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.
When you’re an adult, sometimes you gotta do adult things, which are often not very fun things. One of these things is paying your mortgage. Now, I do that every two weeks like my mortgage company wants me to but sometimes, when you’re lucky enough to have some extra money lying around, you can pay down your mortgage even more.
Now I consider myself quite lucky, because I’m still gainfully employed and given what’s happened to the games industry in the last year or so, I am indeed quite lucky to be where I am. I’m also fortunate to have some extra cash lying around. The interest rates are at the highest they’ve been since I had the privilege of having a mortgage. My current interest rate for my mortgage is 6.5% and that is high for me. It used to be that my savings accounts would accrue interest at a rate higher than what my mortgage would. It just made sense to just park my money in my bank account than pay down my mortgage. That hasn’t been the case for a while now.
I probably should have done this a while ago but I’m gonna put a decent chunk of change into paying down my mortgage in a lump sum payment. I think I’ve done this twice before. It’s been years since I made my last lump sum payment. Anyways, according to the mortgage calculator, once I make this payment, it’ll knock off two years from my payment schedule. I’ll be mortgage-free two years sooner, assuming nothing changes, but of course things will change.
If interest rates remain high like this, it makes more sense to me to make more lump sum payments more frequently. I’m quite close to getting my mortgage down to five-figures now and that’ll be quite the milestone.
Anyways, that money I’m gonna use for the payment could be used for so many other, more fun things but being an adult sometimes means you gotta put away the fun.
I had the last two weeks off since I took an extra week from my vacation days and added that onto the company supplied week off. My plan was to do a combination of productive and lazy days and that’s exactly what I did.
On some days, I did adult things like clean my apartment, put stuff in storage, and fight the ants. On other days, I slept in until noon, ate food, and played video games well into the early morning. I got lots of sleep and there were days I wanted to get up early but my body just told me to keep sleeping until noon.
I also saw my parents and my niece quite a bit over the last two weeks which is so precious and special to me. My niece is three years-old now and I think she is finally understanding the concept of what an uncle is. The last two times I saw my niece, I helped her play with Play-Doh, which is her current focus in terms of play and toys.
I also tried making chicken piccata again. This is my favourite thing to order from Cheesecake Factory. A few years ago, I tried making this at home and I did not come very close to replicating it. It was terrible to be honest. This time around, I used a new recipe and it led to a huge improvement. It’s still not close to how Cheesecake Factory makes it but I got a lot closer. It’s easy to make and compared to some meal kit dinners, it’s much less complicated and takes less time. I’ll continue to refine my technique.
Alas, the break is now over and tomorrow is the first day back at work for the new year. Part of me regrets not taking another week off after the break, as some of my co-workers have done. My hope is that the first week back will be fairly low-key and low-stress as people like me who are returning are trying to shake off the cobwebs and some won’t be back yet. I can’t say I’m expecting myself to be too productive this week and I’m glad it’s a short week anyways.
The war with the ants continues. I had to apply more sealant a few days ago but this time around, I went and purchased “tooling”. It’s essentially just a few pieces of soft plastic that you press and drag along the bead. The plastic is cut into the shape of the bead you want. It can be an angled straight bead or a curved one. Here’s an example of the tooling I’m talking about. The tool scrapes up any extra sealant and pushes sealant into the gap or joint as well. The key is to use just enough material to make a proper sized bead but not too much though, because you just wind up scraping it off and wasting it.
The picture above should show you what a difference having the proper tool makes. The picture on the left is just the bead I did by hand, using no tooling. It just looks messy. The picture on the right almost looks like I didn’t even use any sealant at all. The angle and lighting made it difficult to show but there’s a straight and thin line of sealant along the moulding. It looks much more professional.
The right thing to do is to eventually remove all the badly applied sealant and then redo it with proper tooling. For now though, it’s not the plan, because despite my best efforts, the ants continue to find new ways in.
As I feared, it’s just a never-ending back and forth now.
Since my last post, I confirmed the latest silicone seal that I used near the door jamb prevented them from popping out into my bedroom. The bad news is that it only took them less than a day to figure out they could just go underneath the flooring plank and pop out in a gap in between the end of the plank and the tile of the bathroom. This gap is less than an inch from where I applied the silicone. I saw the gap earlier and I was wondering if I should just seal it up just in case. I didn’t and now I know I should have.
This morning, I applied silicone all along the edges the flooring planks at the threshold. It’s been less than a day but it seems like they don’t know how to get in now. The bad news, however, is that I’ve discovered a new point of ingress. The ants are coming in from under the door jamb on the opposite side of the threshold. The threshold was/is a highway of sorts. They pop out from one side of the door jamb and then make their way parallel to the threshold and then go under the door jamb on the other side. So tomorrow, I have to seal off the other side as well.
