My Diary #255

Life

That $300k house that went into pending last week? It got bounced out of pending, which means the offer was withdrawn by the seller, which usually means something went wrong in the inspection, I believe. So now it's back on the market. Nonetheless, once it goes into pending once, I probably won't be looking at it anymore, because there's a high chance I'd just pay for an inspection and find the same glaring issues that made the other person reject it or something. Maybe if it drops further to around $280k.

A lot of the week was spent at home just chilling and playing games. I did quietly take a couple days off work as mental health days this week, since I still had six of my ten casual illness days in the year left. Now I have four. Among other things, I used those days to prepare my documents to submit for the upcoming referendum's special ballot, and for the Singapore citizenship renunciation thing, both of which reared their heads two weeks ago. Although it only took me a couple hours to locate all the documents that I needed to locate from my boxes, that whole process took up the entirety of my Thursday, which was my first day off, around all the other things that I was doing that day and around the entropy that I had to fight off to get it done.

Using the Edmonton Public Library's web printing service (local), I then submitted a bunch of documents to the printer on Friday, my other day off, and then went down to the nearest branch, the Whitemud Crossing Library, with another armful of documents to copy as well. With apologies to the poor lady waiting in line behind me who said she also had a large number of things to print, I printed 7 things across 6 different print jobs, and photocopied another 2 documents that I had, for a total of $3.60 (7 x 50 cents for colour printing/copying and 1 x 10 cents for black and white copying).

Now that I have my entire referendum package gathered up, I'll deposit it at the post office on Monday.

I then planned to treat myself to a box of large Chinese baos (buns) from Yan's Family Restaurant, a restaurant next to the library that I consider to be a hole-in-the-wall hidden gem in town, on the way home. Their buns are huge and juicy and cheap for their price. But the lady said they had two boxes of 8 baos each, one for $12 and one for $14.50, so instead of buying one box, I ended up buying both to support them, especially since it was the first time this year I had found time to stop by. This covered lunch and an evening snack before dinner on Friday, and breakfast and lunch on Saturday, and breakfast on Sunday too. Yum. That's about as long as I'm willing to keep the buns around though.

Friday was also the day I attempted cooking some fish for the first time in a long time. It didn't go so well. It looks so much nicer on the package:

But a little less so in reality.

I blame Compliments, the cheapskate Safeway in-house brand, since the fish was very watery and even pressing it with five paper towels one after the other did not fully dry the fish pre-cooking. I also don't have a non-stick pan that I use anymore though, so that didn't help. But anyway the front part of the fish just crumbled once it went in to the pan, and I never got to flip it properly.

I did learn with Gemini's help, though, how to properly pre-heat the pan and when to put in the oil properly. I was previously leaving the oil in for a couple minutes to let it simmer before adding the food, without realizing that this was what burned the oil and caused it to leave stain marks on the pan. I was apparently supposed to just toss the oil in, swish it around for maybe 3 seconds, and then immediately add the food. Oops. I also finally saw the Leidenfrost Effect in action, a couple minutes after heating up the pan at a 4.5 setting on the stove and condemning hapless droplets of water into the pan every few seconds, so that was cool. The effect, that is, not the pan. Also the whole apartment smelled of fried fish for several hours afterwards, though I do like the smell.

I've taken a couple late evening walks to Safeway over the past two or three weeks, which I enjoy a lot -- the evening weather and scenery are very nice nice, and the supermarket is much less crowded. The phone camera makes it brighter than it actually was, but I liked the shade of pink that was on the horizon here before it got phone-enhanced.

Also this autumnal leaf snuck into my bag at some point during one of my walks, so I took a picture of it when I found it once I reached home. Then into the bin it went.

I also took a picture this week with my own phone camera since my OBS was tied up making recordings of my Petit Planet closed beta gameplay instead of recording balcony camera footage, but again, it seems so bright compared to what it actually was like in real life. Mon Sep 28, 7:14 pm:

But I tweaked some settings after complaining to Gemini about Samsung's aggressive photo processing nonsense and asking for some potential fixes, so I'm going to see how it looks like in a variety of light settings going forwards.

