Life

Big news at Southgate Mall this week. The new Uncle Tetsu’s Japanese Cheesecake store finally opened! This is a fairly globally-famous Japanese pastry store that has a number of branches scattered throughout the world, including (now) two in Edmonton, one of them (now) very close to my apartment. And it finally opened this week, either on Monday or perhaps a couple days earlier during the weekend when I wasn’t down there.

The reason this is significant is not specifically for their cheesecake though, though I’ve had their tarts before and even without a sweet tooth I do remember liking them, but because the opening of this store has been delayed so ridiculously long that no one was sure if they were ever going to open. To wit, their original opening date was plastered on a construction sign that said that it would open Fall 2024, but autumn 2024 came and went, then winter 2024 came and went, and even now half of spring already passed before the store finally opened up. This was both an eyesore and a curiosity in what is a very busy mall that never really has any shop vacancies at all. This was a picture I took on Feb 27 2025 that I ended up not posting that week, but is relevant now:

That part on the left said “COMING SOON FALL 2024” but it seemed that they were so embarrassed about missing their deadline that they pasted a construction sign over it. Can you imagine emailing that address and getting a job for FALL 2024 and then not actually being able to start working and earn money until SPRING 2025? Geez.

Anyway they’re open now, so I ordered something from there and casually asked them why it took so long to open. They said that the city had not approved their permit until recently. So apparently it was the city’s fault (or rather, the fault of whatever was wrong with the store that was holding up the city’s approval) that caused the six month delay. Oh well, it’s open now, so that’s the end of that saga. Well, there was one last footnote to this whole thing — the credit card purchase I made was charged to Nespresso, which is the store next door, instead of Uncle Tetsu’s. I guess they’re borrowing their credit card system for now or something.

On Sunday night this last week, I was craving some bought food instead of cooking stuff myself after stream, and I went for some new-to-me food on a store on Uber Eats that I had not tried before, and that was having a Buy 1 Get 1 free sale — this was a Mediterranean cuisine place named Tahini’s and I got a rice dish called the Habibi Bowl, which was apparently Middle Eastern in origin and was fairly nice overall.

That’s not why this event was notable though. I went down to open the front apartment lobby door for the Uber Eats driver, Bassam, after he picked my food and drove over to my place, only for the both of us to be flummoxed because Uber Eats was asking for a “PIN number” (I know the N stands for number, but here we are as a society anyway) for confirmation, and it was supposed to be the last 4 digits of my phone number, but it wasn’t matching his order’s PIN. And to that end, while I’ve seen this feature in action before, my app wasn’t asking me to give him a PIN for this order.

Bassam figured it out after a bit though — he actually had two deliveries for the same building but hadn’t realized that. So he went back to his car to get my order in as well. That PIN feature was proving its worth right in front of us. In an odd twist though, he said that his Uber Eats app wouldn’t actually allow him to deliver me my order first as he had to finish the one to the other person in the building first, so I followed him all the way up to the 11th floor where the other person was, watched him deliver the item and confirm the PIN number while I waited in the elevator lobby, and then after that he was finally able to give me my order and check it off on his app, and we did the handover while inside the moving elevator itself. That was a small and quick, yet nonetheless interesting and unique experience for me.

On Monday, I walked to a nearby grocery store called Sunterra Market. Their prices are fairly inflated, but I like the vibe and choice nonetheless, so hopefully they won’t close down (local) the store anytime soon. That being said, while I like the store and it’s not terribly far away, I believe that this was my first trip there in at least three years, maybe more. It’s located in a small strip mall and those are terrible things in Edmonton since the weather is frozen half the year and therefore, not having a car, I’m not ever going to these sorts of places in winter. I also learnt that there were two or three restaurants in that strip mall but they were all closed on Mondays.

Anyway, on the way there, I passed by some interesting houses, one with a ball thing in their yard:

One with a book library in their yard

And a locally famous house which remodelled itself as a castle:

The market looked like this on the outside:

And inside:

I bought a couple things there — one was some ingredients for a new thing I wanted to make — chili. The western sort of chili. I’ve made soup a lot and the process isn’t much different, but I’ve never actually tried making chili before, nor have I traditionally really tried it as it’s not an Eastern dish. That Panache Steakhouse Chili container that I bought for super cheap on Mar 10 has had me craving more though, and even though I’ve never bought any since, I did want to try making some of my own and finally decided to try it this week, using a super basic and quick recipe (local) without much pizzazz to it as I wanted to make sure I had the main process down right before committing to fancier ingredients and cook timers. And although it looked somewhat plain, it was good! And quick, too! I did up the entire meal in less than half an hour at night on Tuesday after my Twitch stream.

