It has been a long while since I failed to make a post in this blog, but yesterday marked such a gap. The reason was that my wife never worked that day, and in what I am certain was a tribute to her impending birthday ─ she turned 47 today ─ an outing had been planned for the latter afternoon for an early supper of sushi at Maguro Japanese Restaurant (Google map) in the Guildford area of Surrey, B.C.
I had been alerted to this outing by my wife the day before, so I was prepared. Otherwise, I would probably not have gone because I would not have had any hunger. I absolutely need to know of these events a day or more ahead of time.
We all took photos, but I am disappointed with mine.
This first pair of mine that were taken at 4:31 p.m. features my wife and her youngest son (22 years old) ─ my hand was unsteady for the first photo, so it's a good thing that I took two of them:
Then my eldest stepson (25 years old) had me join them, but his first effort was as shaky as was mine:
Finally, the younger lad tried his hand at photographing me where I was seated beside his older brother at 4:33 p.m. - 4:34 p.m., but the brightness of the day outside was in full evidence behind us and washed out the shots:
I have an iPhone 5, but all three of my companions have such larger phones that mine looked like a toy beside theirs. No doubt their phones also have superior photography features, and not just more impressive physical size.
We all enjoyed a bottle (355-ml) each of Sapporo beer.
The full tab came to nearly $100, if I heard correctly. My eldest stepson covered it, but I have no idea if his younger brother would later contribute anything back. My wife left a tip of at least $20.
All I had on me was $10, so I kept it.
Our home's monthly mortgage is normally debited from my chequing account on the 22nd, and the account was $605.90 short of that required sum. As a result, both my wife and her eldest son had to transfer money into the account last evening after we got back from eating. My wife contributed $300, and her older boy $306.
It seems likely that due to it now being the weekend, the mortgage debit will not be enacted until Monday, for the money for the mortgage remains in the account as I type these words at 3:31 p.m. However, when the transaction does take place, all that will remain to me is 10¢ until my monthly pension gets direct-deposited quite late this coming week ─ maybe Thursday.
Meantime, I am unable to do any shopping, obviously.
For that reason, I was unable to buy my wife a thing for her birthday. It really sucks being a 70-year-old pensioner with no other income.
After we all got back home, my wife had plans to leave us, for she normally spends her weekends somewhere in Vancouver (such is my sorry marriage). When I went outside to see her off, she was not sure just when she would be back ─ she even suggested that it might not be until sometime after she finished work on Monday at the Thai restaurant that employs her.
Once she was gone, I quickly burned right out. Had that not been the case, I might have been able to blog. And so it was that at 6:00 p.m. I found myself in bed.
It was to be 2½ hours before I felt awake and curious enough to check the time. By then, I could hear that the T.V. was on downstairs, so I knew that my younger brother had gotten home from whatever bar he had been drinking at.
He normally sits up until the midnight hour.
I felt quite refreshed; and had it been after my brother had gone to bed for the night, I would have risen to do research on the new post that I want to begin at one of my six hosted websites.
Unfortunately, that was still 3½ hours into my future ─ I felt able enough to spend awhile longer enjoying bed, but there was no way that I could put in that much time. There was no choice but for me to rise and join him, for he would soon enough want me to put our T9 Android 8.1 TV Box into operation (he has no skill in its use).
We were to watch T.V. until deep into the midnight hour; and it was something like 1:10 a.m. once I was back in my bed. I took a melatonin tablet, and felt as able to sleep as I normally do at that point in the night after sitting up with my brother. That early evening nap was not to be of any interference in that regard.
My nights are characterized as a succession of naps as opposed to a solid block of sleep. I am curious to try grounding (earthing) to see if that proves of any benefit, but due to my limited finances I would have to rig up something on my own ─ I cannot afford a reputable commercial grounding pad or sheet for my bed.
I am too restless to be able to securely attach a grounding wire to my wrist or ankle.
