Life

Life, Games, and Dreams, the “chronicle” sections of my blog, are the only sections in this week’s blog entry. I’ve done something similar to this a couple times before before the start of a vacation trip, as I spent my time on researching potential vacations instead of writing the “historical” sections of my blog (Song, Plushie, Memory Snippet). I have things to write for all of them still, but all my energy currently is focused forward, not behind, even though as you’ll see by the end of this week’s blog, I’ve still not decided on going anywhere yet. I could have though — it was a very real possibility throughout the week, and will be through the next week as well, plus there’s another wrench that got thrown in to my life mid-week on top of that, and that’s why I put aside looking back into the past this week. Things have been busy and will remain that way.

So early this week I bit the bullet and purchased the Surface Pro laptop I was eyeing. Although this was expensive, I knew that it was the best laptop for my needs and that I would fret endlessly over it for two weeks and I didn’t have time to do that — the window where I have lesser obligations and might want to do something interesting (due to both Anime/AMQ and streaming taking a scheduled break because Satinel was participating in a game jam) was May 16-May 26, and a major obstacle for me travelling anywhere was not having a laptop with me. With things like delivery time thrown in, I didn’t want that time window to be cut into by me making a late laptop decision and then having to sit around waiting for things to arrive, especially with another pending Canada Post strike (local).

The other reason that convinced me to buy it was something that Trinstar mentioned — I could always just return the laptop if I get buyer’s remorse or if the laptop doesn’t work out. This is true. I don’t do this frivolously, but if I find that it isn’t what I needed after all, or if I desperately need the nearly $3,000 I spent on it back in the next few months to make a house purchase work, I could always return it within 60 days, which is the return period for items purchased directly from the Microsoft Store. The Microsoft Store would also get the laptop to me within 3 days, and once I made the purchase it actually cut the shipping time down to 2 days, so I was pretty happy about that. Although in the end the keyboard came in 2 days, whereas the Surface itself came in 3, so it was weird having the keyboard without the actual laptop for one extra day. This was compounded by how the keyboard came in a cardboard box that was much larger than the one the laptop came in. Wasteful.

The pricey laptop that I went for in the end was a Microsoft Surface Pro 10 for Business, with an Ultra 5 processor, a 5G card, 16 GB RAM, and 256 GB hard drive. The 5G card upped the price of the item, as well as opting for both a keyboard and a pen and a 2 year partial warranty, otherwise the price would have been probably around $2,000 instead. I did get a 10% discount for buying the bundle though, so the actual price of the items was around $3,300 outside of the bundle. I feel very uneasy that my laptop is more expensive than my desktop. It is offset by the $1,500 I will get from my Personal Spending Account at work, the $2,800 from my tax return, and the recent pay bump at work which will get me some retroactive pay on my next two paychecks, but I do recognize that this line of thinking is not accurate either because none of that money was contingent on this purchase, i.e. if I had bought something cheaper I’d still have gotten all that money one way or another and have more left in the bank account. I might also not use the PSA on this this year since there’s a chance I might not keep the item. I can always claim the $1,500 against internet bills or other electronic purchases.

For the rest of the week, I worked on slowly installing “new installation” stuff on the Surface Pro, things like Firefox, essential addons, some applications like Discord that I need sooner rather than later, etc. And running into the myriad of issues that exist when running Windows on a tablet. We’ll see if I can resolve them over the next week or two.

So anyway, once that purchase was out of the way, I spent most of the rest of the week instead dreaming and researching and bellyaching about what to do for these next two weeks, which was infinitely more fun. I have been using Google Calendar to mark down interesting looking festivals and stuff, but ultimately while there are a lot of the things happening over the summer and fall, they’re all spread out over the months and over different places, and putting together a chain of interesting festivals and things to see in a plan is not really something one can do last minute.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a ton of options of things to do. There aren’t actually many things happening in Edmonton this long weekend through the end of May though, oddly. But I had (and still have) options within the prairie provinces. I could stay at home in Edmonton and attend local evening live music gigs and events that I can’t usually do due to anime and streaming. I could go to Calgary, and then go west to Banff and do some hiking and horse-riding, or join a yoga retreat there. Or I could go to Calgary and take a one day tour to Drumheller and the Badlands and the big dinosaur museum to the northeast. Or just stay in Calgary for a week or so. Or I could go to Vancouver, try to meet up with Allen, and visit a couple of night markets there on Friday evenings. Or fly to Vancouver, and take a bus east through the Rocky Mountains to Calgary, stopping off at a tiny town along the way for a few days for a festival. Other options also include a plane to Toronto, Winnipeg, or Montreal.

