My Diary #239

Life

I finally was able to get rolling on my scanning again this week, and worked through a large portion of my post-trip backlog. Not all of it, but a large portion of it. I also started uploading a few things to my IA page again,and managed to put up twelve items, mostly early on in the week. The uploading part is still full of friction though, I haven't figured out a good system to do it quickly and satisfactorily yet, though I did simplify the corresponding spreadsheet that I keep to track all my IA uploads. For the moment though I'm largely working on scanning, so that I can finish up my Edmonton backlog and start on the stuff from my trip, which I am looking forward to.

One of the things that was causing a minor but not insignificant amount of stress with my scanning was a weird psychological one -- my Plustek OpticBook A300 Plus scanner has an idle standby setting where it would go into after 10 minutes of being on but not being used. This really bothered me, and I found myself with a small but constant amount of anxiety whenever I did any scanning because I often multitask at the same time and also often had to fill in metadata and figure out the name and sometimes provenance of an item before I could go on to the next scan. Or I would scan multiple things at once and then try to get all that named and cropped and squared away before the scanner would go off. Ugh.

Gemini found a solution for this one though. I had no idea this tool existed, but there's an application called Scanner Utility that I guess came preinstalled with my Plustek software. It's not accessible through the actual printing software for whatever reason though, and I had to open up the Windows 11 Start Menu and type Scanner Utility into there to locate it.

In here, I was able to set the idle timeout to 30 minutes, significantly lowering my blood pressure and thus the barrier to entry to start scanning. I was no longer always bracing myself for my scanner to yell at me like my microwave does when I let it sit for a while, but it still will auto-shut itself off if I legitimately forget about it and end up doing something else or going somewhere. It also has a scanner "odometer", which I was intrigued to find.

Gemini tells me that this scanner has no consumables (like rollers) to replace anyway and its a heavy-duty scanner rated for a thousand pages a day in a library setting or something ludicrous like that, so my scanner is still basically in its infancy. It arrived in late March/early April 2023 though, so it's been around for about 1,170 days or so. That's an average of 6 scans per day, every day, almost on the dot. Of course the reality is that 0 scans happen on most days and a few days have a big pile of scans. It had better last upwards of several hundred thousand scans though.

Three packages arrived this week for me. One was related to this scanning project -- five polypropylene boxes from Staples that I linked last week (local). They cost $20 each and are for holding documents. The second was a pair of off-brand air filters that I got off Amazon (local) for my Winix 5520. Barely any reviews on this one at all, but I don't have odours or a ton of pet hair to clear so I really just needed a basic filter, and this one provided two (sets of two) for cheap enough. The replacement of these was very straightforward, although I washed the outermost replaceable filter and left it to air dry for a day before replacing the two inner filters and then placing the replaceable one over top and closing the entire thing. Then I had to manually reset the replacement indicator timer on the machine by holding the button down a few seconds. Turns out Gemini was right, that thing is just timed to go off every 10-11 months or whatever, and not triggered via a sensor of some kind.

The third item to arrive was a CD entitled Distracted by Beauty, from John Wiebe and The Augustana Choir. But wait, didn't I buy this CD way back in early April 2026? Yes. And didn't I say a month after that that I had sent them a followup email and they had said they had missed my order but had sent it out? Yes. And yet, here we are -- it took two whole months from the day I ordered it, Apr 07 2026, to the day it finally arrived in my hands, Jun 08 2026. I started and finished my entire blog migration AND Text Hover plugin rewrite between those two dates.

What happened was kind of interesting though. The lady who received my email, Charlene, said that she mailed it out Apr 30, but I waited and waited and it never arrived. I emailed her to follow up on May 19, and she replied on May 20 saying that she had mailed it out and we agreed to see if it would arrive in the next week before discussing follow-up options. I let that sit for a while longer than that though, before finally emailing them again on Jun 07 to say it never arrived.

Now, I was happy to pay for the CD again as a donation to the University's Augustana campus and that Choir in particular, and I offered to pay a bit extra on top of that for tracking with the shipping of the second CD. I wasn't sure how we would do that, since the order website (local) only had entries for base CD and base CD plus untracked shipping, but I figured we'd figure something out.

