Dear Tigey,
Atsui! Atsui! It was so hot! Actually it wasn’t that hot, relatively speaking, but it was hot.
Entry #147 (Jul 14 2024)
Table of Contents
Scroll of BURN…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #142
ට Song of the Week #119
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #126
ට Dreams
Life
A heat wave passed through Edmonton this week, with highs around 34-36°C on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, bookended with 29°C days which were comparatively a lot more manageable. The highest temperatures in the day were in the late afternoon to evenings, which didn’t pair well with my large balcony door that faces west and welcomes the setting sun like a thirsty sunflower, so I had my balcony door and curtains shut for basically the entire afternoon and evening for all three days, until the temperature dipped back to sane levels later in the night.
I had a headache that was probably heat-related on Monday, which made it worse, and I took the day off work to compensate for it, but by the time Wednesday rolled around I was more or less fine with the heat — still annoyed and stewing, but more or less fine. I do not have portable air-conditioning, nor a good fan, and I realized that I did not have clean/new face square towels to wet with cold water and douse myself with either as I had given all those towels to Mom a few months ago, but I coped with the heat by preparing and drinking lots of cold water, tea, milk, and some vegetable juice that I bought from Safeway for the first time ever (because I was craving tomato juice but didn’t want Clamato — this mixed vegetable juice turned out pretty good though), as well as eating some ice cream (also from Safeway) when I felt like I needed to lower my body temperature some.
I also bummed around mostly shirtless, took 3-4 showers a day, and made use of the ceiling fan behind me, a lousy fan that’s built into my portable heater device (it barely produces a breeze), and a rattan hand fan from two Singapore trips ago, to keep cool. And I avoided using the stove and other things that produce heat besides the computer, and otherwise tried not to move. I also had to lay a bath towel across my bed so that I could lie down on it without my sweat soaking through the sheets before I even went to bed, as it was like my mattress was absorbing the heat throughout the day or something where it lay on the floor.
There was some sort of beetle-like insect crawling around my bathroom during the heat wave. I didn’t have the heart to kill it so I chased it away, and it crawled.. under the porcelain base of my toilet bowl. I didn’t even know that was possible. I’ve seen at least two of them around, and chased one out the front door too, but they had better disappear for good or I will make it disappear after the next time I clean the house this weekend.
Back before my trip, when I had asked the management/maintenance staff to install a door sweep under my door to stopper up the gap and prevent the cold air from constantly wafting in, they had warned that one of the effects of this would be that my apartment would be warmer in summer. Out of curiosity, I checked this week during the sweltering heat, and nah — the vent was producing lukewarm air, and not a ton of it. It probably would still have helped with circulation, but on the other hand I wasn’t going to open my balcony door during the afternoon/evening as well, as it was definitely still hotter outside than in my apartment, and I don’t think the bathroom ventilator really helps much with air circulation even though they claim that it’s working even though it’s completely silent. (I still left the bathroom light switch, which apparently is tied to the ventilator, on through the entire day during the heat wave though, same as my ceiling fan.)
Oh well. It was hot, but it was still a full 5+ degrees Celsius cooler than our neighbouring provinces, they definitely got 40+ Celsius temperatures in British Columbia to our west and apparently also in Sasketchewan to our east, and 45+ down in California where Gibbs and Mell are. For some reason Alberta only got mid-high 30s for our heat wave. Still hot though. Especially without air-conditioning! Then again, it was procrastination levels of hot, but at least it wasn’t debilitating levels of hot, so I at least got some stuff done here and there.
That being said, there’s going to be another moderate heat wave later next week, so I ended up buying a pedestal fan (local), a Honeywell Quiet Set standing fan, from the local Best Buy that’s well-regarded for its silence and that was on sale. I’ve never had a proper electric fan all these years. I also picked up some face towels from Amazon, after getting an offer from them for one month of free Amazon Prime… while my actual Amazon Prime subscription was paused. What? Why? Because I’ve never taken it before in the past? Didn’t I though? Whatever. I didn’t argue and just took it.
I looked up a bunch of portable air-conditioners as an option too, but basically everyone recommended against swamp coolers/evaporation coolers in Edmonton, and suggested to get portable air-conditioners with two hoses that fit over a window. But my apartment doesn’t have a window. And technically I could get a whole setup to make one of them fit my sliding balcony door instead, but that’s way too much effort and money for something that has a high chance of not fitting in my next house anyway. Although long term, apparently this Icybreeze v2 Pro (local) thing is pretty good and I might go for something like that for the new house when finances allow if I need a cooler that cannot connect to a window pointing out of the house.
