Dear Tigey,
I love the sound of distant construction so much. Happy Canada Day and stuff! Also, you still smell of Indigenous-inspired infused tobacco and herbs and I like it.
Entry #197 (Jul 06 2025)
Table of Contents
Burger…
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #190
ට Memory Snippet of the Week #172
ට Dreams
Life
Last week, I mentioned that I had reached out to my realtor about a nearby house that was on sale. It wasn’t bad, though it had windows that were far too high and closets that were far too small. It had a decent basement and laundry room and a decent kitchen and a decent backyard and garage and even an air-conditioning unit, so I did end up making an offer slightly below their asking price for it, but ended up being outbid by another offer on the very same day, the second day that it was on the market, which came in at something around $8,000 higher than my offer and thus also significantly over the asking price, so I balked at that and they won the house.
Canada Day was on July 1st, but that day also had a rainstorm (I think technically it was a thunderstorm watch, but there was exactly one peal of thunder and that was it) as well as a heat warning, and none of the city celebrations interested me, so I wasn’t going anywhere. I did take a photo late in the evening of fireworks going off in the south somewhere though.
I’m not sure where exactly those fireworks were being launched from, since I’m no good at estimating distances. Maybe the Century Park area, but there’s no community space area around the LRT Station there and I’m not sure where the community centres in that area are. Maybe further south? I think last year there was some around a nearby community centre, but they didn’t have any this year that I noticed.
On July 2nd, I caught wind of an event called Downtown YEG Burgerfest (local) that was going on. “YEG” here being the airport code for Edmonton. The idea behind it was that participating restaurants would offer burgers at a promotional price of $10 to hopefully lure people in to try out new restaurants that they hadn’t eaten at before. It was par for the course for Edmonton in that it started out advertising about a dozen restaurants or so (I seem to remember reading that the original number was 13), then several dropped out and they then said thatr there were 9 restaurants, and then a couple more dropped out and the final number came down to 7. So basically it’s a “festival” with 7 “tables”. Classic Edmonton festival!
However, the concept was still nonetheless quite cool, so I wanted to give this one a shot. I did discover that only 4 of the 7 participating restaurants were open over the lunch hour though, with the other 3 only opening in the evening, so that made the festival even more awkward for those like me who cannot attend in the evenings due to other obligations, but on the flip side most people only have one lunch a day anyway, and the festival is only running for 6 days, from Jul 02 to Jul 07, and I didn’t want to go anywhere this weekend either, so maybe that was the right number of meal choices to have after all. I ended up going to two this week, while pencilling in a third one to go to next Monday, the 7th, which should be the festival’s final day.
For both the visits this week, I also bundled in a side trip to a nearby store as part of my adventure. And on the 2nd, this Wednesday, the first restaurant that I visited was called Jack’s Burger Shack. I did not take a picture of the outside, but I did take pictures of the inside:
This $10 burger here was described as a Lakeside Dairy Wagyu Patty, with Sun-dried Tomato Aioli & Lakeside Dairy Mozzarella, and it looked like this:
With the wrapping and the sauce like this it got a little messy to eat, but it was a good burger and I enjoyed it. The lady at the cashier was also super friendly. She even alerted me about another promotion that they were having in a couple of weeks:
The Calgary Stampede down in Calgary is happening this week, though I’m not attending it this year after all, but the K-Days referenced in that above promotion is Edmonton’s smaller version of that and is coming later this month. And this promotion apparently offers free tickets to that event? I might just take up that offer! Though I wonder which day the promotional tickets are for.
Anyway, just outside that restaurant was a second hand bookstore called Wee Book Inn. There are two locations of that store in Edmonton, both of them on both our city’s trendier shopping streets (or at least as close to a shopping street as you can get here anyway), one on Whyte Avenue and the other on Jasper Avenue. This was the Jasper Avenue branch, and I visited this one after I had my fill.
Something that these two second-hand bookstores are very well known for in the city is that the owners also bring in and raise a couple of cats that wander around the store and stare at customers as they browse the books on offer.