Instead, I received an email the next day from Dr. John Wiebe himself:

Jessica

I’ll deliver a CD to you myself, as I’ll be in the area today. Apologies for the delay.

Cheers,

John Wiebe, D.Mus., ARCT

Whoa. Now that's going out of his way (despite what he said) for good service. I never actually met him though, because he managed to make his way into my apartment building, placed the CD with a sticky note on the floor below my apartment's community mailbox, left the building, and THEN left me a message saying that he had placed the CD in the lobby and that if it was gone by the time I went down, then they'd figure out another way again. Oh dear. That seemed a little introverted but also endearing at the same time. Thankfully, I noticed the message eight minutes after he had been sent, and the CD was still there on the floor by the time the elevator took me down. CD get!

The music from the CD itself is actually on YouTube as well as streaming services as well. Well, most of it. The CD actually has one extra track that's not on those playlists for some reason, a rendition of Okâwîmaâw Askiy or "Mother Earth".

In related news, the carpet replacement that I had bought for the area underneath my computer chair was this Interlocking EVA Foam Floor Mat Tiles (local) thing. In theory, I figured that it would be fine even though it's foam, and even though the chairs I use for my computer have four metal legs that cause sharp pressure points at the bottom of those legs rather than wheels or something like that. As long as it kept the chair off the floor so it didn't scrape against the ground every time I stood up or sat down or fidgeted around. In practice though, what I didn't account for was that the chair keeps on catching against the border of the interlocking pieces, and that part in particular is probably going to tear off real soon.

This experiment seems like a bust, though it's easier to clean than carpet. I still should have stuck with carpet though.

Work was very, very busy this week, and promises to be as busy next week as well. I also will be going in to the office on Wednesday and Thursday next week for meetings, which should be their own type of fun. Nothing I dread though, but I plan to take a few more days off in a couple of weeks when things calm down. Nearer the end of the month, since the one major project that I'm most involved in has a deadline of Jun 26 (and then a few days after that of fixing things that break from the major change that's going in that day).

I went to Safeway once earlier in the week, and while I was there, I saw a number of packets of uncooked rice on the half-priced clearance shelves.

Why yes, don't mind if I do. I consume quite a bit of rice. I was carrying too much at that time to loot much of it though, but the discount rack at this Safeway does not move very fast, so I came back the next evening, and the evening after that, to buy some more of it to carry home. The bags aren't very big, but they're not insignificantly tiny either, and I had seven of them by the end of the week. That should last me a while, huh.

Both of those two evening trips have very minor stories attached to them too. The first one was on Wednesday evening, and I was trying to see if I could catch our local Empire Park Community League building open. I've never seen it open, as I mentioned when I came by a month ago. But I had seen the sign that said it was specifically open on Wednesdays from 6:00-8:00 pm, so that's what I tried to catch. I must have arrived too late though, as by the time I got there it was 7:50 pm and everything was deserted as usual. They must have left early for the day. (Or, never opened at all, which is probably more likely.) How unfortunate. At least I managed to captured this nice neighbourhood scene of a local community soccer match being played. Between which teams, I have no idea.

The second one was on Thursday evening, and at that point, I wasn't actually going to go out, except that a fire alarm started blaring at around 6:40 pm or so. So I decided to take that as a sign from the gods and went down to the grocery store to pick up a few more packets of rice after all. How nostalgic. I don't remember the alarm going off as much this last winter, and I don't mind it going off as much in the summer because our summer evenings in Edmonton really are lovely. This one was the third floor alarm though, and I noticed when I took a picture of the fire alarm panel that the time on the panel said 9:14 pm, even though the actual time that I took that picture was 6:47 pm. How weird.

I didn't bother going down again on Friday because Friday found me taking a sojourn down to the nearby H-Mart and T&T Supermarket instead. This was a very uneventful trip, but here are three pictures to memorialize this trip anyway. The first is the notice board from the Edmonton Public Library (Whitemud Crossing) that I walked by on the way there. Notice boards are always interesting to me, they contain tons of hyper-local ephemera that I cannot take home and scan but that will disappear for good once the associated event is over, so I like taking pictures of them to preserve them to some degree.

