My Diary #244

Life

Laundry sucked this week. The machines were "working", but the laundry machine left my clothes still sopping wet for some reason, even though there was no pool of water at the bottom of the machine or anything, and even after wringing some of the water out first, the dryer left my clothes damp and cool, as though the heating portion of the machine wasn't working at all despite me putting the clothes in there for two full cycles (i.e. 2 x 1-hour cycles) on normal heat cycles instead of my usual 1 hour on delicates.

This led to an unpleasant last Sunday where I had to lay out the clothes all over my furniture in the apartment and blow a fan to dry them off as though I was in some Japanese or Chinese hotel room. They all dried by the end of the night before I went to bed, but some of them had a slight lingering musty and damp smell that will only really be solved the next time I put them in the washer again. I still didn't want to wash them again right away because I put in a work order for someone from the Coinamatic/Wash Connect team to come look at it though, and I didn't want to spend more on that overpriced laundry machine by doing a load of laundry out of my usual cycle cadence, so I just decided to live with it for a week.

I did learn this week, however, thanks to this mishap, that refund processes on the app are processed and approved automatically. Assumedly there's some sort of upper limit for this before one gets flagged, and I only angrily requested a refund for the second hour of the dryer after I had used it and removed my clothes only to find them still damp, but at least I got something back I guess. I also sent them another message about fixing the annoying "<5 minutes left" display to show exact remaining time for the last 5 minutes of a washer/dryer cycle. I think this is the fourth time I have sent this one now. And the beatings will continue until the problem is solved. I'm probably going to straight up give them a negative app review soon.

I paid the $265 plus tax (so $278 after tax, $280 after a stupid Entrata portal service fee) for an electrician to come install a new power outlet out on my balcony. They had told me I could pay by the portal or in person at the rental office, but they didn't actually put the charge onto my portal until I went down to the office on Thursday to inquire, only to find out that it had stalled because they had forgotten about it, and then finding out that I couldn't actually pay in person because they only accepted a debit card down there and Mom had trained us never to use debit cards where possible, only credit cards. Anyway I got them to put it on the online portal, then went back home and paid it. And at any rate, this installation is now happening next Monday.

Most of the stuff I need to set up my little hobbyist camera is also on the way, I believe. One package came (or is coming) by Amazon, one by Canada Post, one by UPS, and one by FedEx... naturally, the last two to arrive were the one from UPS and the one from FedEx. My new All-Clad pan did come via UPS without incident in the middle of this week though, and the FedEx delivery person just snuck into the building, left the package outside my door, and snuck out without ever knocking on the door or anything like that. But I heard the rustle of the box against the door, so I went outside to pull the package in while he was still at the elevator lobby, and we exchanged a wave before I closed the door on him. I like this non-interaction though. Both Amazon and Canada Post (when the latter delivers up to my door instead of to my mailbox or the community lockers) do that too, and that's just the way I want it to be.

Anyway, the new pan looked like this:

It's actually a little too heavy for me to comfortably lift, but oh well. Using what Gemini taught me about heating the pan up first and about the Leidenfrost effect (though I didn't see this in action and just barrelled on with cooking anyway), I made my first meal on it, three eggs and a slice of ham, just fine over the weekend. Next up will be soup on Sunday. By far the most uncomfortable part about using this for me is not the weight or the new cooking procedures though, but the fact that I have to let the pan sit on the stove to cool off while I go have my meal, before I can actually wash it. I really don't like not washing up completely before I start eating. Oh well, I'll adjust.

Due to the clothes mishap, I didn't really go out much this week. I had a heat-induced headache too and didn't go to work for a couple of days this week, which also went some ways towards another minor problem I had about having too many leftover sick days this year that I'll lose if I don't use them by the end of the year. My boss was also sick for several days this week, so it was thankfully a quiet work week overall for once.

Besides grocery runs, I still did go out for two notable events this week though. The first was a First Responders Appreciation BBQ (local) that was taking place in the southern parking lot of Southgate Centre. This is the parking lot that I can see from my apartment balcony, and it's the only event that takes place there in the entire year, so even if I set up the camera promptly next week, it will have missed that event by a week. Oh well. It's a noisy event and I can't see much of it from my balcony anyway. Just something like this:

So I had no choice but to go down and take a closer look at it.

There were, as expected, a bunch of first responder-type vehicles and booths set up, as well as tangentially related departments and services provided by the City of Edmonton. Stuff like the Edmonton Police Service, Alberta Health Emergency Medical Services, Edmonton Fire Rescue Services, Alberta Sheriffs, Community Standards, and the Animal Care & Control Centre, as well as a couple other external programs like Youth Empowerment & Support Services and the Mental Health Foundation.