Both shops have been open for decades, and we used to visit the Whyte Avenue one fairly often in the early noughts as a family before we kids moved out. I don’t know how many cats there have been over the years at both stores, but I chatted to a staff member when I visited this week and I found out that this store currently has two cats. The male one, on the right of the bottom photo, is called Bossy, and the female one, on the left side, is called Oakley. They were both adopted a long time ago and came from the pet shelter with those names.
How cute. I also asked the staff member if they had any gamebooks, basically the “Choose Your Own Adventure” style of books, and he replied that they didn’t. I nodded and said that I figured they had gone out of vogue long ago and would be pretty hard to find these days, but I was surprised when he replied that they were actually hard to find not due to low supply but rather due to high demand — they never lasted long in the shop. Apparently when one comes in, the staff would just plop it down in the central rack in front of the cashier’s desk and it would be snapped up right away. Apparently there are quite some people that still feel nostalgia for those sorts of books!
He offered to keep an eye out for them so he could alert me for the next time I came by again, but I told him no as the thrill of the hunt was more interesting to me than the actual books themselves, and I don’t really get to visit these stores very often anyway. Plus he sounded a little hesitant when he said that, as though he started saying it and then realized how bad of an idea that sounded out loud haha. Either way, I very much like the Wee Book Inns in our city and should visit them more.
On Thursday, the 3rd, I visited a second store for this Burgerfest event. This one was downtown, and was called Rosewood Foods. Their featured $10 burger was a Pho Burger, with: Nonay Farms grilled beef patty, pho spiced mayo, scallion, cilantro, pickled white onion, and sriracha on a house milk bun. The place looked like this:
And their menu looked like that:
I wanted to see what the “fried farm egg” for $3.50 was like, so I ordered that together with the burger. The server asked if I wanted the egg on the same plate or separate so I said separate. My dishes arrived after some waiting and staring at a bug walking on the outside of the window that I was seated at:
That.. was a very underwhelming single fried egg for $3.50. I guess I expected *several* fried eggs for $3.50. But it was not to be. That menu above also has “hickory smoked bacon” and “house chicken sausage” listed for $6.50, and now I’m wondering if that’s one single slice of bacon and one single piece of sausage respectively for that price.
Anyway the inside of the burger looked like this:
Mmm cilantro. I did eventually just place the egg inside of the bun and ate the whole thing together, and to the restaurant’s credit, this burger did come with a fork and knife as well, which made it a lot less messy even though the egg yolk was dripping over the patty once I threw it into the burger. I did somewhat like the burger overall, but due to the ridiculousness of paying $3.50 for a single fried egg, I ended up leaving the restaurant an unflattering review.
On the way home from the restaurant, I stopped by a shop that I had seen many a time but had never actually stopped to enter, since it was on a small shopping area that the bus route #9 passes by that I never had a reason to stop at before. This store was called Ki-Fu-Ne Japan Gift Store.
Photos were not permittied inside of the store, but I did take a picture of some nice plates anyway that I was really tempted to get.
Super pretty, though most of those plates were around $15-$20 or so each. There were tons of other neat things in the store though. Teapots, cups, bags, stationery, cloth, model sets, a few plushies, and many other gift-style things imported from Japan. There were even a couple of goshuincho here, the books that are used to collect temple and shrine stamps/seals called goshuin which I got into during my first Japan trip, and then subsequently collected a few more of with Zian when I went to Kyoto for the RSJP.
A woman who I assume was the owner of the store chatted me up when I entered and a couple more times as I walked around the store, and she pointed out several things that she particularly liked and shared some memories of what those items meant to her when she was growing up in Japan. She also told me where she was from, and I know it was a two-syllable prefecture that bordered Nagano prefecture — I’m pretty sure she said that she was from Gunma prefecture, though I suppose it could have been Gifu or Aichi. Ever wish you could rewind time briefly to peek back into the past and confirm a random fact that you aren’t sure whether you had recalled correctly? Yeah, me too.