I caught up completely with browsing through the available houses for sale on the housing portal that my realtor set up for me this week, which is good because even though 5-10 new houses are added to or modified in the list seemingly daily, and a seemingly even number are removed, I didn’t like the existing backlog being 60 deep. I went through them all and downthumbed about 85% of them, question-marked about 8 of them, and marked one single one as interesting and a potential home that I’d like to buy. That one is in Meadowlark, on the west side of town and north of the river that cuts horizontally through the middle of the city. It’s not far from West Edmonton Mall, is across from a Walmart, a Safeway, and a small mall, and is right near an LRT station that is scheduled to open in 2028, which in Edmonton time probably means it will actually open in 2032.
My Botania (Minecraft mod) CD that I bought back in March finally arrived this week. This is the CD that I had arranged with the seller to not send until I got home. Then, when it finally arrived the first time, it got bounced back at the post office due to an “incomplete” FlexDelivery address. I was incensed at that, since I double checked and saw that I had submitted the right address in the purchase form, and I had asked the seller for a picture of the parcel address once the parcel returned back so that I could lodge the complaint. When he sent the picture though, I saw that he had actually omitted part of the address, specifically the part that the post office needed to know which PO Box to put the package into. So anyway it turned out that it wasn’t their fault, and the seller paid for the postage for another package, this time sent directly to my place.
As far as I’m aware, I have just one more package that’s outstanding (not counting a shirt from a cereal box redemption that I don’t care whether it arrives or not), and that’s a small packet of toothpastes that I bought from a Polish online boutique (local), of all things. These toothpastes were the same ones that I had seen in the Slowood store in Central Market in Hong Kong, but unlike the ones that I had seen back then:
These were only $4.35 CAD each instead of $13.75 CAD like the Hong Kong ones. Apparently that Slowood store really marked up their stuff. I had wanted to try them out just for kicks, and on that Polish website they were comparable in price to the slightly larger and cheaper Colgate and other toothpaste tubes at the local safeway, plus allegedly eco-friendly on top of that. Shipping wasn’t too bad as well, clocking in at like a bit over 6 USD for a set of 3 toothpastes, so I eagerly await my set of 3 to try them.
I had my video meeting with Zian this Monday, the first one that we had had with each other since I was in Taiwan. She had actually scheduled it for Sunday my time, Monday her time, but even though I was waiting for the call on schedule, she never called me and I didn’t want to disturb her so I just let it slide and moved on with life. Instead, she called me exactly 24 hours later while on an outing with her parents, and we chatted for about half an hour before she had to go. I think she mistook the days of the week since she is on school holiday at the moment, and I found it funny enough to play along that I didn’t actually bother asking why she was calling on a Monday (her Tuesday) instead of a Sunday (her Monday) morning. We haven’t yet scheduled a next video call, though I’m sure there will be one within the next couple of weeks.
There was a scheduled hot and cold water outage in my building from 9 am to noon on Friday, with a possibility of a longer outage, but in their infinite wisdom the management decided not to post anything about it anywhere at all except on the laundry room doors, so I only found out about it 45 minutes before the actual outage, and only because I happened to want to do laundry in the morning. That’s so weird. They are usually pretty good about disseminating information like this. This is on the tail end of the heat wave too so what gives, Midwest? Still, the water was working weakly even at 9:30 am and 10:00 am, and was back at full strength by 11 am, and I did rush my laundry before it started at 9 am anyway since water is only needed in the initial washing stage, so no harm done I guess.
I’m going to retire the Writing Prompt section of the blog for now, which was sourced from a book called The Story of my Life (published by Piccadilly (USA) Inc.), because I have found it to be very unhelpful recently, as I keep running into questions that I don’t have proper answers to or that I have already answered elsewhere in the blog. Some sections on things like romance and parenthood are coming up too, and those are not things I have or want any experience in to speak about. I also want to free up time to do other things, both within the blog and without, and this section hasn’t “felt right” for a while now, so it’s time to pause or end this little experiment for now. I’m also unsure about Song of the Week — there are still other songs that I like that I can feature, but there aren’t a ton of memories associated with many of them anymore these days, plus I had to replace a few dead video links elsewhere in the blog this week and that’s only going to be a growing problem the further I go and the more YouTube videos I add to my blog. We’ll see.