All I bought at Sunterra for it was a jar of salsa, a can of refried pinto beans, and some lean ground pork because ground beef is WAY too expensive. On Tuesday evening, I browned the ground pork and an onion, threw half the can of beans and the entire salsa jar into the wok pan, cooked it all and used it as topping on some boiled macaroni shells, and away I went. And all Wednesday I was looking forward to a similar dinner with leftover chili and rice instead of pasta. I went to Safeway to look for similar but cheaper ingredients to use on Thursday, and now have to figure out the best way to keep the cost down for this dish and weave it between my rounds of soup and leftovers. Or maybe I can make some sort of hybrid dish between the two, using soup ingredients in my chili, or salsa in my soup, or something.

As a sidenote, I made a second batch later in the week and it was nowhere near as good. I know why though — it’s because this time I tried using some Compliments brand salsa, Compliments being the Safeway local in-house brand that they make to compete with more expensive products. Cheaper stuff, but lower quality in general too. In-house brands definitely have their advantages, but in this specific case, the lower quality and worse taste definitely showed.

The other thing I bought at Sunterra was totally on a whim. It was a local premium brand of tea from a company called Jolene’s Tea House, called Alberta Rose Sencha, and I immediately loved it as well. I had originally bought it even though it was a bit expensive, because I liked the packaging it came in, and also from a desire to support a local tea place on what was election day in Canada.

But I’m glad I randomly tried it, the rose taste reminds me a bit of the bandung (rose syrup) drink from Singapore because, well, both use roses as their main flavour, and it was neither too sweet nor too strong. If/when I go down to Banff this year, I will probably try to see if I can stop by that shop there, as that’s where they’re based out of.

On Thursday, I went down to the mall to look at the new weekly sale price at The Bay. To my surprise, there was no change from last week! They’re still 40%-70% sales. Technically they skipped a week last week, going from 30%-60% to 40%-70% instead of 35%-70%, but I was surprised that it didn’t rise to 45% or 50% as the discount floor this week still. Maybe that’s as low as they’ll go? A lot of their stuff is still horrendously overpriced though. Or maybe it’s because of news that a bid (local) was probably put in for the store/franchise? Maybe I’ll go pick up a few things next week if the prices don’t fall again.

Here’s the usual shot from my usual position on the 3rd floor of the store:

But there was one major change in the store this week! And it was a huge surprise! They actually fixed the escalators going up from the 2nd to the 3rd floor! I feel like this was done due to the news of the purchase bid heh. Although technically that bid was announced a few weeks ago, it only became official this week after the deadline for bids passed. This escalator hadn’t worked in a couple of months!

One of the CDs that I Kickstarted over the past year also came in on Thursday too. This one is called Into Me and is by an artist called SNoW, and it was Kickstarted back in Sep 2024. That took a while to fulfil and arrive huh. I still have one more crowdfunded CD and one plushie still pending.

I then went out and about on Friday and Saturday. The former is longer than the latter, but both deserve their own mini-sections, so see below the following sunset sky pictures from the week. I am pasting three of those pictures in my online scrapbook this week, the first from 9:35 pm on Sunday, Apr 27:

The second from 9:15 pm on Monday, Apr 28:

And the third from 9:04 pm on Thursday, May 01:

I should also state here that the I picked up a number of business cards and event brochures and stuff through my weekend escapades, and this has pushed my ephemera scanning and uploading project on archive.org higher up on the list of things to do. I had already uploaded a bunch of them to the site last year, but had stopped once they got hacked as they took forever to recover from the hack and make the upload tools usable again. Maybe it’s fixed now and maybe it’s time I pivot back to that. Oh well, soon. For now, onwards to the long-form travel posts of the week!

Friday May 02

I took the day off on Friday because, well, I have too much vacation accrued and there were a bunch of things I had to do. Also, I was overworking a little in the earlier part of the week as is as I had to cover for a teammate who had an emergency. So now that he was back, it was nice to cut loose for a bit.

There were three things on my to-do list on Friday. The first was a history walk (local) that was being held as part of an overall event called Jane’s Walk. There were a bunch of walks being held, but I went on one called “Downtown – Rails & Stations” held by Ian Hosler, and I emailed the organizers to acquire permission to try to record the event on my DJI Pocket 2 camera and got to chat with Ian briefly before the event.

