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I’ve been having weird dreams lately. I’ve forgotten most of them because that’s your brain’s way of not mixing up reality with dreams. This morning’s dream, however, stayed with me because it was so vivid and because I woke up so soon after the dream.

In my dream, I was checking out an apartment for whatever reason. I don’t even know why I was there. The apartment was very plain and might have been built in the 90s or something. I thought the apartment was going to be empty but it was not. Out of nowhere, a lemur appeared. It wasn’t threatening but it sure surprised me. I decided it was time to leave. As I passed by the bathroom, I noticed a dude sitting in the bathtub taking a bath. He yelled something at me and then brought up a shotgun from underneath the bath water. I kept going and was leaving through the door when some security guard appeared and stood in the doorway of the bathroom with a pistol drawn. He yelled at the bathtub guy to drop the shotgun. I didn’t stick around to find out what was gonna happen. As I was walking down the hallway, I heard more shouting and then gun shots. From the sounds, it appeared the security guard fired first. It was when I got down to the ground floor of the building I realized I wasn’t in an apartment building, I was actually at “Dr. Dre Davis Hospital”. At least that’s what the large sign said. That’s when I woke up.

My whole dream didn’t really make any sense. Dr. Dre isn’t even a real medical doctor as he’s only licensed to dispense phat beats. I don’t even know where the “Davis” part comes in. What I do know is that the dream woke me up an hour earlier than I needed to be and I couldn’t fall back asleep again. It left me feeling quite tired all evening. While entertaining, I hope I don’t dream again tonight.

On Friday evening I was feeling a bit tired. That’s not an unusual feeling for me at the end of the week. What was out of the ordinary was the time that I went to bed. Even though I probably could have stayed awake, I decided to crawl into bed at 11pm. It didn’t take long for me to fall asleep. I can’t remember the last time I actually slept before midnight.

I woke up around 5am. It was an odd feeling waking up at 5am since I usually go to bed at 3 or 4am on the weekends. My body was probably confused. I got up and boiled up some water and made myself a nice drink. I wasn’t wide awake yet I wasn’t feeling all that sleepy either. I decided to play a few games on my tablet in bed. An hour and a half went by quickly. In that time, the sky went from dark to light as the sun rose. I started to get sleepy again so just to make sure, I popped a couple of melatonin pills.

It was about 8am at this point and back to sleep I went. The next thing I knew the sun was bright and shining outside. It was 1pm. I felt really thirsty. I decided it was probably a good time to get up for real for the day. I’d slept for about thirteen hours in total. I felt quite refreshed on Saturday.

Perhaps I’ll to go to bed earlier once in a while.

It might not surprise a lot of you but we have a couple of iPads lying around at work. Now I don’t consider myself an Apple expert but I used iPads all of last spring and most of last summer when I was working on Capsized+. So you’d think I’d know my way around them by now.

Just before the end of the day, I grabbed an iPad to play around with it while I waited for some people to finish discussing something so I could ask a question. This might be difficult to imagine but this was the first iPad that I had held that had a smart cover on it. The previous ones I worked with either had no cover or had custom cases around them. So here I was holding the iPad when I went to adjust my grip on the thing. The cover was unfolded from the screen so I was holding the cover with one hand and then let go of the iPad itself. Now here’s the thing I didn’t realize at the time. The smart cover is only attached to the iPad itself with some relatively weak magnet. Magnetic force is what’s holding those two things together. For some reason, I thought it was held together by mechanical means with a slot and tab type solution. Of course, I found out real quick that wasn’t the case when the iPad broke free from the cover and started to fall towards the concrete floor. Though I’m getting old and slow, I instinctively grabbed at the iPad with my free hand. Luckily, I caught the damn thing.

It was afterwards that I realized how those smart covers actually work. I feel kinda stupid for almost ruining an iPad but now I know better!

Someone has turned in a magazine full of bullets to a Skytrain Attendant at #NewWestminster Station. Transit Police are coming to get it.

— ScanBC (@ScanBC) March 21, 2013

This evening I came home from my getting my haircut. I was starving so as I was getting off the train I was trying to decide between getting Subway or sushi. I decided Subway was going to be faster even though I think the Subway downstairs sucks. On any other day, I’d much rather give my money to the sushi place but I’m going on a tangent here.

As I walked closer to the Subway, I noticed three police officers hanging out, along with at least two Skytrain attendants and also one property security guy. Two of the police officers were on the phone, while the other was talking to the rest of the group. I usually don’t see that many people of those types all in one area. Something was up but I couldn’t tell what. They hadn’t apprehended anyone. There didn’t seem to be any property damage. Everyone was just talking, either on the phone or to each other.

I was still hungry so I just went into the Subway and ordered my sub. Once I paid for it and left, everyone was still outside. On the way up to my apartment, I checked my “go-to” Twitter account for all things emergency related. The tweet above explains why there was all this excitement.

There are worse ways to get rid of bullets and though a bit unorthodox, I’m glad they chose to give it to someone in a sorta position of authority.

I love it when Conan O’Brien has his associate producer, Jordan Schlansky, on his show. You can Google their previous interactions and it’s all top-notch entertainment. Jordan returns to face Conan’s inquiries about an espresso machine. A strong shot of comedy is served.

