26 June 2004
Argh! Last night I discovered that one of my favorite TV series, "The Prisoner", has been on every Friday night in June. I stumbled across it while flipping through the channels, then realized that it was the last Friday of June. The new cable guide came today and, as I suspected, it's off the air in July. I'll have to keep an eye on channel 308 "The Super Channel" from now on. They're showing "Knight Rider" now, which I don't really care for, but I do want to see the show about the super motorcycle. I don't remember the name of it, just that it came out about the same time as Knight Rider and featured an intelligent motorcycle used to fight crime. When I was a kid I spent my summers watching TV at home. My favorites were Get Smart and The Munsters. I was really fascinated by the Munsters' house. I wanted to have cobwebs and trap doors and giant lever-style electrical switches in my house. Someday I'll build a house on some land, and when I do I'd like to incorporate these elements:I'm going on a short trip to Okayama tomorrow and Monday. Just want to get out in the country for a bit. The next journal entry will be Tuesday or Wednesday.
- a secret panel leading to a secret room
- a large garden
- tatami mat floors in many of the rooms
- a dedicated photographic darkroom
- a rooftop observatory, or just a platform
- a greenhouse
- an underground room in the yard
with turf on the hatch so you don't know it's there- an aviary (only if I'm rich for some reason)
- stone exterior walls (this is probably also a rich thing)
25 June 2004
Well this was a weary kind of day. Kumiko and I woke up at 3:30 this morning to watch England play Portugal in a quarterfinal. I was hoping to get about 3 hours of sleep before heading out to get a haircut. That was assuming the game ended at 5:45, but this one dragged on into extra time, and didn't finish until 6:30. So I got about 2.5 hours before the game, and 2.5 after the game (I overslept a bit and was late for the haircut appointment). After the haircut I went to work. I had to chair a meeting, but actually everything went fine. I wasn't too bedraggled. By the time I finished at 9pm I felt bedraggled though. It's amazing how the body takes abuse and keeps on going. I read a day-old newspaper today and discovered that Navratilova is playing at Wimbledon again. Kumiko was interested to learn this too, and she did some internet research. Turns out she won her first match, but now she's already out. Too bad. I wanted to see her play Myskina. I've kind of got a thing for Myskina. Not as big a thing as I have for Kumiko of course, who greeted me with a delicious couscous when I came home today. I'll eat it for lunch tomorrow too. Thank you, my darling Kumiko, and don't worry about Myskina. I won't worry about you and Portuguese soccer sensation Louis Figo. I'm a little worried about your mom and Del Pierro though.24 June 2004
I talked to Tomita-san at the garden this morning about my cucumbers. They've started dieing off pretty suddenly, so I was worried about how to help them. He told me that cucumber plants only have a 2-month lifespan, so it's perfectly normal. His are dieing too, but not so dramatically as mine. I'll just have to replant from seed if I want to keep growing cukes. Sounds like fun to me. I've been wanting for some work in the garden. He also pointed out that crows have been munching on my tomatoes. They've just started turning red, but all the red ones are being spoiled by hungry beaks. I'm thinking of putting bags around the clusters of tomatoes to keep critters off them. I also experimented picking a few still green today. I recall my parents letting tomatoes ripen in a paper bag on the window sill. I think this might work for me. The diet is going fine, except that I forgot to bring the lunch Kumiko made to work today. I ended up eating a semi-unhealthy 5pm dinner, and a very light bean salad when I got home. Tonight was my night to cook for lunches, so I made hamburger patties with shiso built in. Should be tasty and reasonably healthy. I'll bring some salad as well. Haircut tomorrow morning.23 June 2004
The typhoon knocked over all of my corn plants and one of the tomatoes and one pepper plant, but they were all okay. I staked everything back into place. Tomorrow morning I'll go check out their progress. Today I embark upon a great journey of self-discovery and loathing...my new diet. This is a variation on my standard diet plan of just eating healthier food. This time I'm going to start treating my 5 o'clock "lunch break" as my dinner, and stop eating when I get home from work. At 5, I'll have something relatively healthy (sushi today), and when I get home I'll have something light like some pickles or a salad. This plan is not just a diet plan, however. It's also a financial plan. Kumiko and I have agreed that each night we'll cook something to bring to work the next day. We'll trade nights. I figure I can save an average of 500 yen per day, which means 10,000 per month. I'm considering adding an exercise element to this whole scheme, but that's usually a quick trip to the failure shop for me. Better keep this do-able.21 June 2004
