Life

Y’know, I’m sick of this ant saga. I only saw a small handful of ants for most of this week, but it’s irritating that they’re still there at all. One crawled up my cork coaster and into my plate at one point this week, since the counter area beside the kitchen sink is also my food prep area, and it got terminated with prejudice. Then with me on heightened alert again, I spent a lot of time peering on and under the counter and saw three of them on the counter itself and four or five more scuttling about underneath the jutting out part of the kitchen counter rim on Thursday and Friday. And on Saturday I found around twelve through the evening, including a group of six on the counter and around my water flask, scurrying around with guilt etched upon their little backs as I moved the flask away and then crushed them.

I’m not sure where they’re coming from, though I think that if they have a base, then it’s somewhere behind my cabinets or in the walls/floors between the apartment levels or something. That’s what I thought the last time too though. There are no more on the walls or in the cabinets above, since I 212’d that nest two weeks ago. I have not seen a trail of ants leading anywhere either, just the occasional stubborn wanderer group already on the cabinets. And when I let one go and spent a few minutes watching it, it crawled under a hole in the sealing between the kitchen sink and the cabinet and disappeared. Huh? There’s a hole there?

I then proceeded to clear out all my lower counter cabinets on the sink side of the kitchen, but I found nothing. Well, sort of, I think the sink has a bit of a leak into the cabinet directly below it, which probably attracts them with the water, and I should call maintenance to get that fixed, but I didn’t find any nest and only one ant in total in those lower cabinets. So far. Maybe I should wipe the place down with vinegar. Or seal up those holes. Or move.

I got my payout from my workplace’s PSA benefits this week, so that was nice. I had applied for that last week, against the Surface Pro that I bought back in May, and it was processed very quickly. On the flip side, what was not processed very quickly was the request to have my blog website unblocked from the city’s Open City Wi-Fi thing that I called Shaw about last week. There was no news on this front at all and I didn’t have time to hunt them down or verify that the site was still blocked. So I didn’t pursue it this week. It’s on the to-do list next week though.

An in-person meeting with my workmates was originally scheduled for this week, but it was cancelled partially because the heat was being turned off for repair in the old, rickety building on campus that we were going to meet in, and also partially because some other project booked a meeting right on top of our boss’s calendar, over where he had reserved time for our meeting. How rude. We’re doing one in mid-November and one more in mid-December to close out the year instead.

I most likely won’t be taking any extra vacation time off from work this year before or after our Christmas break, and this is because I do all my work from home already anyway so what’s the point. No, I mean, it’s because I have this monster of a trip planned for February and March next year, and while I do have enough vacation time to cover it, especially if I’ll be working a bit here and there while on the trip anyway, I also want as much time in the bank as possible coming out of the trip.

I received a funny email about my main ticket for the trip from ANA this week. Apparently the time for my outgoing flight was changed and so I am entitled to a refund if I should choose to cancel my ticket, or there are options to move the ticket to another date too. The change in question? My outgoing plane now leaves Edmonton 5 minutes earlier and arrives in Vancouver 6 minutes earlier. Oh no!

While I didn’t formally book anything for that upcoming trip this week, the trip was front and center anyway because I spent a lot of time watching a Twitch channel named KumaMonster this week. He’s an IRL streamer from New York, but he’s currently doing a walk from Kyoto to Tokyo, following a traditional trail called the Nakasendo that’s been very much turned into roads and lined with rural neighbourhoods along most of the route. Some of the little towns and villages along the way, known as post-towns, have been modernized, while others have been kept traditional, so it’s been an interesting mix of architecture and experiences.

And you know what, I want to do something like that. Earlier this year I talked about doing a self-guided hiking trail through England, past little picturesque towns and rolling hills, and I still do want to do that eventually, but it didn’t occur to me that I could do something similar on a trip to Japan too. That Twitch streamer allocated about a month to do his walk, while on the flip side I have the second half of my trip itinerary still empty — the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival in Taiwan is from Mar 03-06, and my flight home is on Mar 23 from Tokyo. I don’t exactly need to do the formal Kyoto to Tokyo walk, at least not yet, but if I fly to Japan on Mar 04 or 05 then I would have just under 20 days to do something like this somewhere.

Now that being said, I’m not interested in a mountainous trail, nor am I interested in a wilderness trek, I like rural or even urban trails and I prefer being around people and civilization rather than nature. Plus if I am going to stream (parts of) this, which is still a possibility but isn’t decided yet, then urban areas likely have a better Internet connection than random nature hiking trails. We’ll see though, we’ll see.

One of the considerations he’s mentioned, and that I’m noting down for myself to look into for the future, is that his 8-10 hour streams, at what seems to be 1080p and 60fps, take up about 15 GB of data a day. That’s actually less than I thought it would take. He has ran into data cap issues and such though, though he’s using a local provider (Docomo) instead of something more robust for travellers like Sakura Mobile. But those are also more expensive. Just something else for me to research and consider when I put together a final itinerary, since this would apply if I plan to stream stuff regardless if I do a full trek somewhere or just spend time within a couple of cities.