Of course, I went around collecting brochures to bring home and scan. Special shoutout to the Alberta Sheriffs' table, which was distributing this AI slop children's colouring book called "Alberta Fish and Wildlife Officers: What do they do and how do I become one?" It looks fine at a cursory glance, but there's some horrific, grotesque stuff in there, and a bunch of messed up wording and other things. So classy.

Anyway, in a change from last year's BBQ, there was no more guy in a moose head but there was now a small vendor market as well.

Hark, in the corner over there, more AI slop. I should probably have tried to get a better picture of it, but oh well.

Instead, I went to check out the actual BBQ. There was a DJ booth blasting out music loud enough that I could hear the booming bass from my apartment, and a bunch of picnic tables underneath umbrellas, which was nice as it was a very hot day. It was too crowded for me though, so I never tried to find a seat there.

The prices for the BBQ had risen from last year, and I think the year before that. Did I visit the one the year before that? I thought they were $1 burgers in the past, but if I did actually experience that before, that would have been before I started cataloguing them down in my blog. According to last year's blog though, it was $3 for the hamburger or cheeseburger set, $2 for the hotdog set, and $1 for just chips or pop/water on its own. This year, it was $5 for the cheeseburger set, $4 for hamburgers or hot dog set, and $1 again for just chips or pop/water on its own. The burger/hot dog sets did come with free chips and water last year though, and it was the same this year. Still, the queue was very long, and I suppose it was for a good cause after all.

This was my resultant cheeseburger before I closed the two halves together.

And the bottle of cold, mineral water was nice too, although I have kinda always thought of mineral water (basically bottled water) and the bottles they come in as a total waste. I had my burger underneath an abandoned tent, and then wandered off back into the mall. I picked up my skirt from the tailor shop in the mall, and gave them a nice review because Paul, the old Chinese guy who manned the store there, remembered my name even though I had only briefly met him once before, when I dropped off my skirt there nine days prior.

There's a second car being displayed in Southgate now, after the Tesla that I photographed three weeks ago. This new one is a Volvo, and it's located in the middle of one of the central aisles instead of a corner aisle like the Tesla.

Yet again, I find myself idly wondering which entrance to the mall the car came in by, since all the pedestrian entrances are too small for it, but there's no really obvious freight route that it could have taken either. And while I'm on the topic of entrances, I sent a small complaint notice to Primaris REIT, the owner/caretaker company of Southgate Centre, to complain that the southeast entrance, which faces the residents in the neighbvourhood, is never open until just before opening hours (~10:00 am) anymore even though it used to be open very early in the morning (~7:00 am) for residents to enter and walk around in or cut through to reach the transit centre on the other side prior to the COVID-19 lockdown.

Some doors are still open for people to access the mall early, but they're the doors on the other side of the mall, by the transit centre and the Starbucks that's open earlier than other stores. Completely locking out the residents who actually live in the area, which is especially painful in winter. What a crappy mall neighbour. I don't expect the email to have any effect, but it had been bugging me for quite a while, so whatever, I had to at least express my displeasure.

The second event I went out for this week was to visit the parents' apartment again to chat with Kel, whose time back in Edmonton was coming to an end again. I chilled around there in the sweltering Friday heat until Jon arrived with dinner in the evening, which was an uninspiring nasi biryani dish from a southern Edmonton Indian restaurant called Nitara that we'll probably never eat at again. The rice was plain, though the chicken was decent, and the chilli was a lousy match for the rice, though the yogurt was nice. No curry was included though and that ruined the dish, especially for the price that they charged ($17.49 before tax and tip).

I gave Kel back her Pebblebee, which I had now resynced to all our devices, and gave her a small bag of Cookies & Cream tea from Harney & Sons (local) as well. She returned me the Solis Edge which she had borrowed for the week, and we looked at a video of her new apartment that she was moving to for her next teaching contract.

Also, she had to fly out Saturday amidst a potential severe thunderstorm and tornado alert!

Image courtesy of this government site (local). Yet, despite that, the actual weather alerts site (local) had nothing for us as late as time of writing (early Saturday afternoon). At 4:54 pm on Saturday though, it suddenly got upgraded from a nothing to an orange severe thunderstorm watch, and a big storm rolled in from the southeast and enveloped Edmonton for a while. There were no tornadoes or funnel clouds, but she ended up being delayed and had to spend one unplanned overnight session at Vancouver airport, and another one at Incheon International Airport in South Korea, and because the delay was due to inclement weather, WestJet would not step in to cover any of the hotel costs.