The second is a HUGE hotpot bowl that I saw in T&T Supermarket. This thing could feed an army!

And the last picture is a collection of new stuff I bought to try this week:

From left to right: Grated Chinese yam, fermented salted pollock roe (mentaiko), green onion kimchi, and desi ghee (Indian clarified butter). The ghee was from earlier in the week at Safeway, and I've been using it as a spread on my white rice, and occasionally as a butter for frying my breakfast eggs in. I like it quite a bit. I think I've had grated yam a very long time ago as I can still kind of remember its taste, but I'm excited to try it as a dressing on my... nine? ten? bags of rice as well. Same for the mentaiko, they kind of serve the same niche, a topping to put on rice or in my bowls of meat/veggie base just before I ladle a bunch of hot broth over them. And I love the green onions.

Saturday June 13

For the third Saturday in a row, I finished the rest of my blog early just so that I could go gallivanting around town. This weekend was a monthly Community Day weekend in Pikmin Bloom, which meant that I could get a meaningless badge if I put in 10,000 steps, and it would make the next anniversary walk at the end of the year easier if I wanted to take part in that thing. (I don't, that's a winter walk.) Either way, it dovetailed well with my wanderlust, so off I went, with phone, parasol, and Tigey in tow.

I took a long walk north and east from the Southgate area toward Whyte Avenue, which was my target for the day. But I planned to pop into random places along the way to pick up paper ephemera as I went. I didn't actually expect my first target to be a cannabis shop of all things though. I'd never even been in one before. But it called out to me, and apparently there was an event there yesterday (Fri Jun 12) and they still had a couple of random papers and brochures and stickers and other things lying out on a table for it. I didn't grab the stickers or water bottles or dubious sweets, as I was just there for the paper.

Interesting. The friendly guy behind the counter watched me like a hawk as I picked over the stuff and I pretended to be doing "research" into their prices before hurriedly excusing myself. Continuing north, I took a picture of this store:

I had previously walked by here and taken a picture of it back on Aug 10 2025 and had commented on how that store was closed down and had a For Sale sign outside of it. Uh, it's still empty and assumedly unsold. Poor art shop.

There's no lootable ephemera in derelict buildings though, so my next actual stop was a bit further north and east of that, and was the same one that I visited after the Colours store last year, the Old Strathcona Antique Mall. I did not really linger long in here, although I did peer at old maps and ads and stuff that were on sale there. I'm not really in the business of paying for old ephemera to scan though, at least not yet. I had a friendly chat with the security guard who was looking after the bag lockers too, did a round around the ground floor of the building, and then headed for the true prize at the exits, the ephemera table! And I captured a picture of the notice board too, but obviously I couldn't take any of those notices.

All the cards and flyers I took though. What's this about a Doll Club of Edmonton? Tigey! We've found our calling!

North and east of there was my actual target for the day, a building called Station Park (well, Station Park Food Hall, on the second level, at least. Station Park includes the buildings on the first floor and a couple of food places working out of buildings shaped like cargo containers off to the left of the picture.) The reason for this is that I had read an article (local) about how the previous tenant had pulled out earlier this year and was now being replaced by a rotating themed list of pop-up restaurants, the first of which was going to be a number of Japanese ones. They'll be there until the end of June, before being replaced by another set of restaurants for 3-4 weeks, and this was the opening weekend for this pop-up experiment(?). Sweet!

The building is very pretty too. I was there two hours early though, as the food hall only opened at 3:00 pm, so I went past the building to our iconic Whyte Avenue, one street north of it, instead. On that corner of Whyte Avenue and Gateway Boulevard, I saw this scene, which immediately led to what ranked as my best piece of obtained ephemera for the day.

That guy was taping up posters on an advertising column on that street corner, and I approached him and asked if I could have a copy of the poster, since he seemed to have a few of them. He said sure! So I walked away with this rare beauty of a piece that is normally relegated to a messy life on a street corner, exposed to the elements and having other things taped and stapled over top of it.

