Dear Tigey,
There’s been no sign of even one ant for over a month now (and only a couple for most of the month before that). Woo? What a relief, though I still nervously check every time I go to the kitchen.
Entry #225 (Jan 18 2026)
Table of Contents
Sunlit …
ට Life
ට Games
ට Plushie of the Week #217
ට Dreams
Life
In the early part of this week, I finally started tinkering with one of the prerequisites for the streaming that I want to try a little of on the upcoming trip — I installed the appropriate Belabox image to the Radxa Rock 5B+ that I bought a couple of months ago and also bolted it to the case that came with it. All that stuff went well, thanks to a SD/Micro SD card reader that I bought a long time ago — I flashed an SD card with a bootable image, stuck it into the Radxa, connected a monitor and keyboard to it just in case (though I apparently did not need to do this), and it did its own thing and spit out a configurable local webpage afterwards.
There was one hitch with this that I discovered though, and that was needing an SD card in the first place — the confusing site I bought it from listed six versions but didn’t bother changing any of the description text for each version, so I thought I was getting a version with soldered eMMC storage space on it to install the image on instead of using a removable SD card. But there wasn’t one. That version was actually like $20 more expensive or something and had a slightly different image on the website (but same damned description). So the SD card I installed it on was one that I borrowed from one of my cameras, and was way too big for what I needed for it.
I’m still glad it worked as a proof of concept though, but this meant that I went to order a smaller SD card from Amazon instead and will flash that and stick that into the box instead of the current one I am using. Then the larger one can go back inside the camera. Due to that, I didn’t actually finish the configuration on the website or try an actual connection to it. I just made sure that the box itself worked.
I also ended up picking up a couple of accessories for my Osmo Pocket 3 camera, including a clip that allegedly can attach the camera to my backpack or belt or whatever else, a stand that lets me perch it on a flat surface but tilt and change its actual angle, a set of lenses to play around with, and a waterproof case for it. The last one was from an Australian site, so they said it could take a while to arrive. It apparently already reached Canada as of the end of this week though.
I finally got my second month bill from Telus Mobility after switching to it back in mid December, and this is my first stable full-month bill so I wanted to happily confirm (as well as leave a note for myself in the future to compare with) that the discounts that Cole had listed, and the order theyt applied in, were indeed accurate. So my bill this month said:
$70.00 base price (“5G+ Select 100GB Canada-US (up to 2Gbps)” plan)
-$14.00 TELUS Internal Referral (this is the -20% that goes onto the charge first)
-$5.00 Monthly credit (for 24 months)
-$15.00 Mobile & Home Offer (for having both internet and phone through them)
-$10.00 Pre-Authorized Payments Discount.
The original calculations on the other linked page above had the monthly credit as $5.25 and the Mobile and Home Offer as $15.75, the difference is because both numbers included the 5% GST that we have here, which is tacked on later.
All this added up (subtracted down?) to $26, so the final lowest price number that Cole gave me was actually correct after all. There were taxes tacked on top of that though — $0.95 for an Albertan 911 Provincial Tax, and $1.35 GST on top of that — which means that either our idiot government or the idiot corporation imposed a tax for emergency numbers AND THEN CHARGED GST ON TOP OF THAT TAX. Double dipping, but whatever. The total came up to $26.95, which is a good price.
Early in the week, I was also puttering around on my blog as well as checking out a new (to me) food service that I had received a bunch of coupons on, and I got struck by a fey mood and ended up making a big comparison list of the different price points at Ho Ho Chinese Food restaurant at the University, comparing the walk-up price to the prices of the dishes on various food delivery apps. It’s listed over here in the Memory Snippet that I devoted to Hoho’s. Besides finding a lot of weird nonsense like a dish that can be ordered on one app but not the others, I also found a pricing error on one of their dishes on the Uber Eats version of their website that still persisted to the end of the week and hasn’t been fixed yet.
I wonder if it actually works and how many people have tried doing it. I have not eaten that dish before, nor taken advantage of that price error, but adding it to the cart on the website does show that it calculates the total based on that low error price. The app shows the proper price though, and most of the food delivery customer traffic probably goes through there instead of the website. And posting it on Reddit or somewhere public like that would get it instantly abused and taken down/fixed.