Safeway now seems to sell fishballs and fishball-adjacent products for something somewhat near a $1 per 100 grams ratio, which is a threshold that I look for but that even at T&T can be hard to find unless stuff is on sale. They had some Watson's assorted fishballs for $5.28/500g this week though, though it was as part of some Asian festival or something so I don't know if it will last long-term. I hope so. Actually I'm glad they sell fishballs at all. They never did for the longest time, and then recently they did add one offering but it was a small bag that was around $2 per 100 grams instead, which is a ridiculous price. Watson's is a brand that can be found at T&T too, and I like both their fishballs (although there it's usually some plain white ones that are even cheaper) and konjak cubes, so I'm glad to see their products at Safeway, whether temporary or not.

I had my humidifier turned off for most of the summer, but now that we are officially into fall, my hygrometer is reading sub-30% humidity levels in my house again, and the evening and night temperatures are fairly chill anyway, so I've been closing the window and running the little Honeywell humidifier that I got back in May again. It's still on its first paper filter, though that thing is probably nearing the end of its life cycle. I have a bag of aftermarket ones ready to replace it with though. That's pushed the normal humidity in the house back to around 35-40%, sometimes a bit over that if I have recently taken a shower or made some soup.

While most of my eBay purchases of the various Aspects of Tigey that I found to be within an acceptable price range have arrived at their destinations (i.e. my or Jah's place), one of them doesn't seem to have been even sent yet 23 days after purchase, or at least I never got a tracking notice for it, so I sent a querying email to the seller this weekend. We'll see what happens with this. At least I believe eBay has a pretty good buyer's protection system, so the worst that can happen is I get the cash back? But I'd rather have the Tigey-likes...

Between digging for my papers this week, and looking at pictures of Jah having a lot of fun on his current Japan vacation, I've been re-developing a hankering for... scanning the documents which I brought back last trip, which are still sitting on a pile on my floor. A bunch of them can be thrown away after scanning, while I have a box ready for the rest now, but I need to actually go do it. The urge to do so is building up again now though, after a couple months' break where I just scanned new incoming flyers and such.

Jah also plugged a website called SomaFM (local) just before he left on his trip, a "Commercial-free, Listener-supported" site with various internet radio stations on it. Cool stuff, though I wish they had more stations (like an adult contemporary one, and one for East Asian instrumentals), and I've been listening to their various ambient, downtempo, dronecore, synthwave, retrowave , and occasionally other random stations as I work or play. Good stuff, bookmarked here so I can stumble upon this again three years from now when I've long forgotten about it.

I also promised a table of sorts a few weeks ago to look at power consumption and see how much the balcony camera might or might not have increased power usage (although it's not a perfect comparison since usage in general can vary significantly). Nonetheless, it looks something like this, with all rates here being calculated by 12.01 cents per kWh through the time period, except a little bit in Dec 2024 which was 12.004 cents instead:

I'll come back and fill in the rest of the chart at some point once those months have actually passed. Look at those exorbitant fees though. Eff EPCOR. Thank goodness I don't pay for (electrical or otherwise) heat too.

I did learn from this (and from feeding these numbers into Gemini) though, that apparently switching away from the Rate of Last Resort to another competitor with lower cents per kilowatt hour cost probably won't actually really help me right now since those competitors by and large have a larger admin fee too that would wipe out my savings in most cases. Until the 12.01 cents number spikes. What it also tells me is I should be taking my annual vacations in January and February every year to offset the higher fees there! I saved about $80 in electricity/EPCOR fees this year during my Feb/Mar vacation despite leaving my PC on 24/7.

Both the balcony camera and the humidifier are new to my power grid draw this year, but they definitely don't seem to adversely impact the power usage by much in the limited data that I have.

Games

Pretty much all I did this week was Petit Planet. I've been building up my planet and getting into flower breeding experiments and more or less visiting other people's planets. And looking for bugs to report, of course. I put in well over 70 hours, possibly over 80, but much of that was also AFK and semi-idle time between other things. Burn out? Me? Probably, at some point. The social aspect of the game might or might not keep me going longer-term though, we'll see, and my little circle of friends so far has been pretty nice to chat and brainstorm with.

Here's a tiny gallery of a couple of notable places and sights on my planet:

And one I happened to have of the planet design UI and some of the flower field breeding experiments going on.

