Life

It was so hot this week that I didn’t have the energy to do much. Every day was just survival. Shut the curtains in the early afternoon, turn on the fan, and try to survive until the end of my stream time (since the temperature drops dramatically in the evening between 6pm, when my stream starts, and 9pm, when my stream ends). Like seriously, what is this nonsense.

From Monday Aug 25:

From Saturday, Aug 30:

An entire week of no clouds! Just sun! And now that we’ve survived that, we get our clouds back next week but the temperatures are still hot for this area of the world. I hear a lot of places in the world would take ours in a heartbeat though. What qualifies as a heat wave here is cool weather for other parts of the world these days! And we better soak up the heat since snow is coming in two months.

At the start of the week, I went over to the parents’ place with my Surface Pro laptop and hooked up my laptop to their smart LG TV using Bluetooth. The reason for this was so I could look at a few potential houses with Dad and show him the house pictures on a larger screen, since his eyesight has been failing for some time now. This did work, although it took a long time to set up, partially because I initially forgot the password to the laptop and got locked out for a few minutes, and partially because the Bluetooth connection on the TV sucked and would just refuse to connect.

In the end, linking up the laptop to the TV via Bluetooth involved just trying to connect over and over and over until it worked, clearing the cached connection on the TV side each time in between tries. Once it was connected it mostly stayed connected though, dropping just once in an hour or so (which required me to repeat the same step again to reconnect — trying it over and over until it worked).

Anyway, from that whole debacle, we picked out one house that we might perhaps settle for, and I agreed with Dad that we’d go see it over the next day or two. I contacted my real estate agent when I got home, and… as usual, the real estate agent said the house was already pending. Oh well. The house had been on the market for over a week at that point, and had been privately on sale for over a month before that, and even now another 4 days later it’s still listed on the market? I guess the lister is lazy and did not remove it from the various realtor sides (since they’re self-representing), although I can’t help but think that my real estate agent isn’t really trying his best either. I believe that my “exclusivity contract” with him ends in November and I won’t be renewing it after that if we don’t find a home by then.

At least we didn’t have to head out in the heat this week.

On the way back from Dad‘s place, I saw that the local annual Midwest Resident Appreciation BBQ was going on for my apartment complex. I’ve been to a couple of these in the past, here’s the link to the 2024 one and that one has links to the 2023 and 2022 one. I didn’t stay long at this BBQ because it was late, and because it was HOT, but I did grab a free hot dog and take a few pictures.

This was my free hot dog — the sausage was actually really good.

And a wild rabbit was lounging in the grass by the side of a nearby building, glad that he was not inside the petting zoo being bunhandled by children.

Also, on last Sunday, I saw this at Southgate Centre. They had yet another little maker’s market called the Mom Market Collective Inc. (local) set up. I do like seeing these little fairs at Southgate, but the tables are never things that interest me. Southgate seems to like to try for higher-end, hoity-toity stuff, both in terms of the store roster they try to cultivate as well as the stalls like these in their fairs, instead of more down-to-earth, cheaper, eclectic options, and this fair was no different.

I had a couple of packages come in this week, one of them being my first package of Temu ever. There were a couple of boxes sealed up in flimsy plastic packaging, and one of the boxes arrived fine but the other looked like this:

Typical Temu quality. Both boxes were similar Loz bricks but one was almost perfect while this one was dented on both the top and bottom, on both the left and right side, so I don’t think it was a shipping issue. I think they just packed a dented box in. Whatever though, since the box was sealed properly and the pieces inside probably were all there anyway. Probably, because I didn’t actually open them — I won’t open these bricks and build them until I get my new house and a shelf in the spare room to house them. I do like Loz designs though, and I have five of their brick sets now.

Due to the heat and due to restarting streaming and group watch anime activities, and my Umamusume gacha game, I didn’t really have enough time to do much else this week. In particular, my art time suffered this week, although I did put in a bit of time playing around with Clip Studio and trying to learn the tools. I need to put a lot more time in this though and I get so easily distracted sometimes.

I only did a little bit of doodling this week, but outside of practice sessions, I did continue that drawing from two weeks ago using the reference drawing there. A little bit every week, right. I want to do more reference drawings though, they’re a fun way of improving core skills. I think?

