lists that I would listen to and write down as well. And not only did I write these down, but I enjoyed tracking how many weeks each song had been in the list, what their highest chart positions were, and how much they had changed that week. I would award songs badges for how many weeks they had been in the list, for hitting #1 (and tracking how many weeks they stayed there), for being the highest newcomer song in a given week, or for “reentries”, if they fell out of the top 20/40 and then came back in in a subsequent week, and they would carry these “badges” with them for whatever duration they spent in the list.

A lot of the sheets were written on the back side of a pile of “junk papers” that we kept in a stack for writing material too, so the back sides of a lot of those sheets also have really interesting things on them, like documents from Dad‘s various old real estate and courier jobs in the late 90s, homework sheets from me or my younger siblings, misprints of letters meant for school administrators that no longer exist in their original forms, and so on. Really interesting stuff to me that I have not had time to dive in to yet.

And there’s hundreds of these, which is why I simply have had no time to scan all these and sort them and figure out which ones (and how) to upload. Yet. And I also need to go through and grab many of these songs and put them into my all-encompassing Spotify playlists. It’s a major blog goal though.

Dreams

A random 7/7 dreams week, even if a couple of them were just snippets, and nothing that I would rate particularly high.

Sep 18 2023
  • Only snippets today, one where I was walking with Dad along the side of a long road toward some destination, one where I had a “graphics card upgrade” and was checking my settings in game to see if I could see things better now (apparently the answer was yes), and one where I joined my Dunman High friends for some sort of school outing to a place.
Sep 19 2023
  • I had a dream where a Russian woman and child in a car pulled up to a 2 storey house-warehouse that I and someone else were staying at. She could not speak English, but we communicated using Google Translate on our phones, and it turns out she was looking for a ballet place nearby. But we said that it was likely closed at this time of night, and invited her and her child to stay overnight with us and then continue on to her destination in the morning. She was grateful for this offer.
  • Another dream involved a large classroom that was actually two classrooms with a divider wall between them, but the wall was open today. The class was usually half full, and I was one of the regular students in the class, but the topic today was an interesting one in general so there were many other guest students who were not actually part of the course but who came in as well, both to our morning class and apparently the alternate one later that evening as well. One of my friends commented that the person sitting to his left and right were different people than usual because most of the usual students had their regular seats taken by other random people and so had to take other seats. There were also several guest students that had to stand due to a lack of seats.
  • Snippet: There were two other snippets that I remember that lacked context, one involving Toodles walking along a passage in a building that Jon and I could see with a cutaway camera, as in the building had back walls but no front walls from our point of view. We saw the little plushie turtle walk from right to left along the corridor, enter a room on the left side, and then crouch down behind a low wall as though taking cover from something.
  • Snippet: The other snippet involved a family dinner with 15+ relatives, although I didn’t really recognize anyone I knew there. I think they were people from my Dad‘s side of the family and that my grandparents, Ah Ma and Ah Kong, were likely there though. The people were split between two dinner tables, one upstairs and one downstairs, and I went upstairs to say hello to the people there.
Sep 20 2023
  • Snippet: It was Sports Day in school, and our class was going to win likely the school trophy for best performing class once everyone had participated. There was just myself and two of my friends left to go, and one of them was a super tall guy. I finished my race first and tried to warn the others over phone text that a couple of the remaining participants from lower grade classes were sore losers. But I couldn’t really reach them. In his race, the tall guy won fair and square, but one of the participants I tried to warn him about tried to nullify the race or influence the tall guy to reflexively stop and help (and lose the race) by diving to the ground and pretending he fell down near the end, after it became apparent that he couldn’t beat the tall guy fair and square. But thankfully he was too late and the tall guy didn’t see him before he crossed the finish line.
  • Snippet: In a separate dream later, there was something about sitting down in class in front of a guy that I liked, but the girl in the desk adjacent to me also liked him and was jealous of my seating position, so she sat down in my seat instead and refused to move, even when I sat down on her lap since that was “my seat”. I got frustrated at her after a bit and moved elsewhere.
  • Snippet: There was also something about filling up an item with some sort of nozzle that had two buttons, one that would steadily fill the item up and one that would steadily empty it, but the effects were reversed so the button that was supposed to empty it was actually the button that would fill it up.
