Life

I’m gonna try out a hybrid of a daily life blog and a weekly life blog this week. And by that, I mean that I’ll write a daily entry if I went somewhere and did something fairly interesting, and skip the days where I stay at home or just go to the nearby mall. This part of the blog, at the top, will contain the weekly “general stuff” sort of miscellaneous notes that didn’t warrant a full on daily subsection devoted to it. If I want to do a “daily travel blog” then that stuff will go below.

One problem I foresee with this is that it will cause situations where I’ll refer to things down below that the reader hasn’t read yet because it’s not in chronological order. I should be able to work around that though, as long as I’m careful. That already kind of happens sometimes in normal blog entries anyway. But I can adjust the sails as needed. I just need to write and roll along with my weekly blogs. Roll along and see how the dice fall.

So first, here are the general notes about the week.

There was a house that I was interested in for about 275k that popped up on late Friday or early Saturday last week, and I only saw it on Sunday night since it was outside of my normal house filters, so I contacted my realtor about it on Monday morning. Apparently that was long enough to already miss out on the house because it already went into Pending status on Monday, which meant that someone made an offer on it already.

That being said, I noticed that the house was still listed on Realtor.ca while not being listed on the Paragonrels portal that my realtor set up for me, and on Tuesday night I bypassed my realtor to contact the other realtor directly and ask why that was the case. That other realtor said that the house was in Pending with conditions, but they were still open to backup offers in case the current offer fell through. Then they would go to my offer before the house went back onto the open market. He said he had received an inquiry as to how stable/likely the current deal was the day before, and asked if that was my realtor. I gave him my realtor’s first name, and he said that no, it wasn’t. I had a very good chat with him though and thanked him for his advice.

I still liked the house enough that I then went back to my own realtor and asked if we could go down and take a look even though it was in Pending, and write a backup offer just in case. I had found out that the Pending with conditions status was slated to end on Friday at 9pm, so we’d know by then whether I had a chance or not. The realtor said that his next free time slot was Thursday at 12 pm, and I talked to Dad and we agreed in principle to that, but then the realtor called back and said that that was also the time that the person with the current offer was going to have their house inspection, so we couldn’t be there at the time.

In the end, we settled for my realtor calling their realtor on Friday to find out where the current buyer’s head was at, and while I had to poke my realtor on Friday again to get him to send the question, the answer back was that the other person had removed conditions and the house sale was going to go through, so I did miss out on that one in the end. At least we didn’t waste time on the visit and backup offer I guess. This is so stupid and I hope a housing recession hits us.

I also finally completed my taxes this week. I had put it off for so long because I needed to calculate rent, utilities, and insurance both for my work from home job as well as my Twitch streaming venture, and that entire venture took a couple of hours to do. I did end up with a refund of a little over $2,800 though, which is nice. About $267 or something of that was from Twitch-related write-offs, which was around a third of what I claimed as office supply expenses for that — mostly games and equipment (that didn’t include a computer or furniture, which would have fallen until capital gains instead, not that I bought either of those this year within my streaming period). I am also leaving a note here for myself next year that Twitch streaming activities seem to get filed in the T2125 tax form and under the NAICS industry code of “516219 – Other media content providers”.

The bedbug incident from Friday last week also seems to have concluded for now. Although I had mentioned that they had posted a note saying that they would be coming by everyone’s unit on Tuesday to look for pests, they never actually arrived at my unit and I just went on with my day as normal. Maybe that means they found them in someone else’s unit? Or someone fessed up to them before the inspection? Maybe they just forgot about it? Who knows. Hopefully that’s the end of that saga.

In more pleasant news, due to the success of the white honey that I had mixed into the roasted rice tea last month, I figured it would taste similar when mixed into another savoury tea that I disliked on its own — cinnamon tea. I tried it with the Harney & Sons version of that tea and it indeed had a similar effect — it turned it from a merely bearable tea into one that I loved very much and ranked as top tier.

The union that I work under also seems to have successfully negotiated a baseline raise (and other things, but the raise is likely most front and central for people) with the board of governors at our University this week. It’s not great, but not terrible either, and probably good enough under the current government. We got a 3% raise retroactive to Apr 01 2024, and a 3% further raise every fiscal year after that for Apr 01 2025, 2026, and 2027. Then the agreement ends in 2028. It barely covers the average increased inflation/cost of living, but at least it does more or less cover it. Some people are rightfully not happy about it because the last collective agreement did not cover inflation and this one doesn’t make up for that loss, but I still think it will probably pass the member ratification vote as is.

I changed my toothbrush last week, finally cycling out the last free one from my trip to Asia last year. This note is mostly here so that I can see in the future how long my toothbrushes normally last by searching for that keyword and finding this post again. Mid-April 2025!

My collection of pictures of The Bay’s closing down sale continue to expand this week as well, though I only visited it once, on Thursdays when the sale values changed again from 25-50% off to 30-60% off.

