Life

My boss was away for a couple days this week, and our late morning standup meetings were cancelled due to this. I took advantage of the first one midweek to go down to the local barbershop and get a haircut, because it had been long enough since my last one that my hair felt heavy and I felt icky if I didn’t use a shampoo every day instead of every couple days. That, together with headaches (though I only got one a couple of weeks ago this time) is usually the sign that it’s around time for a haircut. This also came at a good time since I might or might not be going down to my parents’ place to stay with them for a couple of weeks, so this felt like “freshening up” in preparation for that.

I also bought a nice comfy pair of shorts because I have a lot more tops to wear around the house than I do bottoms. Southgate has many clothing stores, but most of them are very pricey, and not really geared toward casual wear. I bought my pair from a H&M clothing store for $17 in the end.

We haven’t actually decided as a family whether I’m going down for the full week or not, since that would necessitate me bringing my computer over there (or rather, Jon helping me do so, since he’s the only one that can drive properly at this point). Dad called me up midweek and suggested that I only go down for a couple hours during weekends while he goes out to buy groceries, and otherwise I can stay home but will have to help them order food and stuff now and then. He’s just trying to be considerate though, and I don’t think we really trust Mom and Dad to just live by themselves alone at this point when Mom will be out of commission for so long. But we’ll see what Jon and Kel think. That being said, I might have a package with a couple CDs arriving around the start of the surgery date, so we’ll see.

Dad also noted that the surgery date is confirmed but won’t be a sure thing until the actual surgery time itself because there’s always a risk that she’ll be bumped off if an emergency surgery case comes in around the same time. Which makes sense, but that’s a lot of uncertainty to worry about before a surgery, since one has to emotionally build up that sort of thing.

My computer chair broke this week:

Part of the back rest frame, made of metal, just snapped off entirely. I guess I’ve had this chair for oh.. at least 13 years now, and if I’m not wrong it was chilling in the family home for longer than that before. It had been “creaking” for about a week or so and I actually hate the material on the chair anyway, which is why I put a cloth over it, and so the chair never really brought me joy, but.. but I never knew it would end like this.

So anyway I looked at computer chairs this week as well. There are two furniture stores with chairs in Southgate Mall — Crate & Barrel and Restoration Hardware. Both are apparently pretty pricey, I was shocked at chairs that were on sale for things like $850.

I like that second chair quite a bit, but I’m sorry what? Since when were chairs this expensive? For just a chair? And several of the simple dining room tables were like $8,000…. I’m pretty sure I saw one north of $10,000 too. Crazy.

As one might notice, I was using a dining table sort of chair for my current “computer chair”, and that was what I was looking for for a replacement as well. I don’t actually like standard computer chairs with their wheels and such, though I used one at work and that one was fine enough. But in a house? Not really. Especially not on non-carpeted floors. I’d rather use a sturdy, comfortable chair and put it on a small carpet. Time to look at IKEA or something I guess.

For this week’s series of Pictures from my Balcony, I submit this picture of four people doing.. something.. to/from a car.

It was nothing nefarious, since they were there for over half an hour on Thursday, and then 3 of them spent time after that sitting on the railing in front of the car and chatting to each other, but I could still not figure out what they were doing in the brief time that I watched them. People-watching is fun, neh? They were back the very next night, on Friday the 13th, seemingly with more people, even though the car wasn’t left there overnight. And I still couldn’t figure out what they were doing. Maybe they were having a picnic?

But wait, the mystery goes even deeper, because on Saturday the 14th, at exactly 7pm, I saw two people pull up in that car, and park there in its designated parking spot. The man and woman got out of the little minivan, and then immediately got into the minivan that was in the parking spot directly to the right of it, then drove off in it. I never saw a woman in either night-time group. I went outside and took a picture of that larger minivan driving off out of sheer curiosity — it’s the black vehicle driving off on the left side of the carpark in the picture below.

That black minivan was occupying the adjacent parking spot that the smaller blue van is straddling in the two pictures above. I don’t understand what exactly is going on here but I have this entire intriguing headcanon story about spies dropping off packages to each other and exchanging cars so that they cannot be found by authorities. All foiled by a nosy neighbour in the neighbouring block. Since it was raining the other guys didn’t come along that evening though, and the black van returned eventually, which was different from the past two nights.

There are also these sunset and sky pictures. The point which the sun hits the horizon in the evening has been gradually moving south (i.e. shifting “right to left” across my balcony since my balcony faces west), and this week, on Monday Sep 09, it hit a point that was hidden behind the tall building in the distance, so it looked like the building itself was glowing!

The next two are from Tuesday, the 10th, at 7:16 pm and 7:55 pm.

Then this one from Thursday at 7:53 pm:

And lastly 8:22 pm from Saturday, the 14th:

How pretty.

I reflected this week what a good buy this knife that I bought in late June has been. I’ve been loving it, it’s totally revolutionized my kitchen prep work and I’ve been enjoying partitioning everything up into Tupperware containers and Stasher bags. I’ve only cut myself once on it too, while cutting some tofu of all things, and only almost dropped it on the floor and amputating a toe once as well.

I have also very much been missing travelling and seeing the sights and hearing the sounds and eating the food of the world, and making nice daily blog posts of precious daily life in faraway places. Especially Japan, but I’ve also been craving travelling around Canada a bit. Hmm. I’ve been wondering if I could find some sort of travel sponsorship, whether for website or for video blogging. Hmm.

I’ve also been spending more time watching random English VTubers recently, from small ones on Twitch to large Hololive EN ones on YouTube, and now I have this wistful wish that I could do something like that, though perhaps not exactly that. I wonder if it’s possible to reinvent my life and do something wild that would make me even more incredibly happy than I already am. What would I have to give up for that? What paths of opportunity even exist out there? I can dream, right? I wonder if I should just send out random cold calls.. err emails and see what sort of sponsorships I can get for anything interesting and inspiring.

Oh, and writing about random emails, I had emailed Ladymakeup about a month ago. This was the Polish company that I ordered the fancy toothpastes from several months ago. They took a full month to open a complaint ticket with the Polish postal service and patiently wait for a reply from *them* in turn, and it took some prodding for me before the makeup company finally said this week that they’d issue me a refund for the package that I requested but that never left Poland as far as I’m aware. I’m still waiting for the actual refund to be issued, though.