I believe she ended up leaning on the travel insurance on her Scotiabank Passport Visa Infinite+ card for that though, the same card that both Jon and I have as well, which gives up to $500 to cover hotel, transportation, and meals for events such as this, including inclement weather. Which reminds me -- they supposedly rebranded our cards from the Visa Infinite to the Visa Infinite+ and are supposed to send us the cards at some point, but they haven't arrived yet.

While I'm sharing interesting weather maps, here's one of active Canadian wildfires this week/right now as well, courtesy of this site (the picture below acts as a (local) cache):

It looks like a dragon swept by and burned most of Canada. Thankfully the wildfires missed us and the wind's not blowing this way either. Bad weather in a good swathe of the rest of the country though.

Still, it oscillated between crazy storms and hot weather and then back to storms this week, and I'm glad I don't actually own a house yet and have to worry about flooding, or roofing issues. Instead, I get some nice balcony pictures every week to share. To followup the hailstorm on Saturday last week, there was another brief one on Sun, Jul 12 2026, while the sun was still out and brightly shining. The wind wasn't blowing right into my balcony this time, so I could at least go out and take some cool pictures of it. As of 6:55 and 6:56 pm:

Here are some cute clouds from the next day, Mon, Jul 13 2026 at 10:39 pm:

Some Jacob's Ladders the next day, Tue, Jul 14 2026 at 9:02 pm:

A half-light, half-dark bisection of the sky as a raincloud swept by again in the distance, Wed, Jul 15 2026 at 9:34 pm:

What even are these colours? Wed, Jul 15 2026 at 10:24 pm:

And patchwork clouds overlooking a murky sunset, Thu, Jul 16 2026 at 9:24 pm:

Both the Taste of Edmonton and K-Days are running this next week, and I hope to make it down to both when time permits, so hopefully there's some days of decent weather coming up.

Games

This week, I did play a bit more of the Football, Tactics & Glory (local) game that I had bought last week, but not a whole bunch, largely just to finish up my current seasons. I had already won everything there was to win as a club, and just about fully upgraded everything I could, and the national team part of the game I found to be much less satisfying, because I had to grind a 5% RNG roll over multiple years to get enough youth players on my club to fill my country's roster to be able to really challenge the best teams. Weird mechanic, that.

I also got sucked into an old flame, TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children (local), and started a new game on the hardest difficulty because I couldn't remember much about the story in the other save file that I had already progressed more than halfway through the plotline with. I'm not sure why I started this game, except that the Football game had probably awakened a desire to play more tactical SRPG-type games in me, but I did have fun with the few levels that I played again, and the Cruel difficulty mode doesn't seem too difficult either, thus far.

Another game I played from Steam this week was Euro Truck Simulator 2 (local), in which I did a bunch of the tutorial, got a massive dizzy headache, and then came back the next day to just do a little bit of driving around in Europe, and then a little bit of driving around in Project Japan (local). I want to like it, but will I stick with it? We'll see.

The last solo game in this category was Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor (local), which hit 1.0 a little ago but I never swung back to. I started a new save file since there were some new mechanics like gear now, romped through a few early levels, and it's awaiting my mood to see how I feel about it next week.

Satinel and I also picked up Sniper Elite v2 Remastered (local) (and a few other Rebellion games) from a Fanatical bundle, and we spent a couple days on the weekend playing this. The game is definitely a step down from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th games in franchise, which we've played, but it's still been a few years since we played any Sniper Elite, so that's been fun nonetheless. Missing so much quality of life stuff though. And the game pauses when either of us tab out.

I also have an urge to swing back into a gacha game of some sort. Neverness to Everness is on Steam as NTE: Neverness to Everness (local) now, and both Honkai: Star Rail (archive) and Zenless Zone Zero (archive) were having returning player events with free gifts so I went to check out some of that too, but although I immediately rolled the new 5-star character in HSR, and although I really like the female protagonist in both of those games, the sheer number of things I have to click on and check out when I attempt a return to those games always turns me off.

Belfknightt also mentioned a recent mobile game called Sword x Staff (local) that he was checking out and was enjoying, so I quietly checked that out as well and found myself poking away at it in bed. It's a whole lot of menus within menus of reward, with a gacha system to earn and upgrade skills, and the gameplay itself is all autoplay and idle resource collecting with very little actual player agency, but I don't particularly want a lot of agency or complexity in my phone games anyway, so I'm still giving it a bit more of a shot to see if it gets better. Particularly once I hit their live event stuff, which I'm fairly close to, I think.