Unfortunately, because I haven’t used the video camera in so long, the video itself is very scuffed, with broken footage every now and then, and more importantly, even though the walk was only about an hour and 45 minutes long, both the camera’s battery and the spare portable battery I had brought along had expired before the tour was over. I had also missed recording the very start of the walk when he was introducing it before we started walking, so with the beast basically missing both its head and its tail, and with its body being chopped up into like five pieces, it wasn’t quite something worth saving in the end. It gave me even more experience as to how to do something like this and what pitfalls to look for though.

The tour itself was fascinating. I love railways and trains, and listening to the history of how the various railway companies in Canada had plans to lay down rails into Edmonton, and what actually transpired with each of those attempts, and how that influenced the development of Edmonton both north and south of the river, was very neat. Ian was a very fun presenter and the walk was over in no time, even though the temperature was blazing — there were no clouds to block the sun the entire day and temperatures hit at least 27°C if not higher.

But before the walk even started, there was something else cool that happened as well. We were gathering in front of City Hall, by a very obvious banner:

And as a sidenote, this was the first time I had actually been to City Hall — I stepped in to use the public washrooms to wash my hands, but snapped a pic as I floated by the main desk.

Anyway, while we were gathered outside, one of the City Hall employees brought out this intriguing NHL playoff bracket sign that kept blowing over in the wind. He held it straight and posed for me as I snapped a picture of him and the sign.

This sign is interesting because on the previous day, Thursday, The Vegas Golden Knights had defeated the Minnesota Wild early in the evening, and the Edmonton Oilers had defeated the Los Angeles Kings an hour or so later. Yet, that bracket board had the Golden Knights advancing but not the Oilers, even though that was our hometown team. What gives?

The answer became apparent a few minutes later, when these little lambs trotted out.

They were introduced as a Grade 1 class from St. Boniface Catholic Elementary School, and apparently there’s some sort of tradition where they will come here and cheer the bracket advancement being added to the board. We all watched on as this event took place:

And the actual pasting of the playoff sticker was done by Councillor Anne Stevenson (local)

The kids were primed to cheer once the sticker was placed on. They then turned around and cheered us, the Jane’s Walk participants, as well, before we broke off into groups and set off on our journeys. That was cool!

As for the walk itself, I didn’t take many pictures since I was fiddling with the failed attempt at video recording it, but here’s a picture of Ian Hosler introducing the tour before we started out:

And of Ian and his co-host Wesley Andreas:

They were City Hall employees on top of volunteers for this walk, and as Ian said, they weren’t historians, they were history buffs who had done research into their topic. Also, here’s a cute old couple that was with us, the lady on the left was also carrying a small black dog:

Our guides brought us around to various places, going as far north as the southern edge of Chinatown, then to a couple other places including the base of CN Tower, and an old Canada Post sorting facility. We also passed the old Edmonton Remand Centre along the way, which was being torn down this year (local):

We also passed an outdoor Neon Sign Museum, run by a friend of Ian’s, that’s apparently very pretty at night:

Hmmm. One day.

We also passed by the Rogers Place hockey stadium, and then went through the Ice District and into the Ice District Plaza (aka the Moss Pit):

This was my first time into the Ice District as I haven’t really ever come into Downtown Edmonton much until this year. We disbanded soon after partway back to City Hall from here, so I wandered back here and went into the Official Oilers Team Store store nearby:

Cool, but nothing that called out to me, so I wandered around window shopping for a bit and then left.

Heading back to the nearby train station, I took the LRT to my second stop for the day: The University of Alberta Butterdome. Friday was the first day of three days for the biannual Butterdome Craft Sale (local), Spring edition, and while I have been to one of these before, it was a long, long time ago that I visited it, back during a time when I wasn’t so interested in local crafts and sustainability and such. This would have been easily 10-20 years ago, either back when I was a student or in my early working days here. Anyway, it had been a while, so when I saw an ad for it I decided that I would check it out this year.

I really liked this fair. It did cost $8 to enter, but while many craft fairs usually leave me underwhelmed with rows of stalls selling things I don’t care for, the way I shop at these fairs is to make one circuit and write down items and prices of things that I might be interested in, and then deciding on what items would fit within whatever budget I had set for myself after doing that circuit. Usually I end up with one, maybe two, interesting items from stalls from an entire craft fair, but this one I ended up with at least ten stalls that I was contemplating buying from.