I also saw something on sale that really called out to me — WELCA, or the Whitemud Equine Learning Centre Association (local), is a local horse ranch and riding school located in the river valley in the middle of our city, and I’ve been on their newsletter since late April last year since I was curious if I could afford to try horse riding lessons (I can, but they’re very pricey, so it’s not a priority compared to other purchases that I want or need to make first).
Well, this month’s newsletter included a blurb about a set of 50 horse cards that they had printed, one for each of their 48 (I think) horses and two bonus cards of some kind, being on sale. To quote the site, “NEW for 2026, WELCA has launched trading cards of the horse! Each wallet-sized card features 2 photos of the lesson horse, details about their breed, weight, heights etc., and information on their personalities, past, and skills!“
This sounded great. It clocked in at a dollar a card, though, so $50 all in all, and $52.50 after tax, but the money goes toward supporting the horses (or WELCA in general), while the cards were something that really called out to me because they’re informational tidbits about the current horses, which played into my local historian/chronicler sort of… aesthetic? Anyway I bought this and immediately got into a friendly conversation with a staff member who reached out. I need to go down and pick it up at some point, maybe next week, maybe the week after. Then in the future I’ll probably scan all the cards and upload them onto the Internet Archive. They apparently will look like this:
I also had a renewal offer for my apartment this week, and it clocks in the same price again as last year assuming that I sign up for another year. $1,329/month. This is probably something I’ll do, and if I do find a house within the year I’ll just eat the cancellation fee at that point.
The tea that I ordered from Harney & Sons together with WingBenny last week, arrived at my place this week:
Most of those aren’t mine, only the tin in the bottom right corner and the two adjacent to its sides are, everything else belonged to my friend. And he was in town, so we went out for lunch on Thursday, at which time I gave him his teas as well as most of a large tin of black Chinese tea that Kel had given me when I went to the parents’ place two weeks ago, before she flew back to China.
Funny story there — Kel had four tins left that she was trying to give away when I was there, so she insisted I take one, and I did so and tried it. It smelled good and I did more or less like it, though there was a bit of a bitter taste near the end. Anyway, I passed it on to Benny as he also drinks a lot of tea, then told Dad when we chatted later on in the week that I could take another tin as I had assumed that Kel was still trying to give the rest away. My parents looked for the other tins though, and couldn’t find them — it seems that Kel had managed to give away their tins to another friend in the interim, in the couple of days after we had the family gathering and before she flew off again. Well, I still have lots more tea at any rate, and its one less problem that I thought we needed to solve!
Anyway, Benny and I went out to a restaurant nearby my house for Lunch on Thursday. This restaurant was Syphay, a Thai-Laos mixed cuisine restaurant, and I had never been there before. I also just tried a dish that looked decent but that I had never tried before (and had no idea what the name meant) — Pad Ped Mee.
I opted for the highest spice level, Thai Spicy or something like that, which was above and beyond Extra Spicy. It wasn’t that hot. The dish itself had a strong peanut flavour, since I believe most of that crumbly substance on top of the dish here were peanuts. Benny had a curry rice lunch special, which looked like this:
He also paid for lunch. Again. After lunch, he took me to a nearby Costco Business Centre, as there were a couple things that he wanted to pick up. I also told him about my new year’s resolution and said that I wanted to see if I could find a new item that I had never eaten before, but eh, not really in the end, since they sold large quantities of everything and I had to take into consideration how much time I would have left here in the country before I flew off. I got a large jar of kimchi, a large bag of broccoli, and a large jar of hot pepper rings, which is about the closest thing that I did get that could be considered a “new item” to try.
I’m not going to actually open that one until I get back from Japan though, since it has an expiry date of a year but has to be refrigerated after I open it. So it’s sitting on a box in the kitchen just off the floor, and looking very neat there as decorative clutter.
I also told him about an amusing(?) dream I had the night before, where we had met up and then took shelter in a shopping mall as a typhoon or tornado swept over the mall. Thankfully that didn’t materialize in real life, so we had a good chuckle about it. We also took a commemorative picture in his car on the way back:
My other main outing this week was on Friday, the next day, when Dad called me up at about 11 am and said that he would be down at the mall for lunch, and asked if I wanted to meet up. I said sure, and met him down there to shop a bit and then sit and chat for an hour or so, which was nice. That was also when I found out about the tea tin shenanigans.