The thing is, with the way Canadian housing and hoteling prices are, a lot of these options became pricey very fast, especially anything that involved hiring others for a tour. And looking around, I found ways to get to either Japan in Asia, or London, Amsterdam, or Rome in Europe, for about $900 CAD or so while avoiding the USA, which even counting lodging and accommodation prices would not be that much more than several of the local options I was planning, and would be far more exotic in return instead.

I ended up spending two full days seriously looking at going to England, and I even plotted out plane routes that would have cost me under $1,000, possibly even under $900, to get to London and back, even though the plane tickets I was looking at would have been in less than a week for the departure, and slightly over two weeks from now for the return. It would have gone Edmonton > Calgary > London > Dublin/Amsterdam > Edmonton, and be mostly Westjet and/or Air Canada.

Regarding England specifically, I was very seriously looking at some self-guided hiking trips, perhaps a pre-booked one through the Cotswold region using a hiking agency the first time there, with the eye of doing future runs by myself once I became familiar with England’s roads and hiking customs. I want to go walk alongside rolling meadows and meandering rivers, visit idyllic little towns and eat random food in their pubs, and gaze at grazing sheep as they stare back at me on the other side of little cobblestone half-walls. I think I will do this sometime soon, even if I don’t go right now. But in the end, I just couldn’t pull the trigger on a trip like this month.

On the flip side, I also tried to plan out an itinerary to visit small towns around Alberta instead. And while it’s easy enough to get to Edmonton, Calgary, Banff, Jasper, Red Deer, and Fort McMurray, anything outside of that seems to require a private shuttle of some sort, and those are pricey, on top of housing prices that are very expensive. A day group tour from Calgary to Drumheller and back runs about $150-$250, which isn’t too bad, but I inquired about a shuttle from Calgary down to Waterton for a food festival that they were holding there, and it was $600 each way, which was more pricey than going to London and back from Calgary. Alberta, outside of the corridor between the two main cities and a couple of other towns, absolutely sucks for travel without a personal car. And lodging in both Banff and Jasper tends to be insanely priced as they’re tourist places. This made me seriously consider just not doing things but instead concentrating on studying for and getting my Learner’s driver licence.

I also spoke to Dad and started to plan out and price out a potential Singapore trip in September or so. It would be 2 or 3 weeks long, two round-trip tickets seem to cost around $2200-2400, although Dad pointed out some round-trip tickets to Kuala Lumpur in adjacent Malaysia that were running for about $1800 or so. Maybe. The hotel cost was the killer though, especially if we wanted separate twin beds (we do) and in-suite laundry (not sure). It was easily north of $150 a day, and over $200 a day if laundry services were included.

In the end though, I didn’t feel like I could afford to go to England or Japan or anywhere exotic while the Singapore trip was still looming in the distance, even though a big travelling trip around Canada, or even Alberta, wasn’t that far behind in price. But it was a bit cheaper, and thus a bit more palatable, so that’s what I had finally set my heart on for now pending finding last minute round-trip tickets to somewhere exotic for $600. That was the plane trip budget I set for myself.

Life had other really interesting plans though. While I was feeling down about getting prepped for this vacation but having nowhere to actually go, I did a house search through the usual neighbourhoods that I had an eye on, and found one that I really liked. I immediately contacted my realtor and he got me in to see the place at 10am the next day, even though it was the Saturday of a long weekend. He had to juggle his schedule and find a babysitter (his parents, in the end) for his son to accommodate me though, which I appreciated. Dad could not come along this time as he was still recovering from his eye surgery back at the start of the month, and was seeing double vision wherever he looked. I told him to hold up a wad of cash in front of him and look at it, but apparently my family already beat me to that joke.