Plushie of the Week #248

This week's Plushie of the Week segment is dedicated to two plushie, two separate bears that Kel had at her Guangzhou place when I visited her earlier this year. According to her, these bears were presents from the school that she taught at, specifically Valentine's Day gifts from parents. Apparently the school bought a bunch of bears off of Taobao and sold them like "candygrams", little gifts that people could buy and gift to someone else, and she received two of them from some parents of the children that she taught. Neat! This means they're dated to approximately Feb 14 2026, though that was a Saturday, and I'm not sure if that means the school event was held on the 13th or 16th or actually on the 14th itself. Around there, though.

Both bears feature clothing that can be taken off, and I had to do that to reach their tags which were hidden away by their bums anyway, so plushie privacy concerns aside, here's a snapshot collection of each one. They didn't seem to have received adoptive names yet, so here's pictures of Bear #1 and Bear #2 as temporary names.

Apparently they're even purchasable over here from Walmart, here's the first (local) and here's the second (local). Complete with nonsensical Chinese brand names.

Bear #1 front:

Back:

Bear-naked and embearassed:

Tag:

Bear 2 front:

Back:

Bear-naked and unbearably glum:

Tag:

Dreams

Sep 29 2026

• I was living in an HDB flat with a few other people, and together we were a former gang that had faded from prominence and were now a trading group and trying to live a normal life, though that was difficult as even the traders had stopped coming by recently.
• I was just a kid, going to late primary or early secondary school and in one scene struggling to read what was supposed to be the Chinese word for soap (but was actually 洗, the Chinese word for wash) that was written on the ground as part of a classroom practice scene.
• Another gang that did not like us was setting up for our destruction, however, and I noticed one of that gang's members lurking outside in the corridor and looking in the window at us on one particular day before school. I reported this and sensed that none of us were going to escape the building that day as they had surrounded the place.
• Finally, the other gang came up to our door and demanded that we step outside into the corridor. They were much more well-organized than us. They also gathered up some of our friends from the levels above and below who were still loyal to us, and I wondered why they had not fled instead. Perhaps some of them were planning to throw themselves at the mercy of the executioners and ask to defect to them? Surely their plea wouldn't be accepted though.
• However, none of them did so. There were eight of us in all as we lined up in two rows of four outside, awaiting our fate. As we lined up though, I noticed that three of them were robed priests, and suddenly I found myself in control of one of them. The three nodded to each other, and as the gang moved in to finish us off, all three priests unleashed blocking and other defensive spells to ward off all the attacks, allowing the rest of the shellshocked gang to rally and attack the invading gang instead once they realized what was happening.
• The attacking gang was thoroughly defeated and left for dead. During this battle, someone also noticed that the front door of the entire HDB block, made out of a heavy stone slab, was held shut by some device above the door. There was a cutscene of two traders approaching, looking puzzled, and turning away again.
• Someone went downstairs to pry open the device, and suddenly a horde of traders bearing goods and gold flooded into the apartment and came upstairs to us as well, trampling over the remnants of the other gang as they restored our wealth and power.

Oct 04 2026

• Snippet: I remember a few snippets taking place in a school. One was that I needed help from an agent, who handed me off to another agent in an office on the flooor above his, and the second agent then took me to a computer lab to set me up for a test. But as students filtered in over the lunch hour, he eventually told me that we would move to an adjacent lab that had slightly less students instead.
• Snippet: In another snippet, I was with a friend and we had accompanied a couple of girls on some task higher up in the same building, and we were now returning to the school downstairs. There were a number of potential staircases that we could use, and my friend pulled me aside and suggested that we use a different set of stairs than the one the girls were using because it was risky in some way.
• Snippet: A third dream involved flower planting and breeding to get different colours and how I discovered three or four different colours in one session, at least one of which was the server first of a rare sky blue colour.
• Snippet: There was also a fourth dream where I had to bring a truck to a road by the side of a field as a kid, where I was automatically given a yellow balloon in return for one that I had. But I didn't catch it in time, so both balloons floated up into the air. I didn't mind, since one of them was for a departed parent, and there was a third one that I was going to get later on at our destination regardless, which was for the other departed parent. A couple other people left the field and came over, and one of them, whom I knew was transgendered due to some sort of ambiguous player title they were wearing, took over the driver's seat and prepared to drive us to the other location.