TYPHOON! No big deal really. Typhoon No.6 hit early this morning and brought torrents of rain and wind. It was never enough to make me close the balcony doors though. Typhoons don't hit very hard in Osaka because we're protected by Shikoku Island. The worst wind was down at the Umeda Sky Building. We went down there to watch "Lost in Translation", and the wind whipping between the two towers was amazing. We had to fight to move forward. I don't know if it was the storm, or if it always happens, but the whole theater was creaking like a ship at sea. We couldn't detect any motion, so I'm not prepared to say the creaking was caused by the wind. Whenever a typhoon comes through, I think of the old TV spots for "Tidal Wave" gum. Anyone remember those? This morning we went a little too far with soccer watching, waking up at 3:30 to watch the Spain/Portugal game. Kumiko couldn't stay awake, and I barely managed. We were rewarded though, since we were routing for Portugal and they pulled it off. Now Spain is out. Tonight is an important England/Croatia match-up. I'd really like to get a normal amount of sleep though.20 June 2004
Today was a really nice, relaxing day. Hot and sticky of course, but a little innovation called "air conditioning" took care of that. Kumiko woke me up at 5, as we'd agreed upon before going to bed, and we watched the tail end of the Czech Republic/Netherlands game. It wa a great way to start the day for a guy who has money on the Czechs, because we got to watch them come from a 2-1 deficit to a 3-2 victory in the course of only 30 minutes. The Czechs looked really good out there, and they became the first team to qualify for the next round. We rode over to the old garden after the game, full of high spirits, revelling in the victory and the rare feeling of being awake and outdoors at 6AM. We picked a fair number of cucumbers, plus an eggplant, and two bell peppers. We had a build-up of eggplant, because we're not used to cooking with it, so I devised an eggplant-rich breakfast, which was extremely delicious. After breakfast we napped in fits until about 1pm. I decided I had to get out of the house again, so I took 3 rolls of film to the cheap processing place in Ishibashi. I also brought my Olympus camera, which I believed to have only 5 shots left on the roll, with the intention of quickly shooting up the rest of the roll in Ishibashi. As it turned out, I had to shoot about 15 shots to get to the end, so I ended up wandering around ugly Ishibashi for quite a while, struggling to find any inspiration. At one point, an old man decided I needed help, and started framing shots for me with his fingers, describing just what to put in the frame and what to keep out. He seemed surprised that I didn't immediately run and do exactly what he said. What a meddler! I bet he knows exactly how everything should be done. Glad I was in a position to be dismissive. His family and coworkers wouldn't have that luxury. Eventually though, I filled the roll of my own vision, and dropped the four rolls at the place. When I got home we had about 2 hours to spare before Kumiko's parents picked us up, so I watched a movie on TV. It was called "The Ice Storm", with Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver and Elijah Wood and Christina Ricci, set in about 1972 or so. The movie was kind of dark and quiet, but the setting was interesting, and the acting seemed realistic. At 5 o'clock we went to Ganko Sushi in Mino with Kumiko's parents to celebrate Father's Day. We ate heaps of sushi and tempura and grilled squid and chicken, and giant rock oysters served in their megalithic shells on a bed of ice. They were great. Kumiko and I were tipsy and tired after dinner, but I had promised to attend a birthday barbeque way out in Nishinomiya, and I managed to talk Kumiko into going with me. I'm glad we went, because we had a nice time talking to Mairwen (who's 30 now) and Tammie and Patrick (who are even older), and some folks we hadn't met or had only briefly met before, who were also very nice. On the way home, I bought some "Skal", which is one of my new favorite soft drinks. By the way, Tammie calls soft drinks "fizzy cordial". Weird, huh? Haven't heard that one before. She's Tasmanian. Anyway, Skal is made from fermented milk, like an Indian lassi I guess, and the effect when they add sugar and carbonation is fantastic. Such a refreshing drink!I don't want to leave my father out on father's day, so here's another fun memory...
When Anna and I were kids we loved to watch seasonal specials on TV. The Charlie Brown Christmas special, for example, was one of our favorites. But there were many throughout the year, shown in prime time, so kids could watch with their parents. We looked forward to these shows with great anticipation, and we knew the intro graphics for each network that meant the show was about to start. That would be the moment of greatest tension for us, and my dad would never fail to get down in front of the TV and act like a horse or a dog or something, blocking the screen until we screamed and pleaded in frustration. Alternatively, he might just suddenly change the channel at that point and say "Let's watch the news" or "I think it's time for '60 Minutes'", which produced the same effect from us, if not worse. Of course he would always change the channel back, and we knew he would, but those moments of frustration were part of the fun for us, and obviously a lot of fun for him. I plan to torture my kids in the same way.