We chatted about a bunch of things but the most interesting bit is that he claims to have seen Auntie Stella, who passed away recently, in a couple of visions by his own bedside after she passed and before/after her funeral. During the first instance, the night before he knew there was a funeral, he saw her in a colourful yellow and (green?) sari, and during the second instance two days later there was also an orb of light that passed through her. He said he couldn’t see her face on either occasion but knew instinctively that it was her. He also provided links to a livestream of her funeral as well as that of another friend of his who recently passed, and I archived both.
He also said he wanted to buy me something from Safeway while we were shopping there, because I had paid for his stuff the last couple times we went to Safeway. I told him about my new year’s resolution too and after briefly consulting with him, I ended up with this weird ginger drink:
It’s, ahhhh- interesting. I’ve drank something like this before, though I don’t recall where. I don’t usually like ginger as an ingredient, and this one is strong, but there’s also some sugar crystals in there and I’m more worried about how unhealthy those can be rather than the burning ginger taste.
Lastly, here are a couple of miscellaneous pictures for the week. The first one is what the Santa section of the mall got replaced with — there’s a children’s play area set up there now! I’ve never seen this one here before.
This next one is the pretty glowing sunset sky at 5:29 pm on Wed Jan 14 2026:
And another pending sunset at 4:49 pm on Thu Jan 15 2026:
And a morning shot at 12:54 pm on Sat Jan 17 2026:
The weather was really nice this week, with multiple days over the freezing mark and a couple of days where we were near to or actually hit record highs, I think. Due to that, there was a fair amount of melt this week, and you can see the roads in the pictures gradually dry up, though the snow piles still seem as high as before. Benny actually commented that the snow piles here in Edmonton are different from Calgary, they’re never piled so high there as they thaw and melt off now and then due to their proximity to the mountains causing chinooks and other different weather patterns. That was interesting!
Games
On stream, I played Urban Myth Dissolution Center through the week, and we are almost done the game, I think. It will probably be done Monday or Tuesday next week. And then what? I’m not sure. I only have a couple weeks left before I fly off and I’m unlikely to stream until the last day before I go or anything like that. I do like the game quite a bit, but also it’s been a lot of reading out character lines, too much so even, every stream, and that part hasn’t been as fun.
Off stream, I continued playing Sunlit Valley, the modded Minecraft pack that I’ve been playing for the last couple of weeks. I finally completed my project, an aquarium to feature many of the fish entities swimming around the game world, although actually gathering the marine creatures to put them in the tanks is a project that I’ll never finish. That’s fine though. I even have a little blurb that I wrote up for many of them, and I think the entire thing looks pretty neat. Especially at sunset or sunrise.
I also found a sparkly violet cow that apparently is a rare 1 in 1,000 spawn, I sent it to Tumbly to keep (and eventually incorporate into a public exhibit or something) since I’m leaving the server at the end of the month and she’s the longest-tenured player around.
How cute!
Plushie of the Week #218
The CrossCode plushies from Makeship that I ordered back in September arrived this week, though the delivery was delayed on the day that they arrived so I had to cancel my stream to receive them. Worth it though. As their arrival date, Jan 16 2026 will be considered to be their birthday, and they cost $106.94 overall, so $35.65 each. They join the Lea plushie that I had from a previous Makeship campaign. Unlike Lea, who had 4,000 copies of her made, Apollo only had 551 made, Emilie had 1,115 made, and Shizuka had 759 made. Without further ado,
Apollo plushie front:
Apollo back:
Apollo tag front:
Apollo tag back:
Emilie plushie front:
Emilie plushie back:
Emilie tag front:
Emilie tag back:
Shizuka plushie front:
Shizuka back:
Shizuka tag front:
Shizuka tag back:
They all shared an identical tag too. Tag 1 front:
Tag 1 back/tag 2 front:
Tag 2 back:
Here’s a picture of the bags, they were identical too. Front and back all at once:
Each bag had a tag, and the front of each tag was the same:
Whereas the bag of the tag had the plushie name. Apollo tag:
Emilie tag:
Shizuka tag:
Finally, here’s a group shot of the three of them with Lea, and Tigey in the middle for size comparison:
Dreams
Jan 12 2026
- I was living in an apartment dormitory together with two other girls, and a guy leader that we had. There was also another girl that was not living with us, but was known to have a deep crush on our leader. She was known to be a mentally unwell stalker, and our leader moved out temporarily to try to dissuade her, cheerfully telling us girls that he would be fine and to take care of ourselves until this all blew over.