Anyway, I was going to get something from here as a keepsake anyway, and had originally planned to get a plate and a small cloth coaster for Tigey to sit on, but in the end she chatted to me about something called a tenugui, a rather large hand towel with pretty patterns on them, and I decided to get that instead. Maybe this is a thing I can start collecting from various places the next time I go to Japan too. Here’s a fact sheet on tenugui that I obtained permission to take a photograph of:
You can see a couple of actual tenugui on the right side of the photo as well since my phone camera takes such wide pictures. And here’s the one that I ended up buying, though I haven’t unwrapped and unfurled it yet.
The kanji on that cloth’s sticker (which shows the entire picture on the towel) says Sakura Biyori, or “Nice day for cherry blossoms”.
There were also origami animals by the cashier that were being given out to people who bought things, and they invited me to pick one up. So I also came home with an origami fox who is now seated safely in a box next to my bed:
So that was most of the week. I didn’t go out besides that, so nothing else too exciting happened, though I managed to cut my finger with a knife on Monday while chopping up an onion. It was nothing serious and didn’t bother me much, and I’m glad to report that I will be able to keep the finger attached. I also finally purchased an air purifier that I had my eye on when I saw it on deep sale on the Amazon page for it that I had bookmarked. I had to resubscribe to Amazon Prime to get that deal though, which brought it down from $275 to $170, so I held my nose and subscribed for a month and ended up ordering a couple other things I needed too.
I also have a couple of sky pictures from the week that I would like to share. The first one is from Mon Jun 30, at 12:35 am, and is interesting because the clouds here were so bright even though it was past midnight already. These are apparently called noctilucent clouds.
The second one is from Tue Jul 01 at 10:28 pm. I like it mostly due to the way the red and the blue clash together and are divided down the middle of the photo.
And lastly, this third one is from Thu Jul 03 at 9:15 pm. It’s a large raincloud in the distance, silhouetted against the orange palette of the sunset, drenching residents over in another part of the city!
Games
This entire week was mostly made up of two games, the Uma Musume: Pretty Derby global gacha game, and Backpack Battles, the latter especially around the early part of the week, then again on Friday night when my night time streamer, Nomakk, held another community night. I spent most of my evenings this week on one or the other, to the point that my dreams for the entire week were just flooded with references to both games. Agh.
It doesn’t really mean anything to anyone that doesn’t play the game, but I did manage to get six good endings this week for my trainees in Umamusume, and also managed to roll up two good three-star spark characters, one in Power and one in Speed. There’s only a 1% chance of rolling a specific 3-star spark after finishing a run in the game, since I need at least 600 points in a stat to qualify for a 5% chance roll for a 3-star spark, and I also need that stat to be selected for a roll by the game, out of 5 possible stats. So there are 5 stats that I raise over the course of the game, the game picks one to give you a spark for at the end of the game, and then if that stat is 600 or higher then you get a 5% chance to roll a 3-star spark for it.
The 3-star sparks then become legacies that can be used to give better starts to your other characters, helping them reach higher thresholds (1100 in a stat) that are more likely to give them better sparks. Right now, the game is still early enough that it’s very difficult to get these high spark characters, so getting two in a week is very lucky. Lots more detail here (local), but anyway.
I also hit a major milestone this week, once I finished the BLUE REFLECTION game that I had borrowed from Satinel and had been playing on my Twitch stream for the past little while. I 100%’d that game, and at the same time managed to reach this nice number on Steam:
11,111 achievements and 111 perfect games. Yay! And even the 37% is 111 divided by 3. That’s going to change right away since both Backpack Battles and Uma Musume are giving me achievements, as will probably whatever game I play next week on stream, but it was a nice goal to achieve. I had not taken too close of a notice to this, outside of being dimly aware that it was close, until I checked on Thursday morning and noticed that I was 11,105 and 110 with 6 achievements left in BLUE REFLECTION. So I had to make sure to not get any achievements on Thursday night.
Besides that, and some demos over both bookending weekends, the only other game I touched was the other gacha game that launched last week, Persona5: The Phantom X. It’s kinda boring with a terrible story so far though, so I haven’t been too invested in that yet. Umamusume is so much better.
