I've been in Japan for three weeks. I think I may have left my brain somewhere over there, or on the plane, or something, along with my shampoo, as I can't seem to concentrate on much at the moment... is it 1 PM? Or AM? Or something else entirely?
Good to be back in my own house though, without hauling tons of clothes around in a big ol' dorky suitcase. The usual complaint about the house being halfway around the planet from the other place I'd like to often be still applies...
Believe it or not, I've actually got a good selection (okay, well, half) of my pictures from Japan up. They are up in raw form (meaning I've sucked them out of the cam, renamed them, and uploaded them as the giant unprocessed jpgs that they are - further processing will happen later) on my storage project account. Yes, they are huge. Yes, most of them are kinda lame. But there are some nice gems in there. I will be using those to make a nicer picture page at some point.
The other person in the pictures other than me is my friend, coworker and neighbor Ben.
There are some new collages up, of which the above is only the first. Check them out on the images page.
It's currently 41F, up from 31F this morning (Peeve: ice on the bike seat) and on its way up to a high of around 50F this afternoon.
Little bit of snow today, then bright purply-blue skies with just a wisp of cloud over it, happy happy. Most of the leaves are now off the trees, over at work they're sucking them up with giant vacuums like they do every year.
I got my eyes tested today. I get a free eye test and pair of glasses once every two years. For a bit now, if I'm on the tired side and writing close up in a notebook (which I spend a lot of time doing on the weekends, studying stuff) I've found myself going crosseyed at the letters I'm writing, or more specifically the very tip of the pencil. Trying to merge the images would just make my head hurt. Taking the glasses off would solve it, but then looking up and out the window would be less than satisfying. Closing one eye while writing also worked - clearly the glasses were the problem. As I suspected, one eye had gotten slightly out of joint more than the other one, and so I was having to knit together slightly "off" stuff, seems like. New glasses should solve that.
So they showed me the glasses available. All the frames these days are these little dinky things with a vaguely triangular shape - yuck. I want huge round glasses just like the ones I have. Oh, but those are out of style, don't you know that? In fact when I got my current pair, two and a half years ago or so, they told me then that I was buying a size that was just too big. Well, pardon me, but I need to wear my glasses all the time, and I care more about what the world looks like out of them than what I look like in them. I can't stand having only a tiny visible area and then frame edges and blur in regions I actually look at frequently. So I asked if there was ANYWHERE that made nice normal big round glasses these days? Glasses woman says she'll call up the company that made my current ones, and see if they have any in the warehouse, since they don't ship those old ones anymore. Well, turns out they have tons of 'em, and so I'm getting glasses exactly like the ones I've got. Identical frames. These glasses are great, they're big, they're round, they're plain, the nose piece is just welded directly to the eye parts, none of the fancy delicate looping around connection that my last pair before these had (though they were also nice and round) that just breaks all the time. Springy joints where the ear parts connect to the eye parts. Yay. So, the next time I need glasses, I can just get new frames in the ones I'm currently wearing, and ride out this tiny glasses fad altogether. Sweet.
My current glasses have nosepads from Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan, 'cuz my glasses lost a screw while I was there and I had them fixed. They even did it for free.
My kotatsu has arrived. I've got the bottom quilts but not the top ones though, so I'm waiting for that final package before I set it all up.
It is currently 27F on its way to a high of 31F. It snowed a bit last night and there was frost so things were sparkling white in the sun this morning. Crisp crisp. I am taking the afternoon off (and it's a four day weekend after this). I will be spending thanksgiving at Mike L's family's farm. Then Friday is Our Aunt Barbara's birthday. Both of these events involve cheesecakes.
I made said cheesecakes last night. Made the crusts, set the oven to preheat, then the leafdude came over to talk about what was up with my gutters and how he needed to store his blower behind my house overnight, then we got to talking about (1) just what the Urbana school board wants to do with the property they're buying up a block away next to the high school, (2) who owns various and sundry frat houses on the west side of town, and (3) his daughter maybe wanting to transfer to UIUC. I returned to the cheesecakes, made the filling, opened the oven, and... nothing. No flame. Yes gas, so I ventilated the room out. Further testing shows that while the stove still works, the oven is busted. It will not light. Now, when I moved in I had this problem and spent some $$$ to get it fixed, which involved replacing some parts deep inside it. As it turns out the gas outlet isn't easily reachable without taking parts out, so I can't just light the thing with matches.
I ended up baking the cheesecakes over at Mike L's. I'm thinking now might the time to give this stove the boot and get a new one. There are several features I now want in any new one I get, most notably (1) a separate heating element for broiling, if possible, so that I can broil stuff not at toe level given that I do that far more often than I bake cakes, (2) square yagura that don't rotate endlessly as I stir or move the pots around (granted, that wouldn't happen so much on the current model if the little nubs that are supposed to hold things in place weren't completely rusted down to nothing), and finally (3) sealed in burners, so the metal of the stove comes right up TO the gas outlets and it's all easy to clean.