This one will go into the physical archives for sure.

I then visited a shop called Whyte Knight Toys & Games, a second floor shopfront near both Wee Book Inn and Woodrack Cafe, both of which I visited two weeks ago. I feel like this store used to be called Whyte Knight Cards & Collectibles, but somehow there's no (more?) matches for that name on Google. I used to come here to buy L5R cards a long time ago though, back in the 90s, and I chatted up the owner there who was surprised that anyone even still remembered the existence of L5R in the current day. He said he probably still had a couple of binders of cards around, but had no idea how to price them anymore, since the game was dead. He also asked if I was interested in playing the game, haha. I gave him some sort of a coy reply to that. He also had a couple of gamebooks in stock, but nothing that I ended up buying. And on the way out was a table with a couple interesting free papers that I grabbed.

My next stop after that was Woodrack Cafe, the place I liked a lot from two weeks ago. A different barista was on staff today, and although I ordered pretty much the same thing, I noticed after I got home that he only charged me $3.68 for the Milk with Rose Syrup. On my previous trip, I was charged $5.17 for Ice Milk with Rose Syrup. Wait a minute.

I sat down there for a while to relax and recharge, and while I didn't take a picture of the milk or the ephemera shelf, I did walk out of there with a handful of old Coffee News and YEGWords crossword puzzles sheets, so that was nice.

I still had about 45 minutes before Station Park opened at that point, so I went up and down the street, peeking into stores and looking for their ephemera racks, which were often near the front of the store, since Whyte Avenue is one of the more arts-focused strips in the city. I found ephemera tables in places like The Plaid Giraffe:

Vivid Print:

PACT Coffee:

And Block 1912 Cafe & Bakery:

I also found a building called Roots on Whyte Community Building that hosted a couple of cafes, an organic grocery store, and a bunch of health and wellness clinics. They had a central lobby area with a huge notice board:

And also a huge number of pamphlets, flyers, and business cards, I think largely from the people and businesses that resided in the building:

Ooh. I was excited to see this. Not for the magazines, I don't tend to take magazines that also have a digital presence online, and many of those I've seen outside other stores in Edmonton anyway, but I definitely looted one of every business card and brochure there to bring home and scan. This was my highest volume ephemera source by far on this day.

3:00 pm finally rolled around, so I made my way back to Station Park and climbed the stairs to the second level food hall there. The area looked like this:

There weren't a ton of people there right at opening time, so I took a window seat, and had a view like this:

The stalls here use a joint QR code that was splashed all over the food hall that led to a unified menu, located here (and here's a local link in two parts to preserve what the menu was like on this first weekend, complete with prices, because for some reason the page doesn't capture well). I am guessing this means I can just visit that menu link on a future month to see what is on sale there without actually trekking all the way there on any given day, huh.

At any rate, while I was there, I ordered the Truffle Fry Roll for $17.00. They seemed to require a 15% tip unless one manually set it to 0, which I didn't, so it cost $20.53 in the end for this:

It was a little overpriced, in an "all North American food is overpriced in this manner" sort of way, but it was pretty good. I enjoyed listening to some Japanese city pop music over the loudspeakers while I ate, and then skedaddled off to catch my bus home once I was done.

There was still one last interesting footnote to record for the diary though, and this happened while I was waiting for the bus. I saw this hippie-like guy stick a bunch of small wildflowers to this window sill of the shop next to a bus stop:

He then walked off in that direction. 1 or 2 minutes later, this OTHER hippie-like guy carrying a guitar comes from that direction, looks at the flowers, detaches it from the windowsill, and walks off with the flowers back in the original direction that the first guy had come from.

What did I even witness here?

Anyway, to wrap up this blog entry, have some sky pictures! Minus Saturday, which featured clear skies from horizon to horizon, it was a rather cloudy (and on-and-off rainy) week, and accordingly, balcony pictures for the week include many cloud-heavy shots. The first one is this deep blue sky that was probably slightly enhanced by my Samsung phone despite best efforts to keep the original shot's colours. Still, it's rather idyllic. This was taken Sun, Jun 07 2026, at 9:55 pm.