  • Snippet: And there was also a scene in my Edmonton 4012 main living room which was filled with delivery boxes from my school as I was helping them with some sort of sorting job.
Sep 21 2023
  • The dream started for me on a morning before school. I left my house and walked through a Singapore neighbourhood similar to Yishun or Tampines, taking a 15 minute walk to a bus terminal that involved passing by many little kids on their way to their kindergarten in a group of 40 or 50 or so, as well as walking by the outside of a park. I pulled out my DJI camera and recorded part of the walk, then stopped for some reason.
  • Once I reached the terminal, I took bus #9 toward school. I had an ordinary, even perhaps slightly disappointing, day at school, but then after class I was in a film club of some sort and we were helping out with shooting an alternative ending to some movie film whose title had four words in it, two words, then a colon, then another two words as a subtitle.
  • The movie had not been well-received critically, with an Internet review site (which I decided in my dream was Rotten Tomatoes, but whose UI was entirely made up since I don’t know what the UI of that site looks like) rating the original version of the show a 4.8 (out of 10) with 3 visible reviews that included comments about how disappointing the show was, and the remake a 2.0 or something with comments about how the preview pictures of the show on the website were wrong becauswe the bot was pointing to the old version of the show, and how one of the preview pictures was just a close-up of a woman’s eyelash, and they called that the “billion dollar eyelashes” in a reference to the two films’ combined budgets.
  • Our job was to redo the ending, and there was a couple adults who had roughly rewrote the script, while about seven of us kids were going to act it out. There were adults standing by off camera with costumes, round floodlights, scripts, and such.
  • The original final scene started with a woman playing a commanding officer who was addressing a group of cadets standing at attention in an open area next to a building, and the scene had gotten criticized for unrealistic acting and poor performance by the woman pretending to be a guy and questions about why they didn’t just hire a real guy here. In our remake, a couple of characters who were also in the later scene came out here and told her to just be herself, so she actually declared that she was going to stop pretending that she was who she wasn’t, and that she was a woman and that her name was Diva, and then she continued in her original script without trying to change her voice instead, which came out a lot more realistic.
  • The scene then shifted indoors for the other half of the original final scene, which was a conversation between two adults that faded to black and disappointed the audience. The two adults here were gone, replaced with another kid and me. We still had the two shirts worn by the two original adults, and were going to wear them as a referential nod to the original scene and original remake scene, but I instead grabbed both shirts and put them on one over the other, red shirt over white, and asked the other kid to grab a different shirt instead. It was better that way somehow, I decided.
  • We filmed the scene, and then I asked if we could include a reference to another part of the film’s source franchise that had not been animated yet, which involved a caterpillar character. The director said that we had no budget or camera for it, but then suddenly a cameraman who had worked on the original films and had a powerful handheld video camera on his shoulder turned up at the door to the room, and the director agreed that it was a good idea at that point. If nothing else, the AI in his camera would be able to help with any CGI needed to fill in animations as well, plus that part of the franchise was fairly beloved by fans, and we would be helping lay groundwork and reference for a potential future film sequel in the future by defining what the character looked like now.
  • They dragged up a costume that looked like a lion dance or dragon dance costume from somewhere, with five parts of the caterpillar’s body joined up together that five people could go under/inside and move around. Kel and four other kids, all of them wearing red shirts, got inside the costume and acted out the scene, before throwing themselves off a low bridge into a shallow river below and lying prone there in the water as five red-shirted humans with their hands outstretched. They had instructions to lie flat underwater and stay there for a few seconds until the guest cameraman filmed their scene, which he did, before they all got up and came back to shore.
  • That became the final ending scene and concluded the shooting. There was an audience watching and we got to mingle next to them for a bit as we all took the same bus home, though none of us kids actually talked to them, even though there was a general mood that we were the “stars of the show”. I went up to Kel, who still had wet hair, and pointed out to her that behind me was a man who had seen the original shows but really enjoyed our version of the show and the caterpillar reference at the end as he was openly weeping. Kel said that unlike the last time we had a job like this, she was glad that she had stayed overtime today to have been able to experience this one.