On Tuesday. Apr 15, I took this picture at 9:24 pm which stood as the only sunset(ish) picture that I obtained this week:

And now, here’s a section on my noteworthy trips this week! There’s one for Sunday Apr 13, one for Tuesday Apr 15, and one for Friday Apr 18.

Sunday Apr 13

I had caught wind of a record and CD sale event this Sunday that I wanted to attend. But it was on the north side of the city, which I seldom visit. The bus ride there would be around an hour from the nearby transit centre. That’s so long. What to do? Zao gia! See how I expertly weave previous blog stuff into current and future blogs.

I took that long bus ride from Southgate to Northgate, and although I didn’t stop at that mall to visit it, I would like to someday. For the moment I took note of how the mall had a main building but then, across the road and on the other side of the transit centre, it also had a detached strip mall with shops like this gigantic T&T Supermarket.

I must definitely come back and look for Florida Water some day. For the moment though, I switched buses at the Northgate transit centre and went east, eventually ending up at the venue of the Edmonton Record Fair (local), as the event was called. Oddly enough, though I had heard that the event was free, the Facebook page had a promotion poster for this event that indicated that there was a price.

There wasn’t one though. I wattzed right up to the Northgate Lions Senior Recreation Centre and went right in.

The number of vendors and the entire event, while not huge, was actually larger than I had expected.

Good stuff. Most of it was records, but some stores did sell CDs and cassettes and a few other memorabilia, and I ended up picking up a random Japanese CD for cheap from the one single stall that had any foreign language CDs at all. Different stalls had different prices for their CDs, there were ones for $1, $3, $5, and $7 that I recall off the top of my head. And one with “rarer” CDs that went up to $40 that I saw. Records generally averaged $5 per, but I didn’t look too closely at them at all — I don’t have a record player after all.

Supposedly the guy I bought the CD from has an online Facebook presence somewhere where he sells records and stuff, and his name is supposedly Kevin Coombs, but I couldn’t find any sort of matching marketplace or web store presence under that name, so who knows.

To get to this community centre, I had taken bus route 54 east from Northgate. After leaving this place, I took the the next bus route 54 further east again, as there was another nearby event that I had caught wind of, a craft fair at Clareview Community Recreation Centre. I have probably stopped here before in the past, but I don’t actually remember seeing, or at least not mindfully seeing, the transit centre before. And it’s a weird one, as the transit centre was split right into two halves by the LRT Station. Here’s the western half:

You can see the LRT station on the left side of that picture. And this is the eastern half:

What struck me here was how much open space there was.. this really felt like a “prairies” transit centre — lots of open space out the far side of the transit centre, puffy white clouds in the wide blue sky, etc. Yet despite all that open space, especially on that eastern side, there were apartments nestled right up against the very transit centre itself as well. Being a south side kid (and adult), I had actually had a negative impression of the northern LRT stations like Clareview and the surrounding neighbourhoods, and this has held true for some of the sketchier stations like Stadium, Coliseum, and Kingsway, but Clareview actually looked fairly safe and clean and peaceful. Small sample size though, but I now like the area, though I didn’t like the copy/paste apartments that I saw.

Anyway, the day was fairly pleasant, if a little chilly, but I was wearing my new cardigan and that kept me warm. I took a stroll over to the community centre, which was about a ten minute walk away:

And found the craft sale. It was tiny.

But while the craft sale itself was a small sidenote in today’s adventure, that community and recreation centre was huge and I spent some time walking around. It had lots of seating, a child care area, and a cheesecake shop:

And several sports arenas. I particularly like this next shot of the soccer field because it reminded me of going to Changi Airport in Singapore and watching airplanes fly out from the public departure lounge.

There were also basketball courts:

Indoor swimming pools:

Badminton courts:

Hockey rinks:

And exercise gym areas, and more. It was a nice place to wander around. I’ve never been into a recreation centre before but there’s actually one pretty close to my current home. I just haven’t thought to ever visit it before. I wonder if it’s similar to this? Something to do soon!

This rec center was great though. There was even a public library connected to it, though I didn’t enter it.

Instead, after walking around a bit, I left the building and headed back toward the station. Along the way, while looking for restaurants to have lunch at, I saw a store named C-Lovers.

A store with all-you-can-eat fish and chips, cool! They even had a poster out front with their store’s history, tickling my food history sensitivities:

So I went in. However, it was pretty empty, and I kind of got why eventually.

It was an all-you-can-eat place, but it was not a buffet, and the way it works is that they serve you one plate, then when you’re nearly done, they ask you if you want a second, and so on — but you don’t get to build the plate yourself and there are no sides or options as well, although I believe you can ask for lesser fish or no chips in subsequent plates. I think. I didn’t though, and in the end, I only ate two plates.