On a more local scale, I trekked to T&T Supermarket this week again, marking the second time I visited the Asian supermarket this month even though it’s half an hour away. I visited them because they sent me an email ad saying that there were limited edition fridge magnets that I could pick up using my loyalty points, but alas by the time I reached the store they werre already gone. The duration of the event was Oct 17-30, and I only saw it on the last weekend and went down on the 27th, but they were out by then. Oh well. Maybe next time.

I did find out that their hot food deli section was turning into a self-serve area though, starting that very day, so that was a neat consolation prize.

It was nice being able to take bits and pieces from every tray, and even lean towards the parts of a specific dish tray that you happen to like more. The thing with this though is they didn’t provide a weighing scale there, so for a system where you’re filling your large bowl with food and then paying by weight, it’s very easy to end up with a bowl pricier than you had intended to pay at first, and at that point there’s no turning back anyway since all the food is already mixed in with each other in your bowl. So I think it’s actually a fairly dark pattern, though one I was aware of from other places that do this sort of thing. Also they did not provide any utensils or napkins.

I also found and grabbed a couple bottles of tea that were on sale for $1 — these were from a tea brand called Master Kong (康师傅) that I recognized, and I figured $1 was cheap enough to bring home and try. Although I learnt that for whatever reason, you couldn’t mix and match them at T&T — I needed to buy 3 bottles to get the $1 per bottle discount, but when I took one bottle from three different flavours and gave that to the cashier, they all rung up at full price. I had to go grab three bottles of the same flavour before she could ring them up at $1 per. That’s the first item in a long time that I’ve seen this happen to in any store, even in that same T&T trip itself I had some other item that was discounted for buying two at once, and I had one each of two different flavours of that item, and it rung up just fine with the discount. So weird.

Anyway I did like the tea, though it was obviously a processed and rather sugary drink. I had bought it partly on a whim and partly, as mentioned, because I recognized the name from my Tigey‘s Tea-Testers list (I keep writing this as Tigey‘s Tea-Tasters, and I guess it’s the same thing really). I thought it was a tea that I had come across in a convenience store in Hong Kong or Taiwan, but it turned out it was from a Chinese supermarket in Singapore. I then came across it again in Safeway later on in the week, of all places, although this one was pricier:

Talking about Safeway, Halloween was this week and so they were selling seasonal pumpkins, and whenever I visit the store during the Halloween period I always wonder if the average pumpkin was usually this weird-looking or if Safeway’s produce selection just really sucks:

I’ve become more and more aware over the past couple of years just how bottom-of-the-barrel Safeway’s produce is in general, their bags of potatoes (especially the russet ones) often includes several potatoes with dried brown inedible portions, their carrots are often thin and mangled and twisted, their napa cabbage have pock marks all over them, and so on. They probably get a discount on the remaining stock after other supermarkets have picked over them and gotten the better-looking and safer-to-eat ones, and then scoop up all those and try to sell them at regular prices or something. At least, that’s what it always feels like shopping for “fresh” produce from our local Safeway. And then I see those pumpkins and I think to myself… are some of those pumpkins ill?

I stayed up really late several nights this week again to continue to watch the League of Legends Worlds Championship games on Twitch, though except for one night I still was able to get a decent enough chunk of sleep each night. I probably should have called in on that Friday that I only got two hours of sleep in the morning of though, since my three remaining sick days will poof at the end of the year, and I’ll be particularly busy next week because I’m covering for a teammate who will be away for most of next week so I’ll be trying not to take a day then, but I pressed through it anyway and slept in until noon on Saturday instead. Which is why this blog isn’t very long.

Actually, looking at it, it did get pretty long.

With what scant leftover time I had this week outside of work, games, and planning stuff, I took a look at my Discord server archives and saw that I hadn’t really run any since Feb 2024, so I decided to let the archival program I use run for a bit and archive a few servers that I was in too. I’m still using the same program as before, Discord Chat Exporter (local).

My blog mostly avoids politics, besides the occasional archival of some local stuff, but as this is a followup of some earlier stuff, I also wanted to highlight that the Forever Canadian petition that had been going around Alberta canvassing signatures over the past few months ended this week, and they gathered far more signatures than they needed (local). They needed 294k and got 456k, including mine. Great. I signed it back at the AsiaFest YEG festival back in September.

Jon returned from his Japan trip this week, on Oct 29. Welcome home! He noted that I didn’t check in with the parents while he was gone at all and he’s right, that completely slipped my mind, what with all the ant nonsense and random games. I did talk to them once a couple of weeks ago and met Dad once at Southgate Mall when they provided me with food, but that was about it. Jon pointed out that the parents tend not to ask for help even if they need it and he’s probably right. I’m not very used to that aspect yet.

Finally, here are a couple of pictures from the week. Have a rabbit that I stumbled upon in the grass on Oct 31:

And some sky pictures from Wed Oct 29, 10:04 am, with the ground awash with rain:

And Thu Oct 30, 10:46 am, sans rain:

I’ve noticed there’s been a lot of skyscapes recently where the entire near part of the sky is filled with clouds, and then there’s a line on the horizon where it ends and there’s just clear skies beyond that. Like look at the first picture last week too, and all three from three weeks ago. Weird.

Oh well. And here’s one with a blurry moon and a tilted horizon from Sat Nov 01 2025, 1:09 am.

And Sat Nov 01 2025 at 5:58 pm, the landscape again awash with rain:

We made it to November with no ground snow this year!