  • Some of the other kids had pulled out their pencils and pens to sign or write on some memorial form or other, and I also learnt around here that I had dropped my pink mechanical pencil somewhere, likely on the way to school. I reviewed my day from memory and from the partial video that I had taken but was unable to identify where I had dropped it. I resolved to walk the same way to the bus terminal tomorrow morning that I had taken this morning, and hoped to find it that way. The bus reached my stop, and I picked up my umbrella from a two-person bus seat a little further back in the bus that I had propped it against. There was a woman in the inner window seat who looked quizzically at me as I retrieved the umbrella, but due to my umbrella, no one had sat down at that aisle seat even though the bus was standing room only. I then stepped off the bus.
  • Later on, I checked the review site online again but no new reviews had been posted yet. Some of the older reviews seemed excited about the remake but they were dated from February and June earlier in the year.
Sep 22 2023
  • I remember climbing up to the top of a bell tower to trigger a quest objective or special marker on the map, and up on that narrow ledge, which was also the tallest point in the city by far and was lit by a bright moon above, I happened to meet Satinel there as well. We greeted and chatted to each other, she asked how I was going to get down, and I said I was probably going to use a glider and see the entire city on the way down. She was going to climb down the way she came.
  • Elsewhere in the dream, Dad got a smart watch and wanted to buy an app with decorative watch backgrounds from an online app store for it. I helped him browse through the app store, which consisted of a list of shops listed vertically and each shop with a horizontal row of products they were selling, each one with a single rectangular screenshot preview. The background app he wanted had a 10-letter name, made out of two five letter English words, and then had a “2” appended on the end of the name. I found the app in a store and realized two things, one that it was a store that I had bought something else from earlier on in the same dream, and secondly that the app with the screenshot that Dad saw and wanted was an actual, full-fledged game and not an app that just provided backgrounds.
  • Dad also talked about food restaurants in the city, citing one he frequented in general that was owned by a Chinese woman, and how their owners came in and changed the menu slightly once every two weeks. This was apparently why he thought it was better to alternate between food places for variety and then swing back to the original store every week or two instead, so one wouldn’t get tired of the same old food even if one were forced to buy food instead of cook.
  • Also there was something about having and firing a rocket launcher, but I don’t remember the context.
Sep 23 2023
  • I was with 3 other people traveling in a car, we were by a small town adjacent to Edmonton. I was in the back right seat of the car, and it was a right wheel drive car, with Sandy seated in the front left seat, and two other boys I didn’t know seated in the front right and back left seats. We had just driven off the main highway and onto a sandy path that was apparently called Route 98.
  • Suddenly, the car came to a halt and would not start up again for some reason. We thought that it was maybe because we had gone off route. It was not like the area was abandoned, however, there were still buildings and houses around. Sandy had school to attend the next day, so he panicked and got out of the car, saw a large garbage container about to be wheeled away by a man into a truck, and then ran over and hid inside of it, with the idea that the company was likely headed back to Edmonton and he would hitch a ride back into town that way.
  • He thus ran off before we could stop him, and a truck drove away with the dumpster that he was hiding in. After a while, we discovered that the car would start again, apparently something about the maximum weight possible in the car somehow changing due to the terrain and now that there were only three people in the car, we were below the weight limit again. We tried to drive after the truck, with me saying that if we could find him, I would volunteer to stay behind and let him have my spot instead since I was in no hurry to get back to Edmonton. However, we couldn’t find the truck.
  • I had the bright idea that his phone had GPS on it, so we could track him that way too. I flipped open Google Maps and we drove to where the GPS marker for his phone was, ending up at a picnic spot in Edmonton’s river valley area, apparently near McNally High School, where we found that he had abandoned his phone on the ground there for some reason when the truck had stopped to take in another dumpster. We had no idea if he had escaped the truck at that point or was still riding around somewhere.
  • Snippet: Earlier on in a dream, there was an indie concert gathering featuring a number of performing bands. They were separated by gender, and there were no mixed groups, so there was a separate list of guy bands and girl bands, and because the venue couldn’t attract any big names, apparently they had trouble drawing many guy bands to perform here, only about 8-10 of them in total, although the girl bands were far more enthusiastic and there were well over 20 entries still.
Sep 24 2023
  • Snippet: While I was in the vicinity of a hospital, possibly while waiting for a bus, there were clumps of things that were represented by lights located in the area around the hospital, that could supposedly only be triggered on and off in groups of three, and that I could see using a skill that allowed me to detect things through walls. However, I noticed that some of them were triggerable in groups of two instead of three, so someone, possibly Mom, asked me to go find more of them.

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