Tuesday, May 13

I will leave the details of that visit to the potential house for a little bit further down though. Before that happened on Saturday, the main highlight outside of trip planning was that I went to Chinatown on Tuesday. Instead of taking a bus there, I took a train route to Churchill Station and walked north, more or less following the same route as we took on the Jane’s Walk event I attended two weeks ago. It took me past the old Edmonton Remand Centre that was being torn down, again.

It reminded me of the house that was being torn down in Kyoto when I was there for my RSJP trip, and the montage of pictures I took of that house some afternoons on the way back to my accommodation.

I was actually going to find some random restaurant to have lunch there, but I changed my plans when I went past this shop called Li Dong Food Products, as I remembered noting it the last time I came to Chinatown too. I liked it primarily because of this menu they posted outside their door:

They sold laksa! That’s a primarily Singapore/Malaysia regional curry noodle dish, and $12 was very cheap for it comparatively within Canada. I also bought the pork cheung fun from them to try out, basically a steamed rice noodle roll with pork in it, to try at home, though I found out later on that the menu was wrong and that specific item cost $5.50 instead of $5 and just hadn’t been updated.

Now, I called this place a shop instead of a restaurant, because this was the area behind the counter:

And this was the eating area in front of the counter.

I don’t think this quite counts as a restaurant. Either way I decided to do takeout instead of eating there. The lady told me it would be about 20 minutes, so I indicated that I was going out to walk around while waiting and do some grocery shopping. I went to the 99 Supermarket to buy some more of those Searay spinach fishballs that I really liked from last time.

The Chinatown neighbourhood definitely had some sketchy people hanging about here, even above and beyond a few homeless people that were hanging around listlessly. Example:

I can’t imagine how badly businesses must be hurting because of loiterers like that outside of their stores. However, I also had a very positive human interaction in the area as well, on my way back from 99 Supermarket to Li Dong. While crossing a traffic light, a woman approaching from the other end waved me down and inquired if I knew where an address she had written down on a piece of paper was. She said she had an appointment of some sort there at 2pm (which was the exact time that we met in the middle of the crosswalk) but had no idea where exactly it was. I pulled out my Google Maps on the phone and told her I’d walk her to the place.

It turned out that it was one street over, but was behind a bunch of construction work that was blocking our path there, and the sidewalks linking our street to that street were closed on both sides of the connecting road. There were no good detours nearby at all, so we eventually waited for a lull in incoming traffic from a traffic light further up east from where we were, and walked along the side of the road parallel to the closed sidewalk to get there instead. She got to her location a little late but none the worse for wear, after confirming with a girl outside the building, but who worked in the building, that that was the right place. I snuck a picture of her as she was walking away to her destiny. I mean her appointment. She’s the lady with her back to me on the right here.

Also, after parting ways with the woman and after picking up the food from Li Dong, I walked back toward Churchill Station to catch the train home and ran across a long line of little kids on the way to some excursion somewhere. It looked like they were heading toward the Edmonton Convention Centre or thereabouts. It must have been an entire grade’s worth of students from a school, the long lines I captured here were at most 1/3 of the actual line of students, possibly less. There were a good number of adults chaperoning them as well.

I enjoyed the sight. Cute little tots! And even though this was just a couple avenues away from the Chinatown ghetto that our city council keeps failing over and over, this area of downtown has lots of tall commercial buildings and was near to the City Hall, and is a bit further away from the Hope Mission buildings that try to serve the homeless, so homeless people and druggies don’t tend to hang out around there.

Friday, May 16

On Friday, I went down to The Bay. The 50%-70% sale last week levelled up this week to 50% to 80%, which is to say most of the items in the store that were still 50% off, remained 50% off. And a bunch of clothing that were already 70% off, remained 70% off. But I’m sure some stuff somewhere went to 80% off.

