Month: January 2024

I’m not sure what happened but I took two naps today. Usually, taking a nap isn’t a surprise for most people. You feel tired and then you sleep for a short amount of time, it’s not exactly rocket science.

The weird thing is, I didn’t think I needed to take two naps. I had an average amount of sleep last night. It wasn’t over eight hours but I don’t think it was close to six either. At no point during the workday did I feel exhausted or struggling to have energy.

At around 5pm, however, I went to my couch to lie down and watch some TV. The next thing I knew, I had fallen asleep, and twenty minutes had gone by. This surprised me because I usually don’t nap at the time. If I do need a nap, it’s after dinner.

Anyways, I got up, and then made some dinner. After eating, I went back to my couch to enjoy some of the TV that I had missed since I had fallen asleep. To my surprise, I felt tiredness wash over my body, and I closed my eyes as sleep came to me again. I woke up about half an hour later.

I can’t remember the last time I took two naps in one day. I didn’t even do anything strenuous the day before. The day before was a very typical Monday.

Anyways, I hope I get more sleep tomorrow and don’t need two naps again.

If the forecast holds up, tomorrow’s high of 14 degrees Celsius will be the warmest January 29th for the greater Vancouver area since they started keeping records in 1937. It will break the previous record of 13.3 degrees set in 1940.

I’m all for this warmer weather. When it was like -13 degrees a few weeks ago, that sucked. I’m so thankful it’s returned to a more normal Vancouver winter. I’ve put away the humidifier again, as the air is moist and full of life-affirming water vapour. My skin is thankful.

I have a Garmin fitness tracker and try to wear it all the time. It tracks my steps, sleep, heart rate, and stairs climbed among other things. The one thing that I do not like about it is the damn clasp on the band. It manages to unclasp itself really easily. I’ll be randomly just going throughout my day and it’ll just fall off my wrist. Many times I’ll wake up and the tracker will off my wrist and just laying underneath my covers. One time, it slipped off while I was walking on street, leaving it to lie on the sidewalk. Luckily, I noticed about ten minutes after getting home and I rushed back out to retrace my steps. I managed to find it on the sidewalk before anyone else.

Now before you ask me why I don’t replace the band, it doesn’t work that way. The tracker is waterproof to some extent and to get that done, the whole tracker, including the band is one continuous piece of material. You can’t replace just one piece of this thing.

Anyways, this afternoon, I was urinating into my toilet at home. When the urination stopped, I went to go flush the toilet. As I reached for the handle, I didn’t realize the clasp had come loose and I watched helplessly as the tracker tumbled off my wrist and into my toilet bowl, which at this point was sill filled with my urine. I also suddenly remembered this same bowl was filled with my own feces just hours earlier.

As looked into the bowl with shock, I muttered a curse. I had to get the damn thing out of the bowl and out of my urine. I ran to the kitchen to get a disposable bamboo fork I had. I also just happened to have a bucket in my washroom. I used the fork to gingerly fish out the tracker from the bowl. It glistened with my fresh and probably still warm urine. I dropped it in the bucket and then threw away the fork.

I put the bucket in my tub and then filled the bucket with warm water to wash off and the dilute as much of the urine as possible. I must have filed and replaced the water in the bucket at least three times. I then filled it again but also added some soap. I let it sit in the soapy water for about ten minutes before rinsing the whole bucket and tracker clean.

I then took the tracker out and left it on the edge of the tub to dry. Then a few hours later, I grabbed an old toothbrush, and with some soap and water, I scrubbed every part of the tracker, including all the nooks and crannies. I then rinsed it clean with warm water.

I’m wearing it right now but I’m trying not to think about where it was just earlier in the day. I am very lucky it’s waterproof otherwise I would have ruined it with my urine. The clasp still sucks and it will fall off again, though hopefully not into my urine.

I changed my cell phone provider this evening because my new one was offering almost the same plan for $12 (plus taxes) cheaper a month. That won’t send me to retirement ahead of schedule or anything but $12 a month is still $12. That’s an extra fast food meal each month or two more apples that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is also the first time I’m using a eSIM. Instead of the physical SIM card that you insert into your phone, you just download an eSIM. Because of this, I was able to switch providers immediately, without having to go a store to get an actual card.

I’ve lost track but I think this is the third or fourth time I’ve transferred my phone number to another cell phone provider. Each time it’s been ported over without any issues but I’m not exactly sure if the process has gone smoothly this time. The new provider stated in all their documentation that I should expect to get a text from my old provider, with instructions to confirm that I wanted my number to be ported over. It’s been almost six hours since I started the porting process and I haven’t received any text messages from them. Because I’m not sure where we are in the process, I haven’t removed my old SIM card yet.

It’s quite possible the porting process it’s actually completed though. I received a text message from a friend earlier this evening and my texting app denotes which SIM card the text was received from. It said it came from my new provider. Though a few hours later, I needed to receive a two-factor authentication text, and that message said it was received using my old provider. So who knows.

I don’t want to remove my old SIM card just yet. If it looks like the transfer process is still in limbo tomorrow, I may have to contact customer support.

So sometime in the late summer or early fall my credit score dropped by seventy points. My credit score dropped below 800 for the first time in I don’t know how long, possibly over a decade.

The only thing I could think of that caused this drop is that I forgot to pay one of credit card bills one month. I only use two credit cards and the one I forgot to pay doesn’t have an “auto-pay” feature. So every month, I have a scheduled reminder which tells me to go pay my bill. It’s a bit old school because a lot of bills now have some measure of automation that allows you to draw money of out an account to pay said bill.

