My Diary #242

Life

I felt very blah on a couple of occasions this week, and though I'm not sure why this happened, it was an uncomfortable and slightly scary feeling because it was the kind of sensation I felt a lot when I had clinical depression about ten years ago, where it felt like there was no safety net under my mood and it could sink very, very far into the depths of the soulful ocean. During that part of my life, that was a constant, everyday thing though, whereas here it was just for a few hours here and there. Maybe it was all the rain that fell the last few weeks, even though I don't think it is, as I generally like the rain very much and find solace even in a storm. Maybe it was life, and uncertainty over what I'll do with my paused plans for more streaming that seems to be going nowhere anytime soon.

Nah, I know the real reason why. The bulk of it was due to work, which has been pretty emotionally draining the past few weeks as a couple of big projects came to a head. My boss is extremely stressed out too, and that's trickled down to us as well. One of our big projects, an account cleanup one I was most involved with, passed a major deadline last Friday though, which took a lot of stress off the team. Nothing seemed to break either, so after confirming that things were fine on Monday and Tuesday, and with Wednesday being Canada Day, I took Thursday and Friday off as well so that I could have a nice stretch of five days off work.

This gave me some time to rest and recharge, and among other things, led me to research potential road trips that I could do from Edmonton to some nearby small towns. I wasn't initially intending on committing to one right away, but everything fell into place really quickly and before I knew it, I had hopped onto a Friday morning bus to nearby Vegreville, a town an hour east of Edmonton, and spent the day there before taking a return bus back to Edmonton in the late afternoon. That somewhat spontaneous trip is detailed over in a separate travel diary page, as I repurposed the Jilted Jaunts series that I had started last year to add a Day 9 post to it.

That was very satisfying, though exhausting, and gave me a lot of writing to do as I needed to get that travel diary post out as well as this one within a span of two days. It also added probably a couple weeks of material to my scanning backlog. And I was so close to being done absolutely all my Edmonton backlog (including event-related stuff) that I had picked up since I returned to my trip. Damn you, me-from-earlier-this-week! But rare, ephemeral papers are not going to collect and scan themselves, and I think I did come back with a bunch of really cool things to preserve and share.

Talking about scanning, I scanned my Welcards, a set of trading cards with horse pictures and stats on them that I picked up from WELCA back in late January, this week. As the full set of cards had cost $50, I was under the impression that there were exactly 50 cards, but it turned out that I could only find 49 cards all in all, so I emailed them to ask if that was the correct number or if I was actually missing one. I learnt from Seth, the person that I had initially spoken to in January and who also replied to me this time, that they weren't sure either, but that they actually remove cards from the set as the horses leave. As I had picked one up early on in the run though, whatever I had was likely the full set. He also said that they were planning on doing an updated run soon, and that they would announce it in the newsletter when they did. I told him I'd be looking forward to that!

I also asked for permission to upload the scans to my IA page, and he said that they were okay with it "down the road (in) a few years", but that for the moment I could upload a couple of my favourite cards if I wanted. I replied and said that it was unlikely I'd want to upload a couple of them individually and that I'd be more than happy to wait a few years before uploading a current set, because it was a long-term project anyway, but I just realized that I could instead upload them on the blog to show what they look like instead. So here are a couple of example cards! I picked Luke, Miranda, and Isla... hey wait a minute.

Anyway I'll probably upload the others to the IA in, oh, maybe 5 years or so? We'll see.

Another bit of research I did this week was into outdoor weather cameras. Jah got me thinking about this, after I shared a picture of the view from my balcony doors while there was a storm raging outside, which prompted him to suggest that I set up one and stream it live to YouTube or something. He was hoping for a quick and dirty solution, but I instead began to price out what it would cost to set up something like that with a good camera and portable power station, as there's no power socket on my balcony.

