Life

Despite it not snowing this week, this week was chillier than last week, which made me want to stay at home. I know that next week is forecast to be much nicer though. Next, one of my workmates was also off work for most of the week, so I took over his queue monitor duties, which left me with less free time both during the lunch hour as well as after work, as queue monitor duties tend to spill over into the evenings too. Also, I had a headache in the middle of the week, and that made me not really want to do anything. That reads as a long list of excuses, but basically I had itchy feet the entire week and wanted to go out and do stuff, yet I kept finding various reasons to end up not doing so. I still did go out a bit though, mostly on Monday to meet Dad, and Friday for a long lunch walk, with a bit of additional grocery shopping on Tuesday.

On Monday, I met my Dad at Southgate Mall because he texted me to tell me that he was going there to buy some groceries and look over The Bay’s liquidation sale there. I had told him the last time we met to let me know when he was going down there so I could pop by and hang out with him at lunch. We walked around to the Dollarama dollar store, The Bay where he wanted to look for pillows but we only found grossly overpriced ones and thus ended up buying nothing, Safeway for a couple of groceries and deli food, and then to the food court where he bought some lunch.

We then sat down to chat for a bit as our wrapped up food grew cold, as neither of us had actually planned to eat at the mall. Among other things, our chat spawned what turned out to be the story for my Memory Snippet of the Week segment below, as well as me finding out that he was a lot more amenable to going back down to Singapore together at some point this year for what likely will be his last trip ever to Asia. That won’t be for a while though as he needs to go through an eye surgery first, and then a couple months of recovery from that, so if it does happen it will be at some point in the latter half of the year.

Excitement levels building though, whether I have to go by myself or not.

Tangentially, while on the topic of travelling, I also would like to visit various towns around my province, though I’m not sure exactly when I will do this yet. In particular, I plan on visiting Drumheller, northeast of Calgary, where there is a famous dinosaur museum, and maybe I will even swing back to Banff to the west of Calgary or Jasper to the west of Edmonton again. That would mean an overnight stay or two somewhere, in Banff or Drumheller or in Calgary itself. There’s no direct bus service from Edmonton to Drumheller though — the direct buses to that place are largely from Calgary, so it will mean either a bus or flight down there and then making my way from there to Drumheller.

But I digress, and there are several things that need to happen before I can go anywhere and do anything. I’m still watching houses but nothing interesting has come up lately. The house that Dad and I went to see two weeks ago, and which had “5 other bids on”, was originally listed for 375k but has already gone into sold status for 410k. After a little over two weeks from when they were first listed on the market. Did they even do an inspection? That went very fast, and for so much over the asking price. Very discouraging, and I hope the housing market crashes soon.

Double tangentially, on the topic of housing, my old realtor also sent out a mass text this week announcing that he was looking for referrals for more commissions, and would give a bonus to people who referred clients to him depending on how much the closed home sale was worth. Ehhh. Didn’t like you, wouldn’t refer people to you.

But my train of thought is far enough off track now. Back to Monday we go, and here are a couple of pictures from The Bay on Monday when I went a-wandering with Dad. At that point, prices were still “15% to 40%” off. This first one was from the second floor.

And this is my usual spot on the third floor.

I actually went back to The Bay on Friday as well, during my lunchtime walk, and I discovered that all the liquidation signs had levelled up slightly, and were now “20% to 40% off”. I hadn’t expected the liquidation sale to actually change mid-week, but they did, I guess. I wonder what day the sale price actually changed, and if that is indicative of the day that I need to visit The Bay each week to try to snipe something for a really low price. That being said, nearly everything in store was still only the requisite 20% off, and although there were many bare shelves, the bulk of the items were still horribly overpriced.

I made sure to take pictures from each floor when I went back on Friday. Here’s a couple from the third floor.

From the second floor:

And then the first floor…

The poor mannequins!

Safeway also started a major reshuffling of their items around this week, which was mildly annoying because they started it either on, or just before, the monthly Customer Appreciation Day that falls on the first Tuesday of every month, which was Apr 01 this year. So for people who might only visit the store every month for the 15% off discount for total purchases over $50, suddenly they had to contend with missing and rearranged stock as the hapless employees stripped a couple of shelves of items at a time and moved them to a different place in the store. In the end it looked like they turned Aisle 2, the former “Asian Foods” aisle, into an “International” aisle with a section for “South Asian”, “East Asian”, “European”, and “British” goods.

Other stuff like juices, soup, rice, and more got shuttered around too to make room for this, and to fill the holes left in the shelves from other products being moved. And sometimes the places the products ended up in made no sense. For example, instead of uncooked Italian pasta being in the European aisle, pasta and saltine crackers were now located in the pet food and cleaning supplies aisle, eight aisles away from where they used to be:

It was just like.. what? Well, whatever.

I also learnt that while the Southgate clothing donation bins were still there, and joined by a new clothing bin, the recycling depot with all the cardboard and other big bins in the back carpark were now removed for some inexplicable reason. This was a rather well-used depot and now it’s just gone.