There was a First Responders BBQ on Friday in the southern parking lot of Southgate, and I could see it from my apartment. The event was from 11 am to 3 pm, and this was the scene from above at 9:50 am:
And then again at 11:50 am:
I went down to join the party and take some photographs, there were largely a bunch of emergency and police-type vehicles on display. Most of them were open, allowing people (mostly children) to wander in and even climb onto the driver’s seat if they wanted to. I just dutifully went around taking photographs as an archivist.
(I don’t think that last Paladin Security car was actually part of the exhibition, it just happened to be in the same parking lot next to the tents, and they’re the company that does security for Southgate Centre itself, so they’re a sort of first responder too and thus that was funny.)
There were bouncy castles too:
However, the original ad that I posted two weeks ago (reproduced below) promised games as well. Games! There was none of that.
There were picnic tables though, as well as food tents:
I bought a cheeseburger and some chips, and got a $4 donation receipt for it that I think I can put toward my next income tax filing or something.
Kel came by later Friday afternoon to hang out for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and we chatted a bunch and shot at pigeons with my water gun.
She had missed the First Responders BBQ above, but I gave her my little bag of Dorito chips from the above event as I had not opened the bag yet. She also gave me some things though — she brought a couple of decorations for my Linlee ducks, and also brought a replacement copy of the bowl that I had gotten from Hong Kong but that had gotten broken in my luggage on the way back home!
For my future reference, the tag for both the bowl and the spoons say these are “zuperzozial” branded, “based on bamboo & corn”, “reinforced with melamine resin”, and the bowl was a whopping 98 HKD. I paid off my remaining debt to Kel, which came to about $500 CAD for the Chinese yuan that she spent on me while I was there to help offset some of my the cost of my trip.
She had not asked me if I had wanted anything before she came back this time, or I would have requested the bowl anyway, but she apparently saw the blog entry and stopped by the Slowood store in Hong Kong’s Central Market to pick up the bowl anyway while she was there. She even apparently checked with one of the store staff members to figure out which bowl I was referring to, using the picture that I had provided earlier on in the blog, to make sure she got the right one. She’s the best. It was kind of an expensive bowl too so I feel a bit guilty! I’ll probably add a bit of extra money once she gives me an actual figure of how much I owe her for her buying me train tickets and such while I was in China.
My first meal with the bowl ended up being cereal the next morning, and I paired it with one of the new spoons that I had bought from the same store when I was there. But the spoon promptly fell into the milk. And by the end of the week, there was a pigeon hanging out on my balcony that seemed to be enjoying the water gun squirts instead of fleeing when I shot it. My life…
I saw a couple of cars with interesting signs on them in a carpark near my apartment, apparently the tail end of some sort of struggle that the rental office had been having with them. These two cars were parked side by side and it seems like their owners are in trouble~🎵.
Lastly, here are some sunsets and sky shots from the week. Gotta milk the views while I have them.
From Wednesday 10 pm, basically at the end of the major part of the heat wave:
Thursday 7:20 pm, just as a welcome but very, very brief rainstorm was starting to roll in to the city in the distance:
10 pm on Thursday, where I saw a huge snail crawling across the sky:
And Friday evening at 10 pm, just after the sun had set and the moon was still high in the sky.
Games
The Steam sale ended this week, with me picking up just one more game, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which I had been eyeing for some time despite already having played the individual games separately before. It’s been a long time though, and I want to play through the combined game series again for the achievements at some point. And then eventually go play Mass Effect: Andromeda too, which I do also already own.
I got 100% achievements on one of the games that I bought in the first week of the summer sale, Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs. It had its interesting moments, and at its core the combat is fairly fun and challenging, but due to horrendous and irritating UI I cannot say that I recommend the game. It really brought down the game for me. The writing had some off moments but in general was fairly decently fun to read through though, and it was really nice that each character had a little personal quest to work through throughout the entire story too that showed off some of their background and character growth. The overall game had a time limit with seven or so different checkpoints to hit, but on normal mode I never felt like it was particularly stressful or difficult to adhere to, as long as I approached the game with a balanced plan.
I also got 100% achievements on Satinel‘s last game, Last Fantasy: The Final Stand, after she updated the game to add a few of them. She had been constantly updating the game and adding gameplay enhancements over the past couple months or so since the game jam finished and even since I came home and tried it, and it’s turned from a gameplay concept into a small but fully-fledged game now with its own specific gameplay loop and ending and even New Game Plus mode.