Next, another slightly less blue one, with a gash across the sky. Wed, Jun 10 2026, at 10:38 pm.

This next one is very fluffy, isn't it? It kinda looks like a herd of sheep was thundering across the horizon! Fri, Jun 12 2026, 7:10 pm.

And then a slightly pale red sunset that was almost glorious a few hours later, Fri, Jun 12 2026 at 10:25 pm.

Games

I continued playing a bit of Neverness to Everness (local) this week, although what gets me down about it is that there's just so much to do even just on the Daily and Weekly checklist. I do like the game and the characters and the story, but it's a lot to do, and I have so many other things outside of the game to do too that I just end up doing a couple of them and then leaving before I finish the checklist, and due to that I never even look at the story progression stuff that I haven't done yet.

I am so broken from my ephemera-collecting trip though. These days, when I enter a building in even a virtual game, and I see a scene like this:

I'm not looking at the pretty girl, or my cute outfit, or the imposing, gilded bank architecture, or whatever else most people look at. Nope. My eyes instinctively go right to the brochure/pamphlet/flyer rack and I wonder what's on it and if I can loot it to bring papers home to scan. Urgh.

I also bought and played a bit of HITMAN World of Assassination (local) this week. I had complained two weeks ago that the game had gone on a 14- or 15-day sale on Fanatical but did not start with keys (or maybe a super low number that was out of stock within the first 5-6 hours). I checked every day until the end of the sale but they never restocked it, even though I opened two tickets to see if they were aware of the issue, and both times they said they expected it to be restocked in 1-2 days. Above and beyond the absurdity of an artificial scarcity created on purpose for a digital product, it reflects very badly on Fanatical that they left the sale up for the entire two weeks when there were no keys in stock for the product for the entire sale period. I eventually just bought it from Steam for something like $5 more though.

Since it's an amalgamation of the last three games in one, I already have done the first couple missions several times before (and the boat tutorial mission is like Bleak Falls Barrow (local) in Skyrim at this point). And so they basically devolve into scenes like this where I start knocking everyone in a level out and dragging them to the same bush collection spot.

And hark, more paper ephemera.

Lastly, I forgot to feature it last week but Satinel finished her game jam game for the GameDev.tv Game Jam 2026 (local) at the end of May and it's another great banger. This one is called Animal Connections (local), and is apparently heavily inspired by an old game called Anteater and another one called Oil's Well. Neither game was anything I had ever heard of until Satinel showed me the games. This game has mechanics unique to it though, and even has a pacifish... I mean pacifist run built in to it where players can try to complete the game without eating any fish (electrocuting is apparently ok) to get special cutscene text.

Plushie of the Week #232

Back in, oh, My Diary #230, I mentioned that I had wanted to list all the plushies that I acquired on my trip in chronological order, but that for some reason I had decided not to do that, so I listed all the airplane ones and then jumped around a bit instead. The true reason for this is very extra. It's because one of the first plushies that I looted was this Hatsune Miku/Snow Miku plushie, but Miku in Japanese is an alternate way of saying "39", where the Mi is an alternate reading of the number 3 and Ku is an alternate reading of the number 9. So I just wanted to delay her until My Diary #239 to feature her segment.

That's it. That's the only reason. I messed up the chronological order to make Miku happy.

This Snow Miku plushie was acquired from an event called SNOW MIKU 2026, which was held at Wing Bay Otaru, in Otaru, Hokkaido, on Feb 08 2026. She was acquired from the Gift booth for 7,000 JPY ($60.80 CAD on that day of acquisition), and I logged the whole journey and stress of getting there here on my blog. It turned out that once I got there, the booth was deserted and still had plenty of stock left though, which deeply contrasted the Gift booths that I've previously visited at Touhou Reitaisai's here and here. Her official name is Yuki Miku Nuigurumi Sweet Snow Ver., where Yuki means snow and Nuigurumi is plushie. So she's the Snow Miku Plushie, Sweet Snow Version.