The Edmonton weather poses other problems for this idea too, the first problem being that our temperatures regularly drop to below -20°C in the winter, sometimes to as low as -40°C, and things just don't charge in that weather. Plus my balcony door fully freezes and won't open when under a certain temperature as well, so I can't bring a power station in and out of the balcony patio even if I wanted to. The second issue is that since my balcony faces west, it gets a lot of bright sunlight glare some days, and I'm not sure what sort of rating I should be looking for to help mitigate that as well. It might well be a case of "keep trying cameras until I find one that works". Either way, one thing is for sure, even if I set up a camera, it would not be a full year-round thing, but spring through fall would still provide plenty of great views.

The good thing though is that any item I get would still be relevant even once I move into a new house, and don't have the glorious balcony view to justify running a weather camera. I'd still need door cameras for personal safety, for example, and a portable power station is always useful in case of blackouts. Which is why I don't mind spending a bit more if I have to to get something good, rather than the cheapest, hackiest solution.

Anyway, I didn't actually make any purchase this week because I realized that my first order of operation should be to simply ask the rental landlord company if they would be willing to install an outdoor power socket for me. That would remove the need for a portable power station altogether. I even offered to pay for the installation. I don't know that they'd say yes to something like this though, but I figured it would not hurt to ask (and mention that if they didn't do it, then they would be forcing me to get a potentially dangerous portable power station made from lithium-ion batteries instead). As of the end of the week, they have not yet replied to me.

But I probably will end up paying a bit more to avoid that danger altogether, if I eventually go down this route. After some Gemini-induced research on ways to get around that danger, one promising option seemed to be this rather pricey, but very future-proof and (relatively) eco-friendly sodium-ion battery from Bluetti (local) instead. Or I can wait until more sodium-ion batteries arrive, which seem to be a semi-new technology that's only now starting to enter the consumer market. Camera-wise, my current top option was something like this EmpireTech Color4K-T one (local), but Gemini pointed out that that one would require a wireless bridge of some kind too as it doesn't seem to have a built-in radio even though it supports the relevant protocols, and I couldn't find any indication as to how glare-resistant it is. Who knows. For now, I wanted to note those choices down so I don't lose them, for if or when I come back to this in the future

To offset that potential spending, we (Albertans) are supposed to be getting some extra money this month. One is an Alberta Energy Rebate from the provincial government, and I needed to sign up for this one on this website (local) to get $100. People are also supposed to get a Canadian Groceries and Essentials Benefit (local), and that one is automatic and of a varying amount, but I just learnt that I'm actually just outside the income bracket (local) to be able to get anything from it now, so I won't be getting even a few pennies. Oh well.

In local news that's closer to home this week, I had noted a few months ago that there was a WasteWise sheet posted in our lobby with stickers containing house numbers of people who were actively participating in the food waste and other recycling program. The sheet at the time was only half-filled:

I don't exactly look at it very often but I did note at some point that the list got updated with more stickers, and finally there's some representation from the slacking 5th floor in our apartment!

in all seriousness though, I have no idea what order the Waste Outreach person went about the apartment, and whether he'll ever come back to the apartments he's already been to once before.

Finally, pictures. I attached my Osmo Pocket 3 to my balcony during a storm early this week to shoot a short video of the storm, and pulled this still image from the video for my ZOMG Discord to look at it, which is what spawned Jahandar's idea about setting up a permanent weather camera to begin with. This picture is from sometime around 11:00 pm on Mon, Jun 29 2026:

This other picture is from 10:44 pm on Fri, Jul 03, after I had returned from my Vegreville trip. I liked it due to the wall of clouds on the horizon and the varying colour palette just above the wall.

Games

This week had me trying out a bunch of the games that I had bought, or bought DLCs for, last week: Esports Godfather (local), Big Ambitions (local), Judgment (local), and a game from the Kairosoft bundles, Mega Mall Story 2 (local). Mega Mall was okay, but it seemed to lack a proper pause button which hurt it greatly, and a few of its systems seem rather obtuse. Judgment is fun, and exactly what I thought it would be, plus some detective mechanics that I was not expecting but pretty simple so far (in Chapter 1). Esports Godfather is something I like to play a couple games now and then to let out some tactical steam. And Big Ambitions (local)... it's interesting and there's a lot of stuff to do in the early game, though a lot of that is busywork as well. It plays like a single-character version of the Sims, but with a lot more focus on work and making money than life stuff.