The other Steam “game” that I bought at the end of the Steam summer sale was Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, though that’s more a productivity app than anything. Kynji said she was interested in it and it was on my wishlist as well so she pressured me into getting it and I fiddled around a bit with it. It seems fine but there’s no way to set a custom alarm and it’s very easy to miss the built-in alarm-like sound that the game has, so that part is a bit weird for a productivity app, but it seems like it’s still being developed anyway. I do like the spiritographer thing, which is an in-game rank that you slowly get experience in and develop as you idle around or do tasks that you set for yourself in real life. Upping the rank lets you buy new player and pet cosmetics.
Besides these, I mainly played a little bit of Persona 5 Royal this week, hoping to get back into the mood for playing it since I have a playthrough that’s halfway through the game already and would like to finish it. I also hopped on to Zenless Zone Zero (local) now and then and am slowly pushing the story in that still. As of Friday night, I hit level 30 and was looking for the rank advancement quest to raise my level cap to 40.
I also downloaded and set up Twine (local) again, as I had not set that up since getting my new computer. I still have to find a good way of writing down the stories in my head for the school life/magical girl game that I’d like to write eventually, and I need to find a good way of doing some world building and story snippet writing eventually. But at least for now I familiarized myself with the tool and what I had experimented with the last time I played with the tool.
Plushie of the Week #142
I’m glad I randomly decided to skip featuring the Linlee ducks last week and feature the next plushie (chronologically) that I had picked up on the trip instead, since Kel came by this week with a couple duck accessories for them, so now they have an extra powered-up photo to contribute to their official Plushie of the Week segment.
Linlee is a lemonade company based in China. I’ve briefly written about them before, but essentially they sell overpriced lemonade but are extremely popular due to a marketing gimmick where they give away rubber ducks with every purchase, and they have tons of special ducks that one can collect, as well as larger ducks that one can trade smaller ones in for as well. Not that we’d ever do that with the special ducks that we have collected and adore. That would be duck trafficking.
Anyway, Kel has a pile of them already, and I picked up three of them while I was on my vacation, two from two different Linlee branches in Guangzhou, and then one later on in Hong Kong. The first two ducks came with drinks that cost 18 RMB (around $3.40 CAD) each, on May 13 and May 14 2024 respectively, and the third one came with a drink that cost 34 HKD (around $5.95 CAD) on May 26 2024.
They posed together with Ducky for some pictures several weeks back, and they are arranged in chronological order here, with Ducky on the left, then the first Linlee duck I got with the neck decoration, the second duck which is just a plain yellow one, and the third yandere one which is pink with heart-shaped eyes and is a little possessive of whoever her current love interest or chosen lap to sit on (Tigey or Orson, generally) is.
Front:
Back:
And um, undersides.
When Kel stopped by on Friday, she brought a crown for the pink princess duck and a necklace that ended up first around Ducky‘s neck, then around the other normal yellow duck’s head.
Apparently those decorations were from some Hong Kong Linlee branch that she visited and saw that they were giving away duck decorations at. So she grabbed a couple of them and they ended up here. Thanks!
While I was at Kel‘s place in mid-May, I also lined up and took some pictures of the Linlee ducks that she had at the time. They are displayed here for posterity’s sake as well:
A couple stories about the ducks from Kel — most of these are from Guangzhou, specifically the Clifford branch of Linlee, the same one that I visited while staying with Kel and which is easiest for Kel in general to visit. The one with the wig is from Hong Kong, though. The blue tuque on the leftmost duck was a gift from joining Linlee as a member, and that duck was her first one gotten at the same time as well so that’s why that one gets to wear the hat. The red one on the right is from the same set as the leftmost one of my three, and those two apparently are part of an event commemorating a traditional dance called Chaoshan Yingge (local), or Hero’s Song.
I wish some sort of store in North America had a marketing gimmick with some sort of collectible item like this!
Song of the Week #119
Title: Finally Found
Artist: The Honeyz
Album: Wonder No. 8 (1998)
End of the Line is the other song from The Honeyz from the late 90s that I really like, but this was the first single from the CD that both those songs were from, and the song that first introduced me to the British girl group. Even though that song reached #1 in my list and this one never did, I actually preferred this song to that one for vast swathes of my life, and even right now I think it’s fairly close and I’m not sure which one I like better.
This song brings back a lot of Singapore memories, of course — of our old Tampines home, of MRT trains, of shopping malls, of friends (particularly Huihan) and teachers, and of my parents. It’s yet another one of those quintessential songs for me that was playing on the radio when I was actively listening to radio and forming childhood bonds with them, and it has a kind of glittery orange hue and slightly sweet smell for me that I can “see” and “smell” whenever the song comes on. It also brings up faint memories of Mom playing a board game or something with me, as well as some sort of school camp or activity, but I don’t have firm memories for either blurry association.