Ultimately, what I may do is await warmer weather and then try sleeping on an air mattress on our backyard sundeck, using lengths of metallic duct tape to create a sort of 'sheet' upon which I would lie and to which I would attach a grounding wire, and have the other end of the wire attached to a metal spike or pipe driven into the ground.
But it's a scheme or plan still very much in progress.
I was very comfortable in bed overnight, and I had no intention of trying to get up too early. It began lightly raining last evening after four or five days of sunny weather, and it likely rained lightly well until into the morning. By mid-afternoon we were getting sunny periods.
It is odd that I cannot precisely recall when I rose this morning, but I suspect that it may have been around 7:30 a.m., or a little earlier.
I will remain home all of today. My younger brother set off in the early afternoon to re-engage his drinking somewhere, and will most probably spend the evening with his girlfriend Bev who works at a bar. More often than not on Saturdays he will remain with her thereafter to spend the night at her home, but he has come home late the past two Saturday evenings.
I will endeavour to get to bed rather early this evening, for I do not want to repeat last night. I do not like sitting up late because it robs me of my early morning productivity. If I can get to bed early, then I will rise extremely early in the a.m. to work on that new website post I want to begin that I referred to earlier.
And ultimately, I would very much like to be able to get away on a good, long walk ─ something I need to engage well before the arrival of day. The busy daytime is naught but stress for me, since there is nowhere I can walk in peace and anonymity.
That is another negative of being too poor to pull up roots and move away to somewhere in which I could enjoy my environment ─ not remain housebound as I virtually am here where I live in Surrey. As I have often before suggested, sometimes I feel as if I am under a lifetime sentence of house arrest.
Other times, I feel so stressed and helpless that I see myself as being little more than some caged creature destined to live out its life as such ─ perverted and emotionally twisted as such creatures are when denied the natural environment most optimal for them.
I want to mention the blood flow restriction (BFR) bands that I ordered on February 12 from AliExpress.com after I had done some research on the benefits of light-weight training using such bands.
I won't link to the actual bands until I finally receive them and have some time in which to try them out. However, I want to explain that I had intended to order the very same bands though Amazon Canada where they were priced at $35.98 with $5.54 more for shipping ─ those are Canadian dollars.
Well, I found the very same bands at AliExpress ─ two for the arms, and two for the legs ─ and guess what they cost me in Canadian funds?
With no shipping charge, the full price was $25.97. Sure, I have to wait longer for the product to arrive than would likely have been the case with Amazon even though I do not have an Amazon Prime account.
But I don't much care.
I admit that I was initially concerned about placing the order, for I had not before dealt with AliExpress, and I knew that China is where so many (if not all) of their products are shipped from.
But thus far, this has been the progress of my order:
2020.02.13 19:03 (GMT-7): Shipment dispatched
2020.02.13 19:33 (GMT-7): Shipment at country of origin warehouse
2020.02.20 13:45 (GMT-7): Shipment left country of origin warehouse
2020.02.21 14:45 (GMT-7): Shipment accepted by airline
2020.02.22 00:14 (GMT-7): Departed country of origin
In some confirmation that the parcel had left China, on February 21 I received this E-mail notification from Canada Post:
Your shipment details have been received from UBI SMART PARCEL LIMITED and a shipping label has been created. Your parcel will be shipped as soon as it’s available.
Then today at Canada Post:
The shipper has created a shipping label for this item and has sent us electronic information.
So I have full confidence that the item is indeed being sent to me, and that I was not fleeced.
If you have ever considered buying something from AliExpress but were too hesitant because they are based in China, perhaps this explanation at MegaBonus.com detailing just how much care they extend to customer protection will bring you the assurance you wish that you could have: Is AliExpress Legit and Safe?
I've got an AliExpress advertisement just beneath this post that you can click on just to see how extensive the ads from the sellers there are ─ the details are so much more than you usually find at Amazon.
The placing of my order was something of a learning experience, I have to admit. For example, the BFR bands on the advertisement landing page had this price range:
US $9.67 - 22.26
What the heck?