I will miss the nice goldenrod color of my current stove, though. It matches my floor so nicely, and they just don't make anything in that color these days. Still, I already had to replace my goldenrod fridge with a white one, so now all my appliances would match. At any rate, the stove part still works so I can take my time to find a unit that does what I want. Oh yeah, it also has to be freestanding 'cuz my stove pretty much just stands by a wall all on its lonesome.
The lines of temperature gradient are packed really tightly together and running just about horizontally across Illinois today. Here in Urbana it's just about a steady 45F (up from 28 this morning) but up north of Chicago it's around 25F. Tomorrow the 25F region expands to cover us. Time to go sit in the kotatsu.
Yes, my kotatsu has finally arrived. My house doesn't have a fireplace and so I've wanted a kotatsu for some years now, as a cozy place to sit at in the center of the room. With a kotatsu, you get the benefits of a table, the benefits of sitting under covers, and the benefits of a heater heating only a very small enclosed space, all rolled into one. Most of the time I find myself feeling "cold" at home in the winter is due to my feet being cold, and this takes care of that problem.
I finally got one while on vacation this fall, at one of the newly-ubiquitous "mujiryouhin" ("no-brand-good-quality") stores. Alas, they don't do shipping abroad (yet!!), so I had them pack up the table in one box (or more precisely, get me one direct from the back room that hadn't yet been unpacked for the store), and the associated futons and blankets in two other boxes: "Hm? We ship, you know! What prefecture do you live in?" "Umm, Illinois, so I don't think you'll ship to ME..." "Oh. Yeah. Here, use this tape..." I then had the fun of hauling these around Tokyo and shipping them sea mail myself from the post office in Kiyokawa, Taito-ku, Tokyo. Hauling them around was a major peeve, mainly owing to (1) huge crowds in Shinjuku, which is where I got the table portion, (2) the path into the east entrance of Shinjuku station having one tiny place that was less wide than the table, necessitating my taking the table plus tons of boxes of other crud I'd purchased earlier in usedbookstoreland OFF of the little wheelie rack, moving it all through, and reloading, and (3) the lack of escalator up to my particular train platform. I had little white "gunsyu" gloves from going hiking up around central Hokkaido a few days earlier, and they came in handy. The handle on my little wheelie cart (bought a few hours earlier in Akihabara, along with a 1000W transformer weighing down my other side) has little grooves in it and so my fingers were getting quite red from pulling on it to drag the packages uphill. The room I was staying in near Kita-senjyuu was a fourth-floor walkup, but luckily the owner of the building let me leave the packages in the front office until the next day when the post office would be open. Luckily for me the big table package was juuuuuust under the maximum weight allowed for shipping. And a month and a half later, here it IS. Woo.
It's just amazing. Sat there in my living room last night reading the last bit of Harry Potter and listening to some of the CDs I got in usedbookstoreland (a.k.a. a big street lined with used books and CD shops in Kanda, Tokyo), feet and the rest of me just warm as can be, cats already taking up their traditional positions under the futon. Wow. I finally have a kotatsu in my very own house. Here in Illinois. Life is good.
The cats are convinced I've gotten them their very own new apartment.
I went to see "Bowling for Columbine" by Michael Moore last night. I definitely recommend it, and to be frank I'm not generally all that fond of Michael Moore. I liked "Roger and Me" (perhaps because it was the first of his efforts) but things since have sorta bugged me - he's tended to rely so much on the sort of interview that seems like an ambush, where the subject doesn't get a word in edgewise, and where even when I agree with the point he's making the whole thing makes me cringe. He's been called the Rush Limbaugh of the left, and I must say it's not entirely undeserved.
That said, however, this film was good. The film is a montage of various film clips and interviews. However, the interviews let you hear answers - they ask sticky questions, and get answers back, and it's altogether more exploratory. Things are put up, commentary is made, but there's much less of the "this is a setup!" feel. Various possible factors in the large gun-murder-rate in the US are explored, but there's no real "this is IT!!," and it's not all about gun-control. Turns out Canadians are also armed to the teeth, in fact... if you like all the angles, or not, I'd say it's certainly worth your $7.
The middle part of the film has footage from the closed-circuit cameras taken during the Columbine high school murders, and a pan over the carpet afterward with police tags. I must say that is some of the creepiest stuff I've seen in a good long while, even black and white and fuzzy. Brr.
This morning it was a brisk 14F on the way to work, but one of those great bright sunny days that's great for walking around outside listening to the walkman.
I've spent a good bit of time putting up the storm windows this past weekend. This ended up taking most of Saturday afternoon. I've also got some nice little white lights up around my porch and a brand new red mailbox.
All about the white elephants at work today.