ALL ASIAN

Last week, Canadian actor Simu Liu guest hosted on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. One of his guests was comedian Jimmy O. Yang. I don’t think I’ve seen an Asian host of a late night talk show with an Asian guest before. Sure, the world is in a terrible state right now but that’s pretty cool.

Coincidentally, I have seen both these gentlemen live and in-person during this year. I saw Jimmy’s stand-up show and Simu came to the city for his book tour.

SPIDER INVASION CONTINUES

A few days after I dispatched the spider that wanted to eat my face, I found another spider (of similar size) in the top corner of my shower. I instantly made a decision that it couldn’t stay. It just wouldn’t be cool for me to be naked and exposed, and then have this spider above my head while I showered and washed my genitals. I’d always be afraid it’d want to drop down onto my naked body.

I turned on the shower and made the water go through my wand attachment. I tried to be gentle but I used a spray of water to dislodge the spider from the corner. It valiantly tried to hang on but the volume of water was too much and it fell into the tub. I washed it down the drain with copious amount of water.

As if that wasn’t enough, this afternoon, I saw a dead spider on one of my window sills. This was along the windows that get a lot of sun in the late afternoon. This spider must have chosen to hang out near the top of those windows and it got baked alive during the hot afternoon sun.

I don’t know why there are so many spiders in my apartment but I’m not liking it!

SPIDER INVASION

Last Thursday evening I settled in to do some video gaming. I booted up my game on my desktop computer and then left to go to the kitchen to get a drink. I placed my glass back on my desk and then sat in my chair to spin back towards the monitor.

As I was rotating towards the screen, I saw out of the corner of my eye a dark mass with legs descending down from the ceiling. In that split second, I realized two things: it was a spider and I was rotating into it.

I immediately jumped up and darted away from my desk and in doing so, I turned my back on the spider. When I turned back around, the spider was nowhere to be seen. I was immediately creeped out. Where the hell did that thing go?

My initial thought was that it had somehow dropped into my computer chair. I grabbed a flashlight and brought out my vacuum. I pulled the chair away from the desk and began inspecting every inch of my chair, from top to bottom. Nothing.

I then moved onto my desk, starting first on my desk. I flipped my keyboard over, examined my mouse, looked behind my monitors, basically turning everything over on my desk to see if the spider had hidden somewhere. Just to be sure, I turned on my vacuum and used the hose attachment and just sucked up every nook and cranny on my desk.

I then started working below my desk, where it was dark, and had lots of spaces for the spider to hide. I stuck the hose attachment in as many corners and hiding spots as I could possibly get at, short of disassembling my desk and computer. Even with the flashlight, I couldn’t see where the damn thing went.

Resigned to my failure and still wanting to game, I soldiered on and played for about an hour. Those it was enjoyable, my skin felt like there was a spider on it the entire time. After about an hour, I decided I wanted to watch TV instead and I retired to the living room.

After some time watching TV, I returned to my bedroom. Cautiously, I looked for the spider again. In the corner of the ceiling, above my desk, I saw the spider. It was the same size and colour of the spider that was mere inches from my face earlier in the evening. It had somehow escaped and crawled back up into the ceiling.

Normally, I’m sorta indifferent to spiders. In the past, I’ve captured many of them and released them onto my balcony. This spider, however, did not do itself many favours by basically descending almost onto my face. It had to go and by go, I did not mean the balcony.

i grabbed the vacuum hose attachment again, turned on the vacuum, and raised the wand towards the corner of the ceiling where the spider was. Even though it was at full suction power, I was surprised to see the spider was still holding on tight. It had pulled itself tight into a ball to protect itself. That’s when I angled the wand more tightly against the ceiling, providing a greater seal. That did it, the spider got sucked into the vacuum.

I kept the vacuum running for another minute or so, just to be sure that it wasn’t just hanging around the mouth of the wand attachment. I kinda felt bad for it but it should not have invaded my personal space like that.

A NEW CREDIT

I’ve been working on my “new” team since November of 2020, so this isn’t exactly breaking news but it’s always a pleasure and a honour to get your name in the credits of a video game. After shipping many games, it never loses its shine to see your name up there.

If you’re curious, the whole list of credits can be found here.

LONGEST YOUTUBE AD

I was watching a YouTube video tonight and an ad interrupted my experience. The ad was the longest YouTube ad that I’ve had the displeasure of getting since I started watching YT. It was nearly four hours long. Yes, four hours.

The ad was just a recorded livestream of video game footage from a video game convention. I’m just gonna assume they were gonna show footage from several different games because I obviously did not watch the whole four hours of this ad.

Someone paid money to make this ad appear and I’m not sure who would have done that. I wasn’t even sure what game I was looking at. What a poor way to spend ad money.

BANK RANT

The bank that I get my paycheques deposited to and where I pay my bills from is CIBC. This is the case mostly because of historical reasons and by the fact that I have such an old chequing account, it comes from the days where they didn’t charge you a fee for every single transaction. As such, it’s essentially a no-fee account that is very rare now. If this wasn’t the case, I’d probably have ditched CIBC as my bank a long time ago. The current set of banking products that CIBC has are terrible and are designed to extract as much money from you as possible. I also think their web site sucks.

My latest problem with CIBC stems from the fact they gave me an offer in which they stated that if I opened up a US dollar account, I’d get 3.00% until the end of the year. That’s great because that’s more than double the interest I’m getting in my most beneficial US dollar account.

So, I opened the account but there’s no where on the web site or on the app that confirms that I redeemed the offer and that this new account is earning the promotional interest. I actually can’t even verify what interest rate this account is currently accruing.

Contrast this to Tangerine, where any promotional offer is confirmed via your inbox and you can always find out the current interest rate for any of your savings accounts.

Do not bank with CIBC unless you have a really good reason. There are better alternatives out there.

THIS HEAT AGAIN

I know you’re tired of me complaining about the heat but it’s after midnight right now and the temperature in my bedroom is 27 degrees Celsius. It somehow got hotter after the sun went down. I don’t know how stuff like this happens. I feel like I won’t get a good night of sleep tonight.

The warm weather is supposed to continue until at least Wednesday. So many more days of this!

WHAT A BILL

I received my electrical bill for the last two months and if my memory serves me correctly, it is the most expensive electrical bill I’ve had since I’ve lived in my place. It amounts to just over $90 for two months of service. It includes the period we just had where we had a heat wave for about a week.

During that week, I ran my AC for several hours a day, some days from morning to night. Even during the coldest winters where I used my baseboard heaters, I never had an electrical bill this high. Portable ACs use a lot of juice apparently.

It feels like having an AC is less of an optional compared to heat though. When it’s cold, I can put on more clothes. When it’s hot, all I can do is just strip down naked and that’s basically it. If I still feel hot after getting naked, I got nothing else to do. The AC is really the only practical option.

As the summers get warmer and heat waves are common, our electrical bills will just get more expensive. There will be a day where I hit $50 a month for electricity and I probably won’t have to wait long for that.