Her ponytails are stiff and can be used as handles to pick her up with.

Front:

Back:

Tag

Certificate of Authenticity:

And an image of the event booklet, which shows the Hatsune Miku in the same Snow Miku character costume as this plushie, for comparison:

Dreams

Jun 08 2026

• There was an underground bar with games that I frequented, which depending on the day of the week was also used as a place to leave messages to buy promotional L5R cards and other things, or to plot against the government. The police raided the place a couple of times but never found anything incriminating.
• There was a bus going along a road that cycled through the bar area, and a north, south, east, and west point on the bar at which I wanted to wait for the bus to pass by, and while it was passing by I wanted to sing four different songs which happened to have the same song title but with one word swapped out, that word being north, south, east, or west as well.
• I was with a guy and a girl and the girl had a portable karaoke machine that looked like a record player. We put down the machine at the east point and she played the song with the eastern version of the title, which turned out to be a rap song that I was somehow slightly familiar with from the distant past.
• She started the karaoke machine and we sang it hoping for the bus to come by, but even by the conclusion of the song it had not turned the final corner before the eastern point of the bar yet, so it did not count. We went to investigate and found that it had been delayed two hours at the last bus stop by the police for some reason.

Jun 10 2026

• Snippet: I remember staying in a room without a ceiling and there were two couches with panels or something on opposite sides of the room. A little coloured slime around the size of an apple lived in each one, one green and one orange, and even though they didn't talk or communicate I became friends with them over time. I also found out they had 4 hit points when I accidentally sat on the orange one at one point and it lost 2 hit points. I also remember one of them coming to say goodbye to me when I had to take a taxi from the side of the road to go somewhere at one point.

Jun 11 2026

• Snippet: I remember riding a motorcycle with Dad and Kel, at first I was riding pillion at the back with Dad in front and Kel in the middle. We fit fine when we were not carrying anything, but we occasionally also had to carry bags with us, which made it precariously cramped. Eventually, Dad used another vehicle to drive home with us instead, leaving me to take over the driving spot on the motorcycle. The motorcycle was broken in five places, two around the pedal, one around the handlebar, one around a bicycle chain mechanism it had that came loose once, and a fifth one that I forgot. But I still managed to guide it home safely despite not knowing how to drive one, holding the bike together by leaning forward and clasping something so it didn't fall apart, while slowly navigating along the path.

Jun 14 2026

• I lived in an apartment with a group of about 7-8 other people as part of a student club. Across from our front door was another apartment which housed a much larger club than ours, consisting of about 30 people. We would occasionally have people come visit us and knock at our front door, after which we would welcome them in, and our contact information was posted outside the door so that visitors could get in touch with us even if we were indisposed.
• The club across from us did not leave contact information outside though, and at this point in the dream, we had a couple people outside our door contact us to find out if we knew a way of contacting the people across from us. We didn't, and we were slightly annoyed by the question that didn't involve our club, but we waited around with them until we made contact with the other club, and then I also asked for their contact information so we could talk to them directly if this ever happened again.
• This led to an invitation to come into their apartment and join a party or conference or something in their basement. We agreed, and a couple of us made our way into the apartment, including me. Past the apartment door was a comically long, gently-sloping passage that led downwards, and I summoned a scooter and rode that down the passage, which turned twice before ending up in their actual basement.
• The basement consisted of a bunch of long canteen tables and benches, food being served from a banquet table that was perpendicular to those canteen tables, and someone by a projector screen on the far end. I saw Debbie seated at one of the benches, so I went and sat across from her and greeted her as our eyes met.
• I also knew that it was Debbie's birthday, so I opened up my text prompt and typed, in capital letters, HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEBBIE! Hitting enter caused a printout of a form with the text appended at the end to appear, and I gave that form to her. It also alerted everyone else in the room, and soon she had a deluge of forms with well wishes in front of her. I saw one that had typoed her name into a five letter name similar to Barry, and I was worried at first that I had done that, but concluded in the end that that was someone else's form.