Lastly, Jamie, the dev of Mighty Meow (local), reached out to me again to let me know that she had given my poor, neglected YouTube channel a bit of a shoutout on her latest video for playing her demo sometime back, so I wanted to give her another shoutout for that! I'll also locally archive that video in case things happen.

Plushie of the Week #237

While Kel was recently back in town for a couple of weeks, here's a plushie that she left behind in China at wherever her apartment stuff was stored when she was gone. Likely a storage unit of some kind since she was between apartment contracts. While the Plushie of the Week three weeks ago was from a Chinese dim sum restaurant called Dim Do Duk, this one is from another Chinese restaurant called Song Chongqing Hotpot Factory (怂重庆火锅厂). Three guesses as to what it serves. The particular hotpot restaurant was likely in Guangzhou though, not Chongqing, since that's where Kel stayed. I'm not sure if this one was a prize or loyalty reward of some kind or if it came from a promotion though, but either way it is cute!

The pictures were taken on Mar 13 2026 in Kel's apartment in Guangzhou, though the plushie itself would likely have been from sometime in 2025. I had meant to feature this right after the one three weeks ago, but it got bumped two weeks since I got two new plushies after My Diary #241. So here we are now.

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Dreams

Jul 14 2026

• I was casually playing Pikmin Bloom with both my siblings, and Jon and I took turns driving a truck tractor with a small semi-trailer attached, with Mom and Kel on board. It was Friday night, and we scoped out a farm off a highway just outside of a town, with a dead-end dirt path that ran alongside a field with a hundred mushrooms of different shapes and sizes.
• I wanted to stay around here for when reset happened at midnight, because there surely would be several giant mushrooms that spawned here, and we would all certainly get our 3 giant mushrooms per weekend day quota all fulfilled if we waited. But I warned that even though it was out by a public road, it was technically trespassing, and it looked like there were a couple other people, likely the farming family that owned the field, that were also hanging out along the dirt path.
• Kel dismounted the truck cab and went to speak to the farmer there. After a few seconds, she came back and smiled and said that she had gotten permission for us. I thanked her for being a social butterfly and headed into the field to wait while Jon drove Mom back to our house, which was located not far away, in a rural area just outside of the nearby town's Chinatown.
• Kel and I waited for the game reset at midnight and saw all the physical mushrooms in the field despawn, and then a bunch immmediately respawn as random mushrooms. Although there were about a hundred mushrooms that despawned though, only about 20 respawned, and I realized that these ones did some sort of weird staggered respawn.
• There was only one giant mushroom too, and while I claimed it and invited both Jon and Kel so that they could join it too, I was half-disappointed that there weren't more and half-excited that we could continue the search for the rest of the day.
• I texted Jon and told him that we were ready for pickup, and Jon said that he had just pulled up at the house and dropped Mom off and would come back for us. While we waited for him, another 20 or so respawned and we actually managed to find our second giant mushroom of the day there.
• Once he drove us home, I looked to see if any other friends had found anything. Zixiang was playing but hadn't found any, but I sent him an invite to ours too. I then noticed that a couple of work acquaintances happened to be talking in my workplace's games chat about Pikmin Bloom and a couple similar games.
• Although I already had Amy on the friends list, and I didn't know these other people except passingly by name, I casually dropped my 6-digit friends code in the chat and said that if anyone played it and was interested, they should feel free to add me too. I did get a couple adds from that.
• Later that day, I finally found our third giant mushroom, though I don't remember if it was thanks to the new adds or by myself. It was a mushroom located next to a tower by a shipyard and ocean that I was going to be exploring.

