Saturday, July 24, 2021
Finally! Peace and quiet! Peace of mind! Yes, we've finally moved, lol. The first night sleeping in was amazing. The key exchange was simple, and everyone involved was pretty chill about it. The waifu and I brought some essential stuff over so we could sleep over on the very first day we moved in. And what a peaceful night it was. No big thumps, no giant footsteps, and no Bollywood music being blasted until 11:59pm. It was so pleasant. Such an improvement in our well-being.
It's got a great view too. Very happy with the place.
We've stayed here for about 3 weeks already, and it's a very nice upgrade from our previous place. It's much cleaner and cozy, and everything's in good working order; things just stay cleaner longer even though we spent about the same amount of effort cleaning both places. The neighbourhood is nice and commuting to work is easy, as it's only a 5 minute walk to the Sheppard-Yonge TTC subway station. Chloe, Zoltan and my colleague, Hew, helped with the move, carrying boxes and helping us bring it all into the unit. On the first week, I even took a long bath to rest and relax with some lavender bath bombs, lol. It's the first time in a very long time I've taken a bath. Much needed too, considering all the heavy lifting we did. Onion's arms were so sore and painful after all the stuff she helped carry she woke up in the middle of the night crying about the crazy severe DOMS she was feeling in her arms. I had to get up and head to the Rabba at 4am to get some extra-strength Advil for her, which helped.
Toshi took a while to adjust. I mean, it makes sense that moving is a stressful event for a pet, so she took a week to get familiarized with her new domain. She was super wary and scared the entire week, eyeing all signs of "danger" and just freaking out for most things. She also had a poor appetite and barely ate anything for most of the week. We had to buy high-grade cat food for her to start developing her appetite again. On the first night she slept with us the entire night, sleeping and snuggling on Onion's neck, lol. She'd never done that before, and she was very affectionate and talkative, meowing a lot, which has continued till today. I actually liked the change in attitude. She was getting too cocky back at Grantbrook =p. Because of the big, clear windows we have now, she likes to watch and observe everything going on below; her "cat TV", in the words of Jackson Galaxy. We learned more about credit reports during this time as well, like one instance of another agent, Sami, refusing to help us out because our credit report was too low for him and his team, despite ours being decent. What a discriminatory ass. Funny enough, we've tremendously bumped up our credit report since after knowing what to do.
Anyhoo, earlier this month we also celebrated Onion's birthday! Fortunate enough that things reopened more in time for her birthday. We went to Terre Rouge, a French restaurant in Markham (after taking part in James Ravenscroft's church-wide farewell near his house). Amazing food there. Fantastic flavours and great ambience. It was a perfect temperature and not windy, so it was really comfortable for us to eat on the patio. The area around it is actually pretty fancy and nice, and we saw a lot of fancy people and upscale restaurants. Definitely a nice place to check out in the future if we want to explore more. Her gift was something I bought a month in advance, the FFXII Collector's Edition set. Including 5 busts of the judge magisters featuring of course, Gabranth. Yeah. Horny shit. Happy birthday my love, I hope you enjoyed the night =).
Also, I'm extremely late to the game, but I started an investment account with Wealthsimple. The waifu and I were discussing our financial future and considering the crap state of wages across the world, I started to research more about investments. Obviously I'm still pretty clueless about a lot of things, but I'm constantly learning more online, through videos and the Canadian Couch Potato. It's interesting to see the increase and decreases of my account over time, but it's roughly 0.6-1% returns in the last 3 weeks, which is decent. I'm still trying to learn more.
My colleague Elizabeth is leaving the company to move in with her fiance, Assim, in a new place they'll be renting, and James Ravenscroft, my minister, has left RHUC and Ontario as well. For James, the final (yes, really final) farewell was a backyard lunch at his place with several of the prominent church members, many who've not met since we've had online services. You could definitely tell that everyone loved the chance to talk in-person and meet up again in the safety of the outdoors, vaccinations and low case count in Toronto/York region. All the best on the coast, James! He was a great minister at RHUC and was a pleasure getting to know him better over the few years I've been at RHUC. Discussing difficult topics with him was a highlight as he mentioned my bombarding him with over 10 difficult theological questions in his last "Minister's Message" in the RHUC newsletter, as well as all the discussions we've had with others during Pub Theology. I might mention the details another time.
The waifu and I have signed up and taken classes at All Star Driving School, currently doing the 30 hours online module now. Holy shit, what a drag. Zzz. I hope our driving practicals will be smooth, considering the long absence of driving and the other side of the road. Currently we've scored fantastically well for the online learning modules.
The combination of climate change, wildfires in Ontario, the heat, haze and all (don't forget the churches set on fire! Lol) are making for a very suffocating summer. And I absolutely despise the heat. Zzz. Funny slightly off-tangent thing with Onion and I; ethical consumerism. Yeah. We were discussing the LA '92 riots and modern day cancel culture, and in relation to the topic of my concerns, I showed her a clip of CosmicSkeptic discussing it in an Oxford debate. She's been binging his videos since, watching more and more on morality, ethics and stuff. So she decided to do some ethical consumerism at the Whole Foods near us. Hilarious! Seeing her look through affordable ways to be ethical and seeing what was impractical considering our finances. Very amusing for me, lol. I mean, I'm aware of the problems modern day consumerism does regarding the earth and production pollution, but as with everyone else, the conveniences make things hard to change regarding certain things. There's a lot of discussion and nuance to be had regarding these conversations though. Anyway, we bought some biodegradable sponges and some bar soap from Canadians with ethical sourcing of materials. Starting small!
Banff and car are the next priorities. Soon!
Chronicled
7:34 PM