- As she could not reach him, however, she started targetting us instead, and in particular there was a scene where I was in the laundry room outside the apartment and down a couple floors late at night, retrieving the freshly dried clothes from the tumble washer, when I heard loud noises coming from outside. My intuition told me that I would be in deep trouble if I tried to walk back upstairs with my clothes, so I spent some sort of resource to teleport home with my laundry basket instead, even though the distance didn’t seem worth the teleport. I did discover afterwards that she was indeed the cause of the noise and that she had been trying to find a way in to the apartment.
- Later on, the four of us, including the leader guy, were recording an advertisement for school that involved walking down a long, straight road, together with each other, and with a camera crew following us. This was also a public filming, so the stalker girl was there too, though she was in a ghostly spectator form that prevented her from interacting with us. But she followed the guy closely, while balefully staring at us girls and memorizing what we looked like. However, even though she could not speak in this form, I felt like I bonded with her a little bit after walking together with her for some time.
Jan 13 2026
- I joined a group of students in my school who were doing dailies. This involved three objectives, the first being a group dance, and the second being a group combat with another team that looked more like a fire ritual. In that second one, most of us stood around while three of the boys in our group, who were fire mages, channeled spells with one palm upturned and liquid fire dripping from their hands, in front of another group of students who didn’t have any fire mages and thus were also seated on the ground waiting for our group to burn through their hit points and “defeat” them. Both groups would still get credit. I forget what the third objective was.
- Anyway, after the third objective was completed, the two noisy girls that were leading our group disbanded it, but everyone soon noticed afterwards that our dailies had not actually been completed. People were confused, then I remembered that there was some glitch with the dance portion that caused it to not get completed under certain circumstances sometimes, and that we had triggered that.
- I told everyone this, then went back to the dance room to try to use a slash command to do the dance again and trigger the completion. This was a long shot though, since the period for completion had already passed and the event in the dance room was currently inactive, but I tried it anyway, only to confirm that it didn’t work. Some random boy passing by asked me to fix it because I had been the one to announce to the others why it had happened, and I told him with irritation that I wasn’t the one in charge of the code.
- I went back to my seat, which was located near the back of a room that seemed like an airplane cabin or a movie theatre. The rows across the aisle next to me had no seats though, so we had plenty of extra space to put things.
- I then started looking at nearby houses around us with a guy friend, first moving into a 3D view of the surrounding area and then pulling up a top-down map with filters. I was hoping to buy one, and told the friend that my budget for the house was 350k to 375k or so, but he put in a price filter of 525k and looked around. Despite that, we still saw nothing of interest at the moment, although he jokingly looked at a 60k house that was near us and said that maybe I should buy that as a project.
- That plot of land had no actual house though, just a crumbling brick shed that had to be knocked down, and it was nearly winter to boot. I told my friend that I had actually already noticed that one when we were in the 3D view and had already rejected it!
- Later on, Dad showed me a box of slightly exotic meat and asked if I was comfortable eating it. I said yes. But before we did that we had to go home, so I helped Dad carry that bag and another one as our entire family walked home through a light, drizzling rain. Mom was carrying five bags of groceries herself, Dad was empty handed since I had taken his two bags, and Kel and Jon were following along just behind, empty-handed. Kel eventually noticed that Mom was struggling a little so she took two bags from Mom as well.
Jan 14 2026
- I was in school on the Tuesday of my second week of classes after transferring in, and it was the morning period before the first class started. Three other students were already in class when I arrived, Eisen as well as two other girls, and they were talking about an English test.
- I interjected and mentioned that this was the first English class I’d be around for because there were no English classes last week, and that I had dimly heard about a test (and dimly remember thinking about this in a previous dream from what seemed to be months ago) but had no idea what was going to be on it because I hadn’t been given any notes about it.
- Eisen said that the test had already passed, it was an online assignment that was due yesterday. He agreed that I probably hadn’t been added to the system properly yet, and went to the front of the class, sat at the teacher’s desk, and turned on the computer there. He then logged in to the computer and proceeded to try to figure out how to add me to the system so I wouldn’t miss any future tests.
- Snippet: I visited an aquarium where each tank had a blurb in front of it talking about the fish in the tank, and there was an AI program that created a quiz based on the fish at the very end of it all. I reviewed the questions with someone else afterwards and we realized that the answers somehow led to clues about where to go to find more fish for the aquarium.