Anyways, it’s a bit interesting to see that one missed bill can cause a drop of nearly 100 points. I’m not too concerned because my mortgage doesn’t need renewal anytime soon and I’m not looking to borrow money otherwise either. Also, my credit score is back above 800 now though not to where it was before.

This is a reminder to me to not to screw up my credit score in the time leading up to my mortgage renewal.

The forecast calls for upwards to 20cm of snow to fall between now and tomorrow morning. As I write this, there’s already a healthy layer on snow on the ground already.

Knowing the way the city responds to snow, it’s gonna be a mess out there tomorrow for the morning commute. Some universities and colleges have already preemptively cancelled classes for tomorrow. In the before-times, when I used to have to commute to work, tomorrow undoubtedly would have been a snow-day for sure. Now, tomorrow will be just another normal day of work for me. It might just look a little more like a winter wonderland outside instead.

Of course, not everyone can work from home, and I understand that is a huge privilege to have. For the people who have no other choice to commute, I wish them well. It will be a long day for them.

The air outside hasn’t been above freezing since last Thursday. In fact, it got as low as -13 Centigrade in the last few days. It’s been bitterly cold for this usually mild and balmy city.

As temperatures have dropped, so has the moisture content in the air. The water in the air has dried up and it’s been doing a number on my skin. I had to get my humidifier out and it’s been struggling to get the relative humidity up to just 25%. It just can’t pump enough water into the air before it gets replaced by more dry air or it gets dried out by the heater.

I don’t know how people in the Prairies handle this type of weather. Does everyone just live with dry and itchy skin all winter? Do they have industrial humidifiers in everyone room. It’s just madness. I’ve been applying moisturizer all over my body for the last few days.

The cold snap is supposed to end later this week when temperatures will rise well above freezing again. I can’t wait. Cold air sucks.

Over the holidays, I got deep into one of those YouTube rabbit holes and got lost in the world of what I call “recap YouTube”. There are these channels on YouTube that essentially summarize a movie or TV series in ten to twenty minutes. All these recap videos feature footage from the movie or TV show and there is always narration, which explains the plot and the characters. Some of the channels use text-to-speech, so you’re never sure who really is behind the channel. Other channels use a real human voice and their narration is sprinkled in with commentary, like when a character does something dumb.

I kinda got addicted to watching these, especially for movies or shows I never had the intention of watching. Some of the recaps are from foreign shows and movies that would never even know existed nor would I even know where to get access to them. Instead, I discovered them through these recap channels.

I’ve watched a lot of horror recap vids because I’m not a huge fan of horror but I can easily spend ten minutes and know exactly what happens in a horror movie, without having to devote an hour and a half to two hours of jump scares. It’s great!

There is a potential downside to all these recap videos however. Sometimes I’ll get to the end of the video and think, “that was great, I kinda wish I’d just watched the whole thing”. Now there’s nothing to stop me from doing that but I already know what’s gonna happen, so unless it’s a masterpiece of entertainment, one could view it as a waste of time.

I also have a feeling these types of videos are perhaps an indication of the times we currently live in. Attention spans are shorter now. Social media videos need to be short to get traction and no one has time or the focus to take in information in a long form.

As an experiment, I’ve watched a few recap videos of movies I’ve seen from start to finish, just to see what gets cut out of the plot summary narration and what stays in. Now obviously it’s subjective and boils down to the skill of the person who wrote the narration but for the most part, these videos hit all the necessary major plot points. They also show the most interesting parts of the most important scenes as well. I should also mention that nearly all these videos do not include audio from the show or movie. The narration audio is backed by generic music, so you won’t hear any dialogue or music from the movie. I’m actually surprised these videos don’t get copyright striked on YouTube but they must fall under some fair use policy… or maybe they don’t.

Anyways, the video above is a recap of season one of Outer Range. Don’t watch it unless you want to be spoiled.

This has been an amazingly mild and warm winter, even by Vancouver standards. As the temperatures have been well above freezing, the air is able to hold a lot more moisture and thus the humidity has been relatively high for winter.

Normally, I have to bust out the humidifier sometime in late November or early December. The dry air just wrecks my skin. Because of the lack of a deep freeze, my humidifier has stayed in storage. My skin is doing great, at least for winter.

Of course, things might change later this week, when temperatures are supposed to drop below freezing and we might have the first snow of this winter. I really do not want it to snow.

I received letter mail today which informed me that my personal information was accessed through a security breach in MGM Resorts’ computer systems. This happened in September but I was only made aware of it today. I realize it made the news when it was originally reported but I can’t monitor the news to look for breaches for every single system that my personal information is located on. It’s also quite possible I read the headline and dismissed it because MGM was also hacked as recently as 2019 and just thought it was the same hack. It’s amazing you now have to keep track of which MGM hack you’re talking about now.

Perhaps the only silver lining in any of this is that my personal info that was stolen in 2019 is exactly the same that was taken just a few months ago. My e-mail address, address, and phone number were already out here, so no one learned anything new from this latest hack.

In hindsight, I should have deleted my MGM Resorts account in 2019, after learning about that breach. I have no reason to have such an account anyways. It’s been many years since I last stayed at an MGM property and you don’t need an account with them to book a room anyways.

In any case, I started the process of deleting my account with them today. I understand my info is already out there but I have a strong suspicion that MGM will likely get hacked again and the next time, my info won’t be there. I’m doing the hackers a favour as now there will slightly less data to download off their servers.