Plushie of the Week #190
I mentioned in mid-May that I had gone to JYSK to pick up a couple pillows. While at the checkout counter there, I noticed that the woman in front of me had a cute little goose plushie, and I inquired with the cahsier where to get one of those as well. She pointed to a box not far away from the counter, and also noted that they were being sold as a charity fundraiser for the Special Olympics. On top of that, it was only $5 in price, although GST was apparently charged on the item, making the total cost $5.25. Not sure if that’s right or wrong, but it definitely felt weird paying GST on an item whose entire cost was supposedly going to be donated. Either way though, I made a new friend, this unnamed JYSK goose, who joined Tigey‘s Plushie Army on May 08 2025.
Front:
Back:
Side:
Er.. underside:
Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back:
Tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back:
Memory Snippet of the Week #172
Two separate conversations this week brought up the memory of two old electronic devices that I used to have, and wanted to make a note of so that I won’t forget them again in the future. I’ve talked about and shared pictures of a third old device that I used to have in the past, my Sony Walkman, back in My Diary 109, but these two items that I wanted to write about here do not have pictures, as I don’t think I actually own the items any longer, and in fact my mental memory of them is very vague at this point. But in case I either find pictures or other memories of them in the future, or actually find the items themselves secreted away in a box somewhere, I wanted to have a landing spot for them anyway so I’ll mention them here.
The first item is a Casio calculator watch. I used to have normal watches too of course, but at one point in Singapore I do remember specifically having a calculator watch, though I don’t remember why. Google searches for “casio calculator watch” show a number of watches with a 0-9 numpad and a few extra buttons, a digital screen, and several knob-like buttons on the right side of the watch, and that was roughly what my watch was like, though I do not know which specific model I had.
The second item is an MP3 player. This one I had in my early days in Canada, and was probably a Sony model, but back then it was just a standalone MP3 player and did not have any other smartphone-esque nonsense apps attached to it. None of the ones I’ve scrolled past in reams of Google search results look familiar though. There’s a much better chance that I still have this thing secreted away in a box somewhere, compared to the calculator watch, although it might also just have been tossed away at some point during a move. I wish I had more pictures from before 7 or 8 years ago or so, though this one would have to be at least 16-20 years ago back by now. Not even for the first time in this week’s blog, I wish I could briefly peek back in time to look at something that happened in the past, and then pop back again to the present!
Dreams
Jun 30 2025
- Snippet: There was a dream snippet about a blocked path, and laying down floating planks of various shapes across the surface of a pond so that it could be crossed by other people.
- Snippet: There was also another separate dream with snippets like a small item with a digital panel, similar to a pager, which listed the names of available horse races, as well as a specific scene where I was in a brown room and talking to a couple of people there, including Dad, before I went off to take part in a horse race or something very similar to that. There was an overall plotline where I had to calculate which races I took part in to achieve something but I forget the details, except that I was swapping shoes between characters and passing them down to other characters too.
Jul 01 2025
- I was walking along a sandy field when I noticed that there were a couple of small holes in the ground and that I could see a rocky cavern beneath the sand and grass. I moved over to the left side of the sandy field, where the terrain dipped down and there was a regular dirt field about a metre below the sandy field. I dropped down to the dirt field and found a hole in the rocky wall that led into the caverns under the sandy field. I contemplated jumping in, but I didn’t have a weapon or anything with me and I soon noticed someone coming, so I hid behind a large rock and watched as a couple of suspicious-looking people, likely smugglers, wandered in and out of the cavern.
- Later, I was headed back to my hotel when I met Jon and Kel. Jon had driven the both of them here to visit and I asked if they were going to stay overnight with me in my hotel room. They said they might but that it was dependent on some other task that they had to do first.
- There was also a scene somewhere in the dream where I was walking through a small, abandoned shopping centre with at least two other people. It was at least three levels high but only had one or two rooms or shops per level that I remember seeing.
Jul 02 2025
- Snippet: I had a number of Uma Musume training-related dreams, though I don’t remember the contexts behind them, just that there were various mechanics and puzzles and events that my trainer character had to get through. One I do remember involved a starter urban town zone that I was exploring, and I started with a party of 4 and a tiny car that I packed various things into, including water bottles and food, sliding them onto the car seats and the pockets at the back of each seat. Ther were also achievements to do in that zone, including one where I had to do badly enough to lose three of my four girl characters in the zone and then escape alone with the fourth character, and another one where I needed to escape the zone by ignoring the car and instead walk over to the southern side of the zone and order a taxi to bring me out of the zone from there instead. Both were one-off silly achievements so I saved the game and then did that. It took about eight hops to get from the central area where my car was, to the southern edge of the zone.