Here are some pictures from the event, starting with a little bistro eating area where a guy was strumming a guitar on stage to serenade the locals as they dined on sandwiches:

Here’s a store selling cute little animal ottomans:

And one that did Indian spices which I considered, but they didn’t have nasi briyani:

I considered these coffee and tea beverage bombs:

This store was selling cranberry and bison meat snacks and gave me a small sample:

This store sold cork board maps of the world and had a name that included the word “Wanderlust”, which is an immediate plus point for me:

There was a place doing pottery demos though I didn’t see one occur while I was there:

I liked the print art from this store:

There was also this garlic store that I kind of regret not buying either their garlic powders or signed book from:

But I plan to possibly go to a garlic festival later this year anyway, so that felt duplicative. There was also this cool-looking stall with small, self-contained escape room style puzzle games that fit within an envelope:

This store with extremely expensive clothing — but that tan-coloured hoodie on the right with the red collar and the hummingbird motif really called to me. I’m not paying that sort of price for a piece of clothing though, but I did really like it and it made me sad to pass on it.

There was even a little book stall. Literally. A stall that sold little books. (And regular-sized books.)

Anyway, I ended up buying a couple things here from two other stalls that I didn’t take photographs of. One a T-shirt for just under $40:

And the other a tin of Blue Butterfly Pea tea for $15. Apparently the tea turns colour if you add lemon to it.

I had 35% left on my battery life after this second event, but had almost three hours to go until my last event of the evening. I contemplated going home from the University to recharge my phone before heading out again, but the southbound train that would have brought me home left the train platform just before I could board it, so I took it as a sign and went the other way instead, heading northbound all the way to the end of the line, to NAIT Blatchford Market LRT Station. I had never been here before, and had no idea that either of Edmonton’s Metro or Capital LRT lines even had a station where the platform was divided into two halves by the tracks going up the middle of it, instead of the tracks being on either side of the central platform. (Valley Line has a bunch of stations like that though, which I do find weird, if nostalgic of Japan.)

The sky was still beautifully cloudless, and here are three views in three different directions from the station, one of the platforms itself and some apartments off in the distance, the second a glance toward Kingsway Mall and a Walmart Supercentre attached to it, and the third toward NAIT, a college that was located next to the station. No clouds whatsoever!

I hadn’t eaten all day, so I went to that nearby Kingsway Mall to have a late lunch/early dinner. Being a mall on the north end of the LRT line, I hadn’t been here probably since I came here with Maki back in 2020. The mall food court looked familiar though:

Although this Ukrainian food stall named Shumka looked like it was going to be closing down soon. Not familiar with it, but sad times.

I had not ever really been to the rest of the mall though, and I spent some time walking around it, marvelling at how it was larger than, and actually had better store selection than, my own Southgate Mall. But it was laid out weirdly, kind of like the shape of a 6, and although there were parts of the mall where it was easily as packed and vibrant as Southgate, other parts of the mall felt like.. it’s hard to describe except it was like how some webpages or novice art can be criticized as leaving too much “white space” between elements on the page or around the borders of the page. There were parts of the mall that had that, too much empty space between elements. And parts of the mall, especially on the second level and/or away from the food court area, were noticeably much quieter than the bottom level. Whereas Southgate is just uniformly noisy everywhere and easier to navigate. That may be my familiarity level with the mall speaking out there though.

Anyway, Kingsway also had a (perhaps) doomed Hudson’s Bay store:

It only had two floors instead of three like Southgate‘s, and contrary to our one, both its escalators, up and down, were out of service.

Terrible. However, it still had a Zellers section and signage up, whereas ours did not:

And in general, I think it had a lot more stuff still left on sale. There was also a group of kids, visible in that last photo on the left side, who were using chairs at that alcove the top of the out of service escalator as a meeting and social point, and I thought that was interesting both that they were doing that and that the store employees made no attempt to chase them away. Maybe they were related to some of the employees or something. Ethnically, Kingsway Mall had a lot more Muslim and African people wandering around and hanging out at the mall, and I now realize that this contrasts Southgate Mall quite a bit.

I don’t really have any good general pictures of the mall though, except maybe this one:

And I also took pictures of two nice.. murals? Or graffiti? Probably murals? That were on the walls. The reason I’m not sure if they were graffiti was that there was a third one that I didn’t take a picture of, where a passerby was busy colouring in a blemish using a pen that he had.