And here’s my usual photo from my usual spot.

The ladies’ clothes on the 3rd floor have been moved down to join the ladies’ clothes on the 1st floor, and the men’s clothes are still on the 2nd floor. The 1st floor is still mostly full, but the 2nd and 3rd floors, especially the 3rd floor, are now partially empty and it feels a little liminal walking through it even though there are plenty of people still around.

And nearly all the Hallmark plushies were gone! I guess I’m glad I bought a couple last week. Oh right, they haven’t been featured in Plushie of the Week yet. Soon! And talkiing about plushies, my one outstanding parcel right now, a plushie from Makeship that I had preordered back in February shipped today. The estimated shipping date for this was Jul 12 2025, so they’re about two months early, but hey, I’ll take it, especially if there’s a possibility that I’ll be moving soon.

Saturday, May 17

On Saturday, as mentioned earlier, I went down to look at a potential house down by Century Park. This one was in the same neighbourhood and within a stone’s throw of the last one that I really liked from last month. And for basically the same price to boot, about 280k. I went down at 10am to meet the realtor there and passed a rabbit on the way, which I took as a sign of good vibes. We walked through the house for about 40 minutes or so and it was very neat, clean, and likable. I found nothing majorly wrong with it and was happy to make an offer for it on the spot.

However when my realtor got in contact with the other realtor, we learnt that the owner was going to be taking offers until 7pm on Monday and then consider all available offers from there. He checked to see if the owner was receptive to some sort of immediate bid to skip that period but the answer seemed to be no, so he advised that we not make an offer until Sunday evening, to try to not give people the impression that it’s hotly contested, which he says might trigger bid wars, and then make the offer with one day left and see how things develop over the day in case we need to adjust it. I was worried that applying late would put me behind another offer if that other offer was the same price or something, but he assured me that that wouldn’t be the case since all offers would be reviewed together on the deadline itself.

Anyway, as of the cutoff time for this blog, I’m ready to make an offer for it later this afternoon or tonight, but we haven’t done so yet. By next week I’ll either be in pending and arranging for both the inspection and my mortgage (the old mortgage preapproval likely has expired by now but it’s easy enough to go through that again). The bank won’t be open until Tuesday anyway though since this Monday is Victoria Day, which is a federal holiday, so in that sense the owner only getting around to viewing offers on Monday gives me a couple extra days to sort out my finances and stuff. In particular, I need to also make an $8,000 transfer from my chequing account to my FHSA account before I make any sort of mortgage, which will give me a larger tax break next year.

I’ve meant to do that FHSA transfer for quite awhile now, and actually tried to do it twice last week, once in person at the RBC branch and once on the phone, but apparently I have to call a specific number during working hours in Eastern Standard Time, while sitting in front of a computer logged in to the RBC website, in order to make the transfer, which is weird. And a couple weeks ago, I emailed my RBC financial advisor but got a weird Out of Office email saying he was on vacation and would be back in December 2024. Even though it was April 2025. But he never replied so I guess he left or was let go and RBC just never updated his auto reply.

Anyway, back to Saturday. The realtor offered me a ride back to Southgate Mall, but I politely declined as I had other plans for the day, so we parted ways and I walked back to the Century Park LRT Station and took a bus from the attached bus terminal to Mill Woods Town Centre, to the east/southeast. In the Mill Woods mall, I stumbled upon an event that I had no idea was happening, some sort of a vendor market that was going on. It was decently sized too, and I found out much later, once I had gotten home, that this was part of the MayDaze Carnival & Artisan Collective Market event (local) being held by Wild Rose Shows (here’s a list of their rides (local) for posterity’s sake). The funny thing is that I WAS aware of the carnival and was actually here to take a look at it, I just had no idea that there was an affiliated market going on as well.

Cool. I also went out to look at the carnival itself, which wasn’t particularly active when I was there — but I was also there at like 12:20 pm on a Saturday, the second day of four which it was parked here. I’m guessing it would have been more active in the evenings.