Jul 03 2025
- Snippet: I had a dream where I had irregularly-shaped pieces representing horses that I had to fit onto a board, and I then could surround those pieces with smaller 1×2 rectangular pieces that represented things like various tournaments and trainings for the horse. As long as those smaller pieces were adjacent to one of the horse’s tiles, then it counted as though the training or tournament piece was buffing the horse, giving it synergy and making it stronger. I could also upgrade the base horse piece or the side pieces. With that board, I then did things like compete against other players or just helping out the residents of a small town.
Jul 04 2025
- I was preparing for a set of GEP exams in the basement of a building. I believe that one of the preparations involved taking a plane to get to the location. I got all the way to the security clearance room in an airport that I typically associate with Vancouver airport in my dreams, though nothing in the dream acknowledged that that was where I was. Once I was approaching that room, I realized that I had forgotten my wheeled luggage bag at home, but that I probably still had enough time to leave the airport and pop into my home, which wasn’t too far away, grab the bag, and come back here. I also contemplated asking Dad to drive the bag here but I decided not to inconvenience him.
- I don’t remember anything else about the journey there itself, but once at the location, there were a number of columns of single tables in the large room that everyone was in, but also little pads on the floor in between each column where another column of tables should have been. Later in the dream I found out that those were used for the practical exam segment for dogwalkers, and the room was arranged like that so that we could not peek at the person’s paper on the table to the left or right of us. But at least we could look at cute dogs on leashes being led in by their trainers.
- The exams stretched over a long period of time. I seemed to know most of the people there as friends from Singapore, though I do not specifically remember any names. I also know Haru Urara from the Uma Musume game was there, because an old shopkeeper was giving her a gift and she mentioned that the exams would be going on for 5 more days.
- The room also had a side room that led onto a balcony overlooking an arcade area in the basement below. This was a practical section of the exam, where I could take an energy rifle and look after 8 specific racing machines below. Other people were coming along and trying to turn them on, which required a long induction process of about 20 seconds or so, after which they could sit down and start playing the arcade machine. All the backs of the arcade machines were facing me, and my aim was to shoot them to turn them off before those people could play them. Apparently I would get extra credit the longer the machines remained off, while those people below would get extra credit for their own separate exams, from a different course, the longer that they could play their machine.
- Someone next to me noticed that I was struggling at first, and gave me a hint that it was easier to turn them off if I aimed for a white electrical strip bar on the back of each machine.
– Later on, I also logged into an MMO world with two friends, accomplished some quick task, and then was heading back to a lobby room to log off again when the door to the lobby opened and Kynji and Jungo, the latter of whom was on a character named ItsJungo, walked out.
Jul 05 2025
- Snippet: There was one dream snippet where people were being followed by something floating in the distance while walking along a long road on their way home from something. I went to investigate this and ended up by a large pit where I found tons of weapons, armour, and other items, most of them blue in colour, at the bottom of the pit. It was basically a blue copy of “every item in the game”. Apparently how the area worked was that there was a trigger that would cause a random item from the pit to float out of the pit and after someone who passes by, as a reward of sorts, but only if they already owned none of the existing items in there.
- Snippet: In another snippet, someone else and I owned a piece of land in a house backyard next to a road. The backyard was surrounded by a fence and also divided into two by a fence. Each half of the yard was a game board of its own where items could be arranged, and he was very busy trying to arrange his items to synergize and do specific things while I just used mine as a dumping ground for various items that I collected. He requested at one point that I turn off or remove the wind chime that was in my side of the yard, and after investigating my yard, I found three separate items that were making a wind chime noise. I removed two of them right away but the third one was a smartphone or something that also did other things that I needed, so I could not remove it. I eventually managed to change its settings and turn off the wind chime component of it though.