Jul 15 2026

• There was a war taking place in school between two opposing sides, and this war involved throwing things at each other and involved our side trying to apprehend and eliminate the "bad" people on the other side.
• It ended when I lured the last member of the opposing team, the Umamusume character Gold Ship, into a dorm room where two other girls were sleeping. She thought she had cornered me, and had her hand raised with what looked like a baseball, ready to throw it at me as I retreated from her into a corner.
• Unbeknownst to her though, I had an ally shadowing us from behind, and I backed away into the far corner of the room, causing her to approach me menacingly with her back to the door, which in turn let him slip unnoticed into the room.
• He pounced on her, wrestling her to the ground and eliminating her. The noise awoke the two other girls in the room, and I apologized to them, telling them that "The war was now over".
• Later on, there was also a scene where the school teachers were trying to locate two laminated sheets of paper that had something like the class timetables for the entire school on it. They had left it on a table in the school canteen for people to reference but someone had apparently taken it on accident, and they were going to hold back everyone at school past midnight while they searched for it.
• Even later on, I went with Fro to visit a market next to a ruined coliseum on a celebratory trip to some city, and he then wanted to check out the actual coliseum afterwards so I followed along with him as well. When I saw the coliseum gates, I was struck by a sudden wave of familiarity, as I had seen this place before.
• He said that there were many coliseums like this in the world, and I said that I must have visited one of them on a previous trip. I searched up a list of them on my phone, but I couldn't remember exactly where I had been on my previous trips, and the place I thought I had seen it before, around northwestern Asia, did not contain any coliseums on the map. Neither did South Korea, which was the other place I could remember visiting a long time ago.
• I said that maybe I had gone to see the Finland one, and Fro brightened up and complimented my travel taste because he himself was from Finland, but a few seconds later I realized that it couldn't be that as there was no way that I had been there before. I didn't bother correcting him though and just kept on silently puzzling about it for the remainder of the visit.

Jul 17 2026

• Snippet: In one dream, I was a transfer student to a school and I joined up with three other students in a group. I ended up taking care of some kind of incoming challenges to the group from other people in order to ensure that the other three students had time and space to work on a project without being disturbed too much.
• Snippet: In another dream, I was with my parents and siblings and about 20 other people. Our family had contributed a plate of food to a communal table with about 15 plates on it for a Chinese New Year feast the day after, but as the clock ticked over midnight from two days before the event to the eve of the event, people became confused and wondered if we had the day wrong. Even after we confirmed the date was correct, someone asked what we would eat on this eve day after preparing all the food for the next day's feast. In the end, we picked one or two of the plates and ate that today instead.
• Snippet: In yet another dream, I watched a group of three prisoners demonstrate how to outwit and overcome their captor in a game setting, that showcased a number of flaws in the captor. The scene then rewound to the beginning and put three actual players in the game. They had also watched the video, and so had several ideas as to how to proceed to escape. They chose a path where one of the three, a large wolf-man, requested that the captor let him go to the toilet, and when he did so, he hid in a closet in an adjacent room. When the captor went looking for him, the wolf-man leaped out and strangled the captor while the other two prisoners also scattered into other rooms just in case.
• Snippet: In one last dream, I brought along my DJI camera for a live recording that Nomakk was doing in an apartment set up in the ground floor void deck beneath a HDB block. As the host of the stream, he was forbidden from bringing his own cameras due to separation of church and state, and so had requested that someone else and I be his audio-video techs and bring ours and set them up for him. This gave me a lot of insight into what the surrounding rooms next to his stream room looked like, as well as his actual stream setup. We synced the two cameras together, and I set my camera up in such a way that I could control it and turn it on and off using a remote from afar.

Jul 18 2026

• Snippet: I had hired a Chinese lady to come clean my apartment in preparation for selling it, and she came to the apartment with her two daughters in tow, holding a sponge and detergent spray bottle. Her rate was $80 per hour, and I did some mental calculations and said that that was almost too cheap, since the last person charged more than $240 to clean my previous apartment for three hours, and she was there just by herself, but I thanked her for coming and told her to please clean the kitchen and if they were done within three hours, then to do my washroom area as well. In the meantime, I invited them in and asked the woman's eldest daughter to bring her white sports shoes inside the apartment before I closed the door. I had a friend with me in the apartment so we retreated to the living room area where my computer was.
• Snippet: I remember a specific bus scene where I had to show my ID to a Chinese tour operator, who saw that it was written in English and thus pointed me right away to where my seat was. There was a styrofoam box on the seat itself with takeout dinner from a restaurant in it, and I sat down and started eating while I waited for everyone else to board the bus.
• Snippet: There was also a scene in an office where the president of the company had ten moderators, out of about thirty to forty employees, based roughly on having one moderator per clique that acted similar to a manager of a small team and that reported directly to him. I was one of those moderators, and stood in the doorway of a meeting room as he talked with two other moderators about how another three moderators, all women, and who were all seated in the room behind me, had convinced him to take a vacation and go to a park. He said he would leave the company in our capable hands for those few days. He also stifled a sneeze or cough or something equally embarrassing that was not noticed by the people in the room, but was noticed by me, and he realized this and playfully mimed throwing something at me. I looked up at the air innocently and pretended that I didn't see any of that.