Both the fish and the chips were okay, but not great, however more importantly, my trick with eating at buffets is to avoid the oily food, because that is what makes it difficult for me to continue eating, and the fish here was fairly oily, so after two plates I was done. I still had a normal dinner that night, so this meal did nothing more than regular satiation for me.

Well, whatever. I ate those bowls and then this time really headed home. On the way, I saw some interesting things that I will additionally chronicle here. First, a really long freight train at Clareview station went by on tracks that ran parallel to the station while I was waiting for the train there. It was carrying liquefied petroleum gas, and was so long that I could walk to one end of the station, take a picture, walk to the other end, and still take a picture of the same moving train because it was hundreds of carriages long.

Back at Southgate Mall, the Safeway there had new shelves with fancy new signs for their produce that had been installed within the last week:

The contents of the aisles also got rearranged again, with junk food frontloaded by the entrance now, pop in aisle 1 and chips and candy in aisle 2. Tea, coffee and cereal are in aisle 3 now, soups, canned vegetables and spices in aisle 4, and the pasta that was by the dog food last week got rescued and placed with the other “international” foods in aisle 5. They basically rearranged the entire store! Why.

Outside the store, I saw a truck picking up donated stuff from the clothing donation box. I hadn’t ever caught this in action before, and this explains why they added a book bin here too now that the regular donation stations are gone, since it’s one of the items they collect and hand out.

Lastly, this Canada goose held up the traffic while crossing the road:

And once she crossed, she decided to plop herself down on the grass to assert her dominance over the immediate local area.

I steered well clear.

Tuesday Apr 15

After an uneventful Monday, I decided to venture out to Chinatown again for lunch on Tuesday. Lunch, and checking out a few more grocery stores that I didn’t get to when I went down there a couple of weeks ago. The first place I went to check out was called Tung Lam Food Store, or Tung Lam Oriental Groceries:

The weird thing though, and you can kinda see it in that above picture, is that there were boxes all lined up in front of the front door so people couldn’t actually use it. Instead, one had to enter through the metal-set back door, which was normally closed but sometimes the owner would peek out and wave people in. And it had a big Open sign on it anyway.

Maybe it was a way to make their store not too obvious or tempting of a target to any addled people walking by or something. Not sure. Anyway the inside of the store looked like this:

The items here were pricey compared to other markets in the area, but the owner was nice, and I did end up picking up some random weird stuff to try out anyway.

The store only accepted cash for purchases under $20, but thankfully I had extra cash on hand.

The next store I stopped by was Vien Dong Oriental Food & Fresh Meat Market, but this wasn’t quite the supermarket or grocery store that I had envisioned. The grocery part was very small, this was all of it:

And the meat part took up most of the store:

I didn’t stay long at all because I like rustling through the grocery part of the store and there wasn’t much of that here. Instead, I continued walking south aloong 97 Street, and ended up at a nondescript building called Yorkton Pacific Mall. I had no idea an indoor mall like this was in Chinatown. And there was good reason for it. It didn’t even look like a mall on the outside, just a bunch of shop signs in front of what looked like abandoned stores, then a small overarching sign on top.

And a lot of shops inside were either shuttered or were little offices with blinds covering the windows and doors or something.

The “anchor store” in this mall, which was at the end of the picture just above this paragraph, was.. an RBC branch. A little Royal Bank of Canada outlet! I did like the vibe of this mall though, it reminds me of the malls in Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, etc. Except a good portion of this one was empty. Though I suppose there are emptyish malls in some of those places too. Especially China.

I then found a set of stairs squirreled away in the mall that led up to a second level of the mall that was half the size of the main level.

The second level was even more deserted, except for this little gem of a restaurant, squirreled away on the second level of a half-deserted two-corridor mall.

Very cool! This was a sign and I decided to eat here at Dynasty Century Palace Restaurant. It was a little past 2 pm at that time and the restaurant apparently closed at 3 pm to get ready for the evening, but the nice Chinese man who was manning the cashier waved me to a table anyway.

Not sure why that first picture is so tilted, but nonetheless, the vibe was very nice. While I was waiting for my food, I saw a ladybug on the tip of my little finger while I was holding my phone, which startled me and nearly sent the phone flying. But then the ladybug landed on my bag:

I told the man at the counter that I had a ladybug and was going to let it out outside the restaurant, and he commented that “That’s kind of you”, heh. I let it out by an abandoned Conservative Party table that was just outside the front door, using one of the candidate’s flyers. Then I went back in to wait for my meal.

I had been conflicted over what to order, and in the end asked the server to pick between Buddha Noodles (Lo Han Noodles/Luo Han Mien) and Shanghai Noodles. He picked Shanghai Noodles, so that’s what I ordered.