Outside of those new games, I played more HITMAN World of Assassination (local), and fully completed the fourth map, Bangkok. It's doable, but I don't like it, at least not as much as Marrakesh. I'm also close to being done the next map, Colorado, the second-to-last map in the Hitman 1 remake portion of World of Assassination. This map is pretty horrible, not because it's small and dense, but because it's buggy, I ran into a couple of situations where my saves simply stopped loading due to too much data bloat or something, and I had to revert to an earlier autosave and quickly complete the mission to lock in the achievements that I had unlocked so far. I would have ragequit the game if I had lost the save entirely. I've been having a rising and ebbing level of interest with the game, which suits me just fine, some nights I push new content, some nights I work on trying to 100% a map, and some nights I just take a break and go play something else and do some content.

I also captured this specific screenshot from Judgment this week:

That highlighted drink? That's the tea I really like! Asahi Juurokucha. See this Memory Snippet of the Week. They're pandering to me!

Plushie of the Week #235

I picked up a plushie from the Vegreville Pysakna Festival this weekend, on Jul 03 2026, so why not immediately feature it as well? This plushie is a little perogy, and was from a stall named Charmaine's Little Perogies in the Yarmarok Marketplace in the Pysanka Festival:

It cost $10, and there were variations of this guy that came in various colours like white and pink. This one was multi-coloured though, so Tigey enlisted him for his army, and I duly paid for him. I asked the vendor who took my payment, the guy on the left in the above picture, to give him a name, and he laughed, hmm'ed for a moment, and named him Jerry. With a J, and not a G, I confirmed with him. I've wanted a perogy plushie for some time now, but the ones at UFest were way too expensive, so I was glad to find a cheap one here, even if it was tiny. Tiny just means that Tigey can use him as a backup pillow, though.

I also brought Jerry along to my parents' house when I went there the following week, on Jul 08 2026, and he got to meet both Jon and Kel, who proceeded to fawn over him and make fun of him. We whiled away the time taking turns to name what this not-perogy thing actually was supposed to represent (a curry puff, a gyoza, a cloud, a pincushion, a hexagon, half a flower, the other half of a flower...)

Front:

Back:

Tigey trying Jerry out as a pillow:

Tigey trying Jerry out as a bolster:

Tigey, maybe just treat your subordinates better?

Dreams

Jun 29 2026

• I dreamt that the police really wanted to recruit me to join their sketch artist division, and were trying to constantly catch me out in public places even though I usually managed to dodge them. It went to the point that they set up a mandatory test with a quiz portion as well as an artist sketch portion, where my copy of the test had a well-done sketch of the police commissioner appear no matter what I tried to draw on it, and where they declared that I had scored 91% on the test even though I picked the worst possible answers for the quiz part. Derpie helped me get away from it and to my dorm room though, where I grabbed my things and then tried to plan out an escape route after waiting for the police search intensity to die down and reset. Also there was a house that was on sale near the area that I was going to move to, but the initial selling price was 352k with minimum 5k bid increments after that, and the initial price was already more than what I thought it was worth, yet it went for 362k in the end.

Jul 01 2026

• Snippet: I saw a soldier affiliated with an authoritarian regime take a look at two giant, black triangles that looked like paper clips attached to the interior wall of a city, and then raise a weapon and fire a missile at it, destroying the structure. This caused a tall building next to the city wall to collapse into a pile of rubble, and I ran over there, pulling brick by brick away from one of the ruined entrances to try to see if I could help save anyone that was inside. The collapsed building rumbled a little as bricks were pulled away, which caused me to step away from it, at which point I learnt from someone else that it was a warehouse and there was luckily no one in it at the time.