I didn’t end up posting this picture from Jul 31 2023 elsewhere in the blog, but this was what the Southgate recycling depot used to look like:

And now all the blue bins are gone, and the area looks like this:

What a disservice to the community. But it looked like it closed due to a request from Southgate management (local), and likely due to a number of homeless people that it was attracting.

The second set of The Bay pictures, the Safeway pictures, and the depot pictures were all from Friday, and I took them while on a big walking loop that I made during the lunch hour (and a little bit afterwards), starting at Southgate Mall and then heading east along 51st Avenue. I was not done yet though, as my next stop after that was a new Thrift Centre that had opened nearby. I was also derelict in posting this picture, but I had actually taken a picture of it back on Mar 07 2025, on my way to the McDavid’s McDonald’s store nearby that I had talked about in My Diary #181. At that point, this Edmonton MCC Thrift store was not open yet though, and just had “Leased” signs outside of it:

This time, it was fully open, and I went inside to walk around and snap a few pictures.

It wasn’t particularly big, though I do like thrift stores in general and this one is definitely a lot closer to where I live than the Goodwill down by South Park Centre. There was a separate book area that I did not photograph as well over to one side (though you can sort of see it behind the “Children” banner in the second picture above), as well as the tiniest changing room area that I have ever seen, with one single wooden stall set out by one of the walls of the large central room, with sizable holes underneath the door and walls so there’s little privacy at all. That one I didn’t take a picture of, but it was to the left of the “Toys” banner in the second photo above.

I didn’t stay for long though as I wasn’t there to shop and nothing caught my eye on a quick walk-around anyway. Very near to that thrift store was something else that caught my eye though — there was a Filipino-Chinese restaurant named Palabok House slightly further east along 51st Avenue, and they had this sign perched outside by the main road:

Friday lunch buffet for $21.95 you say? Yes. Although the sign outside their actual main door had a different time span for it (12 pm to 2:30 pm instead of 12 pm to 3 pm).

Still, it was only 1:15 pm at that point, and I wasn’t going to eat there THAT long. I might eat a lot but I’m not really a slow eater. I went in to check it out, and paid in advance like they asked — $21.95 for the base food, 5% tax, and a 15% tip later (though it’s weird that you have to tip before actually experiencing any of the service), it came to $26.51 in total.

The Palabok House restaurant interior looked like this:

And the buffet only really consisted of that one small food line above. It had one noodle dish (pancit bihon/bee hoon), two rice options (fried rice and steamed rice), one vegetable dish (tofu with mixed vegetables), three meat options (beef asado, crispy chicken, and sweet and sour pork), two miscellaneous options (green onion cake and Vietnamese spring roll), and two soup options (egg drop soup and wonton soup).

They also never noticed or cleaned up those bowls perching on the left end of the food tray there for quite some time. Yuck. Though they did regularly have a cleaning cart go by the tables and remove any bowls left there. But still, while the food choice was not very good, the food itself was perfectly fine and I just ate lots of noodles and sampled at least a bit of everything on the main food line except for the egg drop soup and the green onion cake.

I had four plates in all, with all four of them having the bee hoon noodle as the centerpiece. Plate 1:

I didn’t take a picture of plate 2, because it’s customary to forget one picture every time I go to a buffet, it seems. The second plate was noodles with white rice, a bit of beef asado, vegetables, and then sweet and sour pork though. Plate 3 follows:

And I should probably have stopped there, especially since I hadn’t planned to go to a buffet that day and so hadn’t skipped breakfast or anything, but I went for a fourth plate anyway and this pushed my satiety level from a comfortable 75-80% or so to a slightly too full 85-90%.

I’d say the food was so-so. It wasn’t great — both the rice options were dry, and the chicken was also more dry than it was crispy, but I tend not to go for that sort of thing anyway and I liked the noodles and beef stew and vegetables, so I just went with that for basically every plate. There was also a dessert section that I did not partake in:

And water and tea/coffee sections that I also did not drink from:

The smiling staff kept coming around and offering them to me, perhaps worried that I would eat them into bankruptcy or something (I don’t think this was their intention though, they just noticed that I hadn’t taken any drinks and inquired three times if I wanted water or tea or coffee). But nope, it just wasn’t my style and I didn’t find that I needed or wanted any of that. I just took my $26.51 worth of food and then left after exchanging friendly goodbyes to the staff there. That basically covered for my dinner too, and I only had a bowl of instant noodles as a late-night snack that evening.

Finally, here are a couple of balcony pictures from the week. This beautiful shot of a half-set sun was from Sun Mar 30 at 8:04 pm:

And then a picture of the moon and some stars on Sun Mar 30 at 11:55 pm, though I should really get a proper (expensive) camera for astrophotography at some point:

And one from Thursday, Apr 03 at 8:05 pm, when the tall building in the distance was crowned by the setting sun:

Due to Earth’s rotation, the point on the horizon where the sun sets, relative to my balcony, swings from left to right and then back again through the year, with the end points more or less being the equinoxes, and right now it’s on a journey towards the right (north) again.