My phone was low on juice at this point even though I had set it to power saving mode, and I didn’t have a suitable cable to charge it with either even though the Kingsway Mall had rest area tables with USB ports on them, plus I was really tired after walking around so much today, so I sat down from a chair across from some nice Muslim ladies that were chatting up a storm, closed my eyes, and napped for about 30 minutes or so. This energized me greatly, and after that brief nap I got up and walked over towards my third planned event of the day, a certain Cabinet of Curiosities Night Market (local) being held at the Alberta Aviation Museum nearby.

I passed through this carpark along the way, belonging to the Alberta Motor Association, which was nice and empty and gave me a bit of a liminal feeling. It was also where one of three security guards at different places throughout the day waved at me and said hi. How odd.

This museum was very, very easy to spot from a distance:

That thing reminded me of the Malaysia Airlines model plane that we have and that I archived over here.

I was worried, since sunset isn’t until very late in the evening these spring/summer days, that this “night market” that I was going to wouldn’t be at full bloom or something until later on in its 7 pm to 11 pm. While I was not expecting an Asian-style night market, I was envisioning at least something like the one I had seen in Bryant Park in my New York City trip.

No such luck though, as this one was just a regular craft fair, located inside of an airplane hangar. Boring. The only things located outside were three small little food truck stalls.

Still, this was an “alternate lifestyle” sort of market, and though it was less impressive and less interesting to me personally than the Butterdome craft fair earlier in the day, there were still lots of interesting things, ranging from the usual stalls selling pins and stickers that I seldom give a second look at, or carving and knitting stores that I will at least glance over, or some food/drink related ones like honey and alcohols that also tend to be typically found in craft fairs, to rare ones that I haven’t seen anywhere else, things like a tarot and medium table that tried to entice me with a one-day medium retreat in Edmonton, to a blacksmith selling things that he crafted himself, to a couple of stalls selling books and comics, and even one store that sold taxidermy items.

The single store that most intrigued me though, was a junk journaling stall, except that they called it treasure journalling, where they sold pretty journal books where one can paste and store ephemera in, and lots of different sorts of paper that one could decorate their journal with as well. For some reason this really appealed to me, and they said they also held workshops, though I’m not sure what aspect of junk journaling (local) even really requires a workshop.

I really liked this stall. But I guess to some extent, my Yuusha Nikki online journal is already a junk/treasure journal of sorts huh.

I left soon after that, walking back to the NAIT LRT Station and taking the train home. My phone died on the way home, but I had to change train lines at Churchill Station in order to get on the right train home, and at the bottom of the stairs in that station was a person who was lying unresponsive on the floor and several security guards that were attempting to give them CPR while they waited for paramedics to arrive. And my phone died just as I tried to take a picture of those security guards, which was an ominous omen for the person. I hope they made it. I don’t see any fatality reports in the news but I don’t know  that all types of deaths make it in there often. It seems emblematic of the problems with a bunch of the northern/central Edmonton LRT stations either way, and how dangerous they always feel.

Also, my phone and camera and batteries all dying before I get home for the day feels very.. nostalgic as well, of the trips that I have gone on, although I’m not sure it’s a sort of nostalgia that I want to relive very often.

Saturday, May 03

After walking myself ragged yesterday, I was exhausted when I got home, but only slept for about four hours or so before I was up and feeling energetic again. So what was there to do but go out again! I didn’t wander nearly as far today, taking only 8,500 steps or so in the step counter apps (thanks Pikmin Bloom) instead of the 20,000 or so from the previous day. But I started by taking the train back to Churchill Station where yesterday’s adventure concluded as far as the phone was concerned. Then I went up from the underground station to the surface and took, for the first time, a train along the Valley Line. The station boards had incoming trains marked 1C and 2C, standing for 1 carriage and 2 carriage, which reminded me of the trains I saw in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

I took the LRT to Bonnie Doon, another shopping centre that I hadn’t visited in years and years. This year might well be the year of me revisiting all the shopping malls in Edmonton now that I’ve become more mindful of my surroundings. I’ve already done Southgate, Mill Woods, Kingsway, and Bonnie Doon in the past month or so, and passed by the outside of Northgate.

Anyway, I was headed to a Mother’s Day art sale (local) that I had seen advertised, but that was located on the far end of the mall from where I entered it, so I had to walk through the entire mall, which was basically one long corridor.