Jan 15 2026
- WingBenny and I were hanging out in a shopping mall together while buffering winds raged and rattled outside. After a while, someone looked at the minimap and noticed that a tornado had appeared on the minimap and was headed our way.
- Everyone in the mall rushed out of the individual shops into the general lounge area of the mall, which was still an indoors area with a roof high above us. We organically grouped up into groups of about 25 or so depending on where we were in the lounge, huddling together and holding on to each other for protection.
- As I held on to him and other people held on to me, I noticed that the group that Benny and I were in was standing below some glass skylights in the roof, but the tornado was almost upon us so it was too late to get everyone to move. We would probably be fine anyway, I thought to myself.
- The minimap showed a large spiral formation pass over us, much more akin to a typhoon than a tornado. The building shook, but held firm, even the glass above us.
- All of us could feel an upwards pull on us, not strong enough to blow away our collective mass but enough that Benny and a couple of other people in the group were lifted slightly off their feet and floating in midair while we clutched on to each other.
- Eventually it passed, and everyone let go and sighed in relief as they slowly dissipated back into the store. Someone mentioned how lucky we were that we were inside a mall, because some people had found a corpse out on the streets nearby.
Jan 16 2026
- Snippet: I had an inventory UI panel with one main tab and then another UI panel where I could browse messages that other players had sent to the game, written on scrolls and grouped into colours. Those scrolls were arranged into multiple grids in the secondary UI panel, and I had to take scrolls that weren’t in the same row or column as other scrolls, and put them in the corresponding slot in a grid in my main inventory. The colours of the scrolls across each resulting row or column also had to be different.
Jan 17 2026
- Snippet: I remember a little shrine with a field of tall grass in front of it, and a mechnaic where I could plant a thin, fully-grown tree in any squre I wanted. For some reason, I had a goal to plant a tree in every tile along the perimeter of a large square in front of the shrine, with the tile in front of the shrine being one of the corner points of the square itself. I needed to do this before a certain time to avoid an explosion that would take place elsewhere, but I only had about 5-8 trees to go and it seemed like I would safely avoid this.
- Snippet: My guild was at the front gates of a fortress making a distraction there as I came in through a side door and snuck through the fortress for a quest. There were orcs and ogres and other enemies in the fortress, and it was a long stealth quest, made slightly easier by a couple of consumable items which let me drop aggro if I was accidentally seen. Later on, once I was done, another friend needed to do the same thing but he got seen by several groups early on, lost his aggro drop items very quickly and failed. After a restart, I taught him how to optimize their usage by running through an extra room or two before using it even if he accidentally aggroed an enemy early on, as he still had lots of time before the aggroed enemies actually caught up to him and attacked him.
Jan 18 2026
- I dreamt that our school was having a sort of Sports Day or Activity Day where every student had a running points total through a series of events. Somehow, even though I was not good at the activities, and some of the activities had changed slightly because of rain or enemies, Tes saw that I had quietly amassed the top score in our grade section with 8 of 9 events having concluded.
- I told him that the 9th event, which was a race around an oval racetrack where we started on a second level building with hole in the side of the wall just above the starting line, was one of my best events too because I knew how to do tight turns around the corners. In addition, while I had done this race before and so I was used to it already, the last time I had done it was on foot, and this time everyone would be on little vehicles that all ran at the same speed, so it was much less strenuous and unlikely that anyone would overtake me.
- I did learn when experimenting, however, that you could apply armour points to the vehicle to give it a slight, temporary speed boost. I found that to be a weird mechanic, but it didn’t seem to be well-known by other participants or students, so I filed it away just in case.
- Even though there was only one official scoring event left, I sat down with Tes and played a game reminiscent of chess with him, which also counted toward our points or our ranking in some way. I had three pieces left, two queens and a pawn, and he had one piece left, a queen.
- I let him capture both the pawn and my other queen from the center of the board as I took my main queen to the side of the board and let it run up and down the edges, and when he asked why I did that, I said that my winning condition here was just to avoid losing the game while racking up as many spaces moved as possible, so he would never be able to catch my last queen or prevent it from running to the other side of the board in some capacity every turn, whereas saving the other two pieces would have lost me some total number of steps since they were in the middle of the board. He frowned and still tried it for a bit but it indeed turned out to be futile.