What you see above is the current contents of my freezer. Last week I decided to do a clean out despite my freezer being not even a quarter full. I had to throw away most of the items because they were nearly all beyond some reasonable best before date.

There was a package of ground beef that was probably the oldest thing in there. I believe it went into my freezer sometime in early 2010. The beef had turned somewhat gray by the time I took it out. I’m most ashamed of this item. Three years in a freezer and I didn’t even eat it. There were also some packages of partially consumed frozen vegetables. For some reason, I was eating a lot of frozen vegetables about two years ago. That was what remained. There was at least one package of pot stickers that I didn’t manage to finish off. I used to go to T&T a lot about a year and a half ago so I bought frozen Asian foods back then. This also accounted for a few packages of unfinished dumplings as well. Lastly, there was a package of risotto that I never opened. This was beyond the best before date and with my experience with food poisoning, I didn’t want to chance it.

I only kept two items from my purge. The item you see above is a package of frozen green onion pancakes. I got these recently from my mother and they are delicious! You can fry them up from frozen and they only take five minutes to make. The other item was a rack of lamb. That’s currently in fridge for defrosting and I’m gonna make some chops for dinner tomorrow night.

I’m hoping I won’t have to do a freezer purge ever again because wasting food kinda sucks.

So I’ve been participating in lottery pool at work for about three months or so. It’s $5 a week. I know what you’re thinking, I’m wasting $20 a month. It’s true that the odds for this particular lottery are stacked against anyone who plays. The way I look at it though, I see the $20 a month as insurance. What kind of insurance? Regret insurance. I imagined if a whole group of my co-workers won the lottery and I chose not to join in. That would kinda suck. So for $20, I get to buy peace of mind.

Interestingly, there was a bit of a hiccup with buying tickets for Friday’s draw. The person who usually buys tickets for the studio was away this week. She appointed some other dude to buy the tickets while she was gone. Usually she sends out an e-mail to the studio to remind people to get their $5 in. This new guy dropped the ball and didn’t send out the e-mail. I totally forgot about the tickets so dude went and bought tickets without everyone knowing. There were way fewer people in the pool this week. When I heard this had happened, I knew I was tempting fate. I can’t actually prove this, but I believe in the grand scheme of the universe, the second those tickets were bought without me, the people in the pool this week had a better chance of winning. It’s just how my life and luck interact. Stuff like this usually goes against me. I was thinking it would be just my luck if this was the week the numbers went their way.

Strangely enough, when I checked the winning numbers, no one in the country won the grand prize. I tempted fate and lived to waste another $5 next week. Phew!

Tomorrow is Skate Paddy’s Day! Every year since about 2008, the skate dev team meets for St. Patrick’s Day. Considering that the last skate game came out in 2010, the fact that everyone still meets up once a year is a testament to how tight we were as a team. To this day, it’s still the best team I’ve had the pleasure of working on.

There will be much reminiscing tomorrow evening and remembrances of better times. There also might be a bit of drinking too. To those who have left Vancouver, you will be sorely missed.

There’s been a rainfall warning in Vancouver for the last two days. It rained quite heavily tonight. It didn’t take long for me to discover there was a hole somewhere in the sole of my right shoe. The unmistakable feel of a sock sopping up the rain water from underneath my shoes was the indication my commute home wasn’t going to be fun.

I always am forced to buy a new pair of shoes because of this and for no other reason. Some tiny crack in the sole lets water in and the materials above it sucks the water up. I’m left with wet socks and an uncomfortable feeling. These were a pair of loafers so I’ll probably switch to a pair of skate shoes tomorrow.

I could hope for the rain to stop but it’s going to wet and dreary for the rest of the week and even possibly all weekend.

You know your city has reached a certain size when people with mental health issues start showing up on a regular basis on public transit. Of course Vancouver passed that mark decades ago. I use public transit frequently so I’ve seen my fair share of characters on buses and Skytrain.

It’s gotten to the point where I’ve started to recognize a few of them, for better or worse. One particular lady stands out to me for a few reasons, one of them being I’ve seen her the most. I’ve only seen this lady in the morning and she usually gets on the train about four or five stops. It’s hard to keep track of her because she never stays still and will wander the length of the cars.

Like most people with mental health issues on transit, she talks to herself. Actually, it’s more like she lectures people. She doesn’t yell but just speaks aloud on different topics that really make no sense to me. Everything she speaks about is done in a lecturing tone. Most of the time, I can’t really figure out what she’s talking about. I think one time, she was telling people about the dynamic between a husband and a wife. It was hard to follow. She doesn’t seem to be addressing anyone in particular and will walk up and down the car as she’s doing it.

Of course, she makes a lot of people uncomfortable because they just want to get to where they’re going in peace and having a raving woman prevents that. One of my friends encountered this woman one time and he was having a bit of a bad day so he just yelled at her to shut the hell up. She never stops talking so I can see why my friend did that. Whenever I see her, I just put my headphones and listen to some Katy Perry. Since she never confronts anyone physically, that’s problem solved right there.

She’s on the train a lot, enough that many people instantly know who she is. In fact, the short video above shows one of her ravings. To be very clear, I did not shoot that video.

I wonder who this woman is. Where does she go at nights? Why is she on transit anyways? Where is she going? How can I avoid her in the future?