The music video itself is a bit weird. I don’t remember ever seeing it before and wonder why they decided to list the locations and timestamps that the girls were filming the video in at various points in the video. I guess that data is good from an archivist point of view. Seems a bit like humblebragging though since there’s no story in the video and the locations don’t actually influence or do anything.
Memory Snippet of the Week #126
I’ve known that I’ve been deaf in my left ear for a long time now, since back in the mid 2000s or so. The funny thing is that back then, I didn’t immediately realize that one ear had gone deaf, until one day when Dad called the home phone and I answered it with my left ear and thought that the connection was broken because I couldn’t hear him at all. When I swapped the phone to my right ear though everything worked okay. So at that point I realized that I had been deaf for quite some time (a couple of years) in that ear without realizing it!
The actual event that caused my deafness was also odd, as far as I know it was just an inner ear infection that I suffered during my early University years, somewhere around 2003 or so, that gave me a huge headache and dizzyness for several days or something. For several years after that I noted that I could trigger dizzyness by tugging down hard on my left earlobe, though that’s no longer a thing, thankfully. Anyway since my right ear worked perfectly, I had no idea that I was losing hearing in my left ear for the longest time and never cared to do anything about it after discovering that either. Although the ironic thing is that I do get and thus “hear” tinnitus in that left ear, which is annoying sometimes, but which I’ve long learnt to tune out.
It’s just something that I’ve learnt to adjust to in the rare times that it affects my day to day life. For example, I do not answer phones with my left ear any more for obvious reasons, and I also know that I sometimes cannot hear people speaking if they are on my left side, and are either not particularly loud or there is a lot of background ambient noise (like on an airplane), so if I am walking somewhere with a friend I will usually try to slide over so that they are on my right side instead of my left. Or if I’m in a classroom I try to arrive there early on the first day so that I can pick a seat near the front of the class and on the left side of the classroom. I’ve successfully met and interacted long-term with many people who had no idea that I was deaf in one ear.
Back in July 2020, a little after the onset of COVID in March of the same year, I went to see a nearby audiologist out of curiosity using my job’s medical benefits, and she confirmed after doing some tests that my left ear was 95% deaf, though I could still “hear” things through bone conduction through my deaf ear. She said it was unfixable, but referred me to a hearing aid clinic if I was interested anyway, and I said that I was, because it was partially funded by the job benefits anyway. I did end up with a pair of hearing aids, although they were not bone conduction ones or anything like that — instead they were a pair of speakers that I would insert in both ears, and the left ear’s microphone transmitted any sound they heard into the right ear’s speaker, which would then let me “listen” to sounds on my “left side”.
This cost a couple of thousand dollars (again, mostly subsidized), but I never really liked it and never ended up using it much once I actually got them, since the deafness wasn’t exactly debilitating in real life. Plus, due to COVID there were no in-person classes happening, and my first attempts at going to Sophia in Tokyo and/or NUS in Singapore were being cancelled anyway, and no one went outdoors much in general so there was little opportunity for in-person interactions, so the hearing aids never saw much if any use at all. Nonetheless, I kept the hearing aid kit around and it surfaced when I was packing and moving recently, so here’s a picture of the kit, with the hearing aids itself in the little container in the bottom middle of the picture, while the rest of the boxes are things like power chargers, cleaners, and random other accessory things that I don’t recognize or understand how to use.
The clinic in Edmonton that I commissioned the hearing aids from, Melody Audiology and Hearing Clinic, tried to call me up to either check in on me or try to sell upgrades and yearly checkups or something to me for a year or so after I first bought the hearing aid, but I kept on ignoring them and they eventually stopped calling.
And now I need to stop writing this section so I can stop typing ear and year and early and yearly and hoping that I didn’t accidentally replace one of those words with the other.
Dreams
Kind of rare, but I almost didn’t have any this week! Sleep was difficult early on in the week because it was so hot, so I blame that. Lots of barely escaped dreams this week though. Like lying down in bed and knowing that I had a dream about this or that but not being able to recall enough to write it down.
Jul 14 2024
- Snippet: I sat on a train next to ElanaOrama and a streamer friend of hers. They were discussing something and comparing a couple of blue weirdly-shaped plastic things that they were holding. Those items had a width around the size of a person’s head, and a height about twice as tall as that.