It was pretty tasty. Not the best ever, but pretty good. One drawback of the dish was that they didn’t seem to have any chilli sauce that I could add to the dish, but remember that picture of the items that I bought from Tung Lam Food Store at the start of today’s adventure? One of the items there was a bottle of Chin Su Extra-Hot Chili Sauce! So when the cashier guy wasn’t working, I quietly slipped that bottle out and added some of that to the dish of noodles. Maybe it was the amount I added to the noodles but it didn’t feel hot at all, never mind Extra Hot. Still, it was better than no chilli sauce at all.

After lunch, I walked back north and headed to a place called Hiep Thanh Supermarket.

This was actually a fairly big supermarket as they go:

The only problem with this store, and the reason I didn’t spend a lot of time in here, is that they wanted patrons to leave their bags at the front desk, which is fine, but when I offered that, they told me to leave my bags in a shopping basket on the floor near the front door. It felt like anyone walking in or out could just take my bags and go, especially since the woman seated at the entrance was busy with other things and wasn’t really watching the basket even though she was facing it. I tested this by trying to wave at her at the way out once I had reclaimed my bags. It took a moment for her to notice. Anyway due to this unnerving setup I only spent a couple minutes in the store, all the while looking back at the entrance whenever I was in sight of it.

Once I was out, my last stop was the 99 Supermarket store that I had visited the last time I came by Chinatown. Among other things, I wanted to get food from their food tray there for dinner.

Again their selection and freshness looked kind of forlorn but the noodles were really nice. This time there was lots of spillage though as the sauce from the chicken curry had seeped out into the bag before I had even left the store, but the plastic bag that they wrapped around the takeout food container was good enough that the spillage did not spread to the rest of the bag even though I was still well over half an hour away from home. Also, this time I came prepared and brought $12 in actual cash so that I could pay the lady at the food counter itself. And I also bought a couple of items while wandering around the store as well, just to try them:

Those Searay spinach fishballs are wonderful! They taste so good in soup.

I then headed home after that on a very crowded bus route 9. Overall, the trip was fun, but there definitely were more sketchy people hanging around Chinatown than last time, and I do totally understand why a lot of businesses are hesitant about opening up. Like, I don’t know what these fine folks were doing congregating and sitting outside these couple stores, but how would anyone possibly contemplate approaching those stores like this?

That was the most egregious one, but there were other scenes that definitely screamed “avoid” too, like what looked like a guy slumped over inside a bus stop, and two other men standing still and staring at a front door of a shop that was covered with metal plates. Unfortunately, it does not seem that the city is doing more than token lip service in helping to clean up these neighbourhoods that were hit hard a few years ago with the homeless and drug-addled moving in.

Friday Apr 18

This one was not so much a full-blown excursion as a walk around the local neighbourhood. Advance voting for the Canadian federal election opened this Easter long weekend though, going from the 18th to the 22nd this year. It was held at Louis St. Laurent, a Catholic junior high and high school which was about a 20 to 30 minute walk away from my place, depending on my pace and exact route. The weather on Friday, the first day of advance voting, was very pleasant, so I took the opportunity to saunter there and back.

I passed by a roadside memorial along the way, on 111 St NW going over Whitemud Drive. Apparently these were in tribute to a girl that committed suicide there June 07 2024, as far as I could tell. Rest in peace.

I also passed by a high school called Harry Ainley along the way, which was right next to a Confederation Leisure Centre building, which I think is likely similar to the Clareview Recreation Centre that I visited on Sunday. I thought it was interesting that the building was right next to (and in between) both Harry Ainley High School and Louis St. Laurent Catholic School. Must be very popular with the students.

But when I went there after voting to look at it, I found out that it was closed for the Easter long weekend anyway, so I didn’t get to go in and look at it this time. Oh well.

Anyway, I cross the road to Louis St Laurent and passed by the front of the school on the way to the side entrance where the public was being allowed in for polling.

The polling was taking place in the school’s gymnasium, and in hindsight I’m not sure if I was allowed to take a picture of it, but:

There were I think three different lines in here, each one about 20-40 people long at any given time, and depending on your exact location you were assigned a polling station on your voter card. Someone at the door looked at the card once I arrived and sent me to my correct line, which had about 30 people in it. It processed about one person every minute and change — I joined the line at 11:53 am and finished polling at about 12:33 pm.

The lady in front of me had a walking cane to lean on, and the people in charge of polling offered her a chair to sit on while in line. I offered to let her move the chair to the side of the gym and sit there instead, and she could just rejoin the line in front of me when I reached the front, and both the people in charge as well as the lady herself liked that suggestion so that was what we did.

On the way back from the polling station, I took a walk through Confederation Park, which is a large park between the two schools and Southgate Centre.

It was such a gloriously nice day. I took additional pictures of some kids kicking around a ball inside a covered pavilion:

As well as this stylized picture of windswept clouds roughly following the direction of the path I was walking on. I was travelling Where the Wind Takes Me!