A number of the shopfronts were closed and vacant, and the number of people in the mall wasn’t very high, which was really a pity because I found quite a number of eclectic and cool shops there. If Southgate, West Edmonton Mall, and Kingsway were your local, white-washed REIT malls full of big franchises (and I mean, Southgate is (local)…) then Bonnie Doon is more of a local strata mall, even though I’m pretty sure they’re technically a REIT mall too. By all this I mean that Bonnie Doon has weirder shops than the other two, like these ones:

A train exhibition store, amazing! I very much liked walking through there, though like I mentioned, the other aspect that gave it the strata mall sort of feel is how a good number of shops were closed or plain vacant, and how few people there were around, and that’s not a positive aspect of community-focused malls like this. Even the main mall office was permanently closed.

Like Kingsway, there were also nice art murals and stuff here and there, like these ones below. Why does Southgate have nothing like this?

Upon reaching the northern part of the mall, I found the arts and crafts sale in question:

There was a guy at the end of the row of stalls playing music too. Neat. The fair itself was almost all art though, with a couple stalls selling things like soap and ceramics/pottery, but although the art was really nice, I’m never in any position to buy much since large art is prohibitively expensive on my budget and difficult to bring home without a car. I sometimes do buy things like small prints, but I didn’t this time, though a couple were tempting. And I never buy stickers, because I have a weird thing where I consider them single-use consumables. Though they would work well in a junk/treasure journal…

Anyway, I made a circuit around the stalls and left after that. I only saw the one guy doing music, and didn’t see the floral art show or art demonstration while I was there either, though I’m sure they were there somewhere, at some point in time. About half the sales and fairs in Edmonton tend to oversell themselves and underdeliver in terms of uniqueness and quantity it seems, and I think this one was one of them, but what was there was certainly pretty.

After leaving the Bonnie Doon mall, I took a bus west along Whyte Avenue, and stopped by Old Strathcona Farmer’s Market. This, too, was yet another location that I hadn’t visited in years, I believe dating all the way back to 2020 again when Ran was still here. The last time I was here by myself would have been even further back, probably somewhere around 2016 to 2018 or so.

The market was very large and very full, and was crowded with lots of food and drink related stalls, which I expected from my memories of this place, plus the fact that it’s called a farmer’s market in general. Carrots were extremely pricey, with small bags going for $15 or so. I get wanting to support local farmers, but not at that price! I ended up buying some ground pork, which I used later that evening for another attempt at a chili dish.

Here are a couple other stalls that I photographed. This first one reminded me of Japan and my adventures with Zian in Kyoto, when she found a festival stall selling chocolate bananas. $7 here is again too rich for my blood though, though I was tempted.

This next picture is of the main food store selling meals in the farmer’s market, Paperbirch by Chartrand (local). There’s a whole canteen and dining area at the back of the farmer’s market normally, where you can sit down and eat a sandwich or a bowl of indigenous-inspired food, but when I got there at about 1:30 pm they were already out of food for the day. I had even passed on eating at Bonnie Doon’s to have lunch here at the farmer’s market instead, but they were out of food very quickly this day for some reason. The counter person cheerfully told me that I could find other food at the market to eat instead, but it would have been more an overpriced snack instead of a meal at that point, so I decided not to eat here and buy some food on the way back home instead.

Next, this is Pine Creek Tea — it’s the same stall that I had bought tea from yesterday, on Friday, at the Butterdome craft sale. I didn’t take a picture back then but I took one here. The owner of the stall, pictured, also recognized me and commented that we had met the previous day at the Butterdome, and I confirmed that that was indeed true! She said she had a regular table here at the OSFM, and also at another place called the Bountiful Farmer’s Market (local), which was also already on my list to visit at some point. She said a couple of hired girls were running that table over there this week, since the two farmer’s markets run simultaneously on the weekends.

I left the market and headed home not long after that, but picked up one more notable story along the way too. Because I missed out on lunch at the farmer’s market, I just decided to pick up some Tofu Tom Yum from the Thai Express store at Southgate on the way home. The weekday crew there knows me well, and I know them well too, and they all pretty much know my regular order without me asking, but not the weekend crew, whom by and large I don’t recognize at all. Still, the guy at the cashier surprised me by asking if I attended the University — he claimed that I looked familiar and that he thought he had seen me around before.

I said that yes, I did, but I was an employee there rather than a student. We chatted for a bit and he said he had just finished his second year at the University in kinesiology there. I’ve barely been on campus at all in the past two years though, so I suspect that he was mistaking me for someone else, but I suppose it was flattering that he thought I was a student there.