So this is proceeding pretty much as I had feared. It’s just a series of escalating actions on my end. I block and seal off gaps, get a short respite, and then the ants go probing for other openings, and find them. I continue to block and seal, and the cycle begins anew.
My resolve remains strong however. I have lots of sealant, tape, and foam left. It’s a singular entity versus a hive mind of possibly thousands. Who will win in the end?
The battlefront in my war against the ants has shifted slightly. If you’ve been following this saga, the ants were firmly entrenched underneath bathroom sink, in the sink cabinet. After much hard work and strife, I sealed them out of the cabinet. They then were using the outside of the cabinet, which I then also sealed off.
The ants then moved to the threshold between my bathroom and my bedroom. The current front is now the doorjamb, the floor moulding, and the gap between my floor planks and where my closet starts.
In the photo above, you can see basically where all the ants are currently coming and going from. The metal track is where my closet door slides along. All that dried foam is from where I sealed off large gaps where the ants are going under the flooring and the moulding. I’ve never used sealing foam before and it’s very difficult to apply accurately. More is better than less, however, because once it cures and hardens, you can use a utility knife to cut it down to size. I haven’t done that yet.
You’ll also notice the silicone sealant along the rest of the moulding. Yes, the bead I applied is messy and inconsistent but that’s not my concern right now. My primary concern is ensure my latest efforts prevent the ants from entering my apartment.
Whenever I seal off a new area, it always takes a few days to assess if my efforts have worked. I’ve realized that just because I see no ants a few hours or even the next day, it doesn’t mean they can’t come in any more. It could be they’re just not interested in coming into my apartment for whatever reason. Remember, I’ve seen no ants for nearly two weeks in some instances, only to see them again. Who knows where they were or what prompted to return again.
What’s interesting is extrapolating where this is all going. The ants seem to be moving their points of ingress further into my bedroom and away from the bathroom. How far into my bedroom will this go? I hope they just give up at some point.
So about 45 minutes after I made my last post, I decided to call the non-emergency police line. I was getting tired and I knew that if the alarm was still going off when I actually wanted to sleep, I would have trouble falling asleep.
I have heard that people can be on hold for hours on the non-emergency line but it only took a minute to get through. I told the call taker exactly what I wrote in my last post: an alarm across the street was going off for nearly an hour and a half, I thought I heard the fire trucks attending earlier but nothing changed, and the alarm was loud enough to bother the whole block. I also told the call taker that I might break into the building soon to turn it off myself if nothing changed.
They knew I wasn’t lying about the alarm because they said they could hear it through the phone. Interestingly, they also said they hadn’t had any reports about this alarm all night. Was I really the first person to call this in after nearly two hours?
Now of course, as it always happens, as I was on the phone, the alarm went off. I told them immediately and remarked that this was just my luck. I went outside onto my balcony and told the dispatcher that I could see fire trucks down the block, in front of the building with the alarm. I guess they finally turned up? Who called them?
The dispatcher said that if the alarm went off again, I should call this number again and to not break into the building to turn off the alarm myself.
I hope you’re able to listen to the audio file that I’ve embedded above. If you can, you’re listening to an alarm that is going off from across the street. There is a new apartment building being constructed and it should be done in about two or three months. Clearly, the building’s alarms have been installed.
Now why did I decide to record this? Because this alarm has being going off for over an hour and a half now. It started around 11:30pm or so and it’s now nearly 1am. You can hear the alarm anywhere in my apartment. It’s not deafening but it’s loud enough to be annoying. It’s also loud enough that most people would have trouble sleeping. Closing my windows does not mitigate the loudness of the alarm to any extent that would be considered acceptable.
I don’t understand why no one is responding to this alarm. About ten minutes after the alarm started, I heard sirens from what I would assume to be the fire brigade. Unfortunately, if the fire trucks were for the alarm, they weren’t able to turn it off.
I am not understanding how this alarm hasn’t been handled yet. All construction sites for new apartments should have security after hours. If there is security, why haven’t they called someone to take care of this? If there isn’t security, why the hell not?
The only silver lining to all of this is I’m probably not going to bed for another two hours or so. When bedtime does come though and this alarm is still going off, I’m not sure how I’ll be able to sleep.
I had a coffee at 10pm this evening, just because I could. I don’t have to wake up at any specific time tomorrow because I don’t have any work until the new year.
I have a full two weeks off this year for the holidays. I have some things I want to do and also no plans at all at the same time. There are a few housekeeping duties that I need to attend to, like cleaning and getting rid of stuff, but I am ok with days where I sleep in until I feel like it and sip coffee until the late afternoon.
I also have lots of video games and TV watching pencilled in. My service of choice for this month is Netflix and I’ve been catching up on many shows I’ve missed.
I fully expect my sleep schedule to get completely messed up and I’m looking forward to that.