Here are pictures of some of the rides and attractions at the carnival:

Some game stalls:

And some of the food stalls:

Carnivals are weird for me, I like going to them to look at them, but they’re very samey and I don’t actually like any of the rides or attractions or games or even food. I’ve found this about myself in Japan too. I love going to festivals with markets and games, but I seldom actually fancy buying anything from them.

I also went inside the mall and walked around for some time. I wanted to firstly shout out this clock and watch shop, which has been in a prominent central shop for years — I remember this from back when we used to live in Mill Woods, and that was like 15 years ago. It is a very prominent and eye-catching shop, even if most of the clocks are wrong at any given time (I took the picture at 11:01 am).

The shop’s page claims to have 40 years of experience, but what the heck is going on with the webpage itself (local)? Weird.

Also, there’s this passage that was not here before. It connects two of the wings, and I think there used to be a shop here with entrances on both ends. I don’t remember what kind of shop it was, I think maybe a shoe or sports gear shop. Now it’s just a fancy passageway.

But the reason I featured this is that there are two murals on the right wall there with pictures drawn by what I assume are schoolchildren (they were unattributed), and I LOVE chronicling assumedly temporal displays like these.

A lot of them had the theme of “togetherness”, and I later saw another mural elsewhere in the mall that reinforced that, so I guess that is the theme of the mall.

I bought several things from the mall while I was here — new earphones, for one, because my old USB-C earphones had one earpiece die off and stop working some time ago, and although it came back to life for one last hurrah today for whatever reason, shortly after that the phone could not even detect the earphones anymore and just said that it was an “unknown USB device”. So that’s how long this random pair of $13 earphones from Guangzhou lasted. One full year, minus five days!

My new pair is from a company called LDNIO, who are supposedly based in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong, China as well. It cost $26 after tax, and comes with a one year warranty. Hey, a one year warranty would have been nice on the last pair of earphones. Though who knows how to claim warranties when the maker is across the world and sells their stuff via random third party stores.

Other things I bought include a nuigurumi learn to crochet kit, which blog viewers probably won’t see the outcome of for months, but expect that to appear in Plushie of the Week eventually down the road. It was the first one I’ve ever seen in person “in the wild”, so to speak — I knew I could have ordered them online, and I see tons of finished crocheted plushies in craft sales and such, but I hadn’t ever seen an actual crochet kit for them even though I have been looking out for them. Today I found one, and now it is mine. I also picked up a few socks that were on sale, and a cheap CD from a second hand CD/record store named Revolver — not for the first time, I wish Southgate had a CD store, but then again maybe it’s for the best that it does not.

I almost bought more plushies from the store I got the nuigurumi kit from. This store was called Showcase, and they had very tempting friends like these:

And these 7.5 inch Squishmallows that were on “sale” for $15 per, but 4 for $45. Look at that giant box!

I am happy to say that I resisted though. Instead, I went to have lunch at that Bernardo place again that I went to last time I was here. This time I had assorted seafood and pork with mayonnaise, and the latter was soooo nice. The former was just okay. They also ran out of rice after serving the customer lined up in front of me, so I had to wait around for 10 minutes and then come back. What the heck.

Finally, here are some sky pictures for the week. I have been very spoiled with this scenery behind my computer, and If I get a new house and move out of here, I likely won’t have as amazing a scenery from my house. This scenery is a precious gift that I cannot hold on to forever, and a huge positive moodlet that kept me sane against the miseries of living in a poorly sound-insulated apartment with crazy neighbours and wonky fire alarms and questionable staff.

Anyway, Sunday May 11 at 9:17 pm. It was raining, a cool wind was slowly tricking in through the bug netting over the balcony door, and everything smelled so good.

Monday May 12 at 9:11 pm. I like the long, orange band of the sunset, and how the smoke wafting up from the mall (actually, I believe it’s the train station behind the mall) looks like it’s on fire.

Friday May 16, at 8:23 pm. Look at the weird cloud lines in the sky! And the way the gentle yellow of the sun collides with the dark clouds in front of it.

And Saturday May 27, at 8:00 pm. Angel’s ladders are so pretty!

I will miss this view.