Another effect of the heat was that I found a couple of bugs, specifically ants, in the apartment this week. I barely ever find bugs in the house — I haven’t seen a single one since the heat wave last year — but they always seem to appear in the bathroom first as well. Or maybe that’s just where I notice them, while I’m on the pot. I don’t know. Anyway there was one ant earlier in the week that I disposed off, then three during a stressful evening mid-week. I sprayed the corners and potential entry holes with insecticide after that and didn’t see one for the rest of the week, but I’m still a bit jittery.

Yet another effect of the heat was that I ordered online grocery delivery from T&T Supermarket for the third time this week. The last time I did it was at the start of July, but this time they had a $10 coupon that covered most of the shipping and handling fee, and then I spent 1,000 loyalty points from my T&T card to actually negate the shipping cost to get a net positive profit on it all. There was a free shipping coupon too but I would have saved less using that instead of the $10 off coupon. They didn’t stack though, since corporations are evil.

But online delivery is nice when I’m ordering heavy things like potatoes. And the potatoes (and carrots) from T&T are so much better than the ones from Safeway. The groceries seem to come in different packaging each time, last time it was in a box whose bottom gave up and broke just as I reached my door, this time it was in five different sealed handle-less paper bags that I had to drag into the lobby, then into the elevator on the ground floor while a conveniently-located John the Midwest handyman held the door open for me, and then drag out of the elevator once it reached my floor. And the top of one of the paper bags started to tear as I dragged them into my apartment. Everything made it, though, including not only those potatoes and carrots but also some um.. “Green Tea Red Bean Ice Cream”. It’s not bad.

Three separate sets of earbuds also arrived this week, a Bluetooth pair that Jah suggested, an IEM pair because I wanted a wired pair with USB-C cords and without volume controls, couldn’t find any, and then just settled for one with volume controls but that was purpotedly sturdy and also replaceable instead, and a cheap 3.5mm pair I used to fill up an Amazon order with that I gave to Dad cause he wanted a pair to use for his bedtime radio. I didn’t take a picture of the latter one, but the two former ones can be seen here:

Both of them are pretty. I like the purple case (and earbuds) for the Bluetooth pair, and I like the winded cords of the IEM one, known as Moondrop CHU II, as well as the anime-inspired case it came in. It even has a certificate of authenticity.

I don’t like Bluetooth ones in general because I’ve had lots of struggles pairing them on my phone when I need both to be connected to the phone but only really use one earbud at the time, since I am deaf in the other ear. I haven’t played around with it too much yet but on the one day I did try it, I definitely ran into issues where I’d pick out just one earphone from its case and it wouldn’t seamlessly connect. These ones also do not have the speaker centered in the middle of the earbud, but rather pointed out to one side, so the left earbud is completely useless to me because it doesn’t work in my working right ear even as a substitute in case the right earbud is low on battery. They force users to use the left earbud only in the left ear, and so on. Oh well. It still seems like a decent set overall I suppose, and they were only $25.

The Moondrop ones were also comparable both in that they were only $25 as well as having earbuds that were fitted to only work in one ear each, thus the second earbud is useless for me. However, since it’s modular, you can see in the picture above that I only actually attached one of the earbuds to the wire and left the other one as prongs. And if that wire actually breaks, I can probably move the earbud to the other wire, use that until it breaks, then just replace the cord instead of the entire thing. In theory anyway. We’ll see if it actually works like that. The audio quality is supposedly really good for its price point as an IEM, but I can never really tell and I was mostly going for it being modular heh.

Another thing I needed to plot the purchase of this week was scissors, because this has been happening to my kitchen scissors over the past month or so:

It’s gotten to the point where even with a screwdriver I can’t screw the fulcrum screw in anymore. Wanting something similarly long-lasting, as these scissors had served me well around 15 years, I ended up on the BuyItForLife subreddit and browsed a few threads there and got caught up looking at neat and sturdy Japanese pairs of scissors. A lot of their recommendations were not available in Amazon Canada or even other online stores without exorbitant shipping though, but I eventually settled on a Kai DH3345 pair which was more expensive than the two sets of earbuds above combined, but about half the price that it would have cost me to get any other pair I was considering.

I’d still like to go get a nice pair from Japan at some point though, but not right now. That being said, that did remind me that I still did not put aside any time this week to research the Asia trip in Jan-Feb 2025 that I wanted to make.

And a very happy birthday this week goes out to… my dream diary! My first entry in it was Aug 25 2016, so it passed its 9 year anniversary early this week. And one year I will catch up to putting all my entries into that instead of at the bottom of every blog post. (And also Satinel, my best friend and dearest muse, I hope you have a good year!)