But I slowly figured out that at the top of the page, there was an option for me to change the currency to any other I wanted to be billed for ─ obviously, I selected Canadian dollars. And that resulted in this:
C$ 13.02 - 29.96
C$ 20.99 - 48.31 -38% New User Deal
As a new user, I was being given a 38% reduction over the higher price range of C$ 20.99 - 48.31.
In addition, just beneath that range of prices was this ─ an opportunity for further reductions:
Instant discount: Buy 2 get 2% off
C$ 4.04 New User Coupon
C$ 1.35 off on C$ 12.11
Get coupons
But why a price range?
Initially I thought that maybe the prices were based upon quantity orders. For example, if a customer ordered some maximum number of the bands, then the cost would break down to being $13.02 each, and there were probably less levels of discounts from there all the way down to just an order for one item which would then cost the buyer $29.96.
But that was not the case at all, although I bet such discounts likely are available for mass orders.
What the price range really involved was this ─ before placing an order, the customer had to actually select one of these three small images:
If you only wanted a pair of bands for the arms, select the first image ─ the cost was then C$ 13.02. The second image meant that the customer only wanted a pair of bands for the legs ─ C$ 16.61. And of course, a pair of each of the bands for arms and legs would cost C$ 29.96 before those potential (and immediate) coupon reductions which I of course took advantage of.
So if you don't mind waiting a little longer for an order, consider AliExpress if saving some money is important to you. As the article I linked to indicates, they do seem to care about their customers.
Before I call it a day for this post, I want to mention a couple of entertainment items that my brother and I viewed via our T9 Android TV Box yesterday morning.
The first was the 2017 Norwegian movie Thelma.
If you don't like movies that end without any clear explanation or understandable finality, then you will be better off avoiding this one. Wikipedia says that at the end of the movie, the title character used her newly-understood powers to bring back into existence a lesbian lover (Anja) Thelma had inadvertently blinked away while she was voluntarily having a seizure induced for research purposes at a medical facility.
Well, if that's what happened, my brother and I had no idea. We figured that she had more likely created her own version of her lost Anja, for nothing else would explain why Anja would come back into existence and be all smiles and romantic advances to this young woman who had blotted her out.
It was as if Anja knew nothing of what had happened to herself.
If I had been brought back into existence after having been non-existent for several days, I think that I would be terrified of the person who had the ability to do this to me!
Also, why was Anja content to leave her father dead if she could have also brought him back? She had killed him when he was boating out on a lake ─ she burst him into flames while she was sleeping and dreaming. He had managed to extinguish them by falling or jumping into the lake; but as soon as he surfaced, he seemed to just re-combust. And this time it didn't look as if the water would be able to douse the flames. His entire body was combusting in spontaneous fashion.
He never did anything to Anya to deserve this. And even though Anya healed her crippled mother after murdering her father, she was leaving her mother to be thereafter alone without her husband.
And all so Anya could go back to university and live a lesbian existence with her re-created lover?
This was such a dreadfully disappointing denouement. I would not recommend the movie to anyone.
The other piece of entertainment my brother and I witnessed was the series finale of Killjoys. I'm glad that run of nonsense is over with. When the main characters appear to be invulnerable ─ even though they are not ─ and can come back from any diversity, one loses the ability to be concerned for them.
If a character is clearly never going to be made to die, how can we be afraid for him or her? It also doesn't help that they greet every threat with ridiculous bravado and even humour. No mere mortal could do that when threatened with clear and imminent death ─ not unless that person was a character who understood his or her essential invulnerability.
Under that circumstance, practically anyone could be utterly fearless and crack jokes when death or some fate worse than that appeared to be imminent.
I got tired of being constantly barraged with this absence of realism where facing death or torture was concerned.
Okay, my evening is now upon me ─ it is 6:00 p.m.
Although she is not here and I have not heard from her, I bid my wife in absentia a most Happy Birthday! Further, I wish my life's situation was better than it proved to be, and that I could have been the husband for you that I always wanted to be.
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