19 June 2004
Tomorrow is Father's Day in Japan and America. I was thinking of something my father used to do. He always loved shopping for groceries. He was almost always the one to go to the grocery store, and he usually spent a lot of money there. When he came home he would call my mom over and show off what he got. He'd take each item out of the bag, looking hopeful, and explain his reasoning for each one, seeking approval because he knew it was all unneccessary. My mom would usually go along with it, and give him her retroactive approval. At the end of many of the explanations, he would kind of shake the item a bit in the air (a can of tamales, or some deli meat or something) in a final flourish of showmanship, before putting it away. I never gave those scenes a second thought back then, but now I think it was really cute. It came back to me very clearly yesterday. Another memory -- he loved cars, as I do, and was always shopping for some car, reading "Auto Trader" or the local classifieds. Even if we had no need at all, he would still read through the weekly "Auto Trader" magazine without fail. When I lived with my folks, he would annoy me every Saturday morning by asking me to go to Seven Eleven to get the new Auto Trader. I just wanted to relax on Saturday mornings, like him, but it somehow became my duty. He usually made it worth my while by giving me a 5-dollar bill, and telling me to keep the change. Not having to drive to 7-11 was apparently worth $3.75 to him. Now I miss my father most when I think of some bit of car trivia that I want to ask him or share with him.18 June 2004
Feeling much better today. I traded Dana (my colleague) a bag of vegetables and a USJ discount coupon for some of her leftover antibiotic medicine. I know the safest bet is always to get medicine from your friends rather than from a doctor or pharmacy. What do they know that Dana doesn't? I want to do something with all that nice paper I bought on Wednesday, but I keep forgetting to buy printer ink. I'm out of "light cyan", and dangerously low on yellow. Good to get that important info recorded for perpetuity. Oh, here's something. I made an olive salad after work tonight. Black olives, stuffed green olives, shiso leaf, parmesan cheese, and olive oil from a bottle of artichoke hearts. It was a great salad. I might have another tomorrow night.16 June 2004
Today could be called an average day in the life of "M", except for these small differences:Otherwise, pretty standard stuff.
- I'm having some kind of sinus pain, and my snot has a bad smell.
- I didn't get anything for breakfast from Circle K on my way home from watering the garden.
- I didn't bring my lunch back to the office to eat it.
- I inexplicably bought 100 sheets of paper (50 each of two types) on my lunch break.
- Kumiko wasn't home when I came home (dinner with coworkers).
14 June 2004
Last night we had 4 people over to watch the England v France Euro 2004 game. We had a great time. The game was really exciting, but it ended in tears for England fans. We stayed up until 6:30am, so we had an out of it day today. Our friend Katherine is leaving the country tomorrow. We had lunch with her and said goodbye. That's probably the hardest part of living overseas. Friends are always leaving.12 June 2004
Recently I've been reading a lot from the "nature writing" genre. First Gerald Durrell, who was once a nature show host in England, and before that a zookeeper. Next Gavin Maxwell, who lived with otters in the west highlands of Scotland. Now I'm reading Henry Beston's "The Outermost House", about his year living on the beach at Cape Cod. So far I haven't gotten into it deeply, but I have hope, based on its reviews and its longevity. After this I'm going to try "Walden", to see where they all started, but at this point I'm thinking it's the animals that keep me interested, rather than "life in the great outdoors". Regardless, I had to get away from the city today, because it's been on my mind since I started reading all this stuff. So I woke up early and went to Asuka in Nara Prefecture. When I woke up I had a swollen uvula (the punching bag in the back of your throat). This is the third time in my life that I've had that condition. It's a really annoying feeling, because it keeps me from breathing regularly, and hurts when I swallow. The first time it happened I was in college. I went to see a doctor because it was so worrisome. She had never seen that before and didn't really know what to tell me but to wait and see. I did, and the next day I was fine. The next time was two years ago. That time it lasted for about a week though. Luckily, I'm already feeling better today. I think I'll be at normal uvula proportions by tomorrow morning. I wasn't going to let my uvula stop me from getting away for the day though. I left the house with Kumiko, and we parted ways in Umeda. She went to work and I went to Namba to catch the Kintetsu line to Nara. I rented a bicycle when I got to Asuka, and quickly ditched it, since there are too many hills to enjoy riding. The rain was on and off, but always light enough to keep moving. It was basically just a peaceful country place. The attraction is supposed to be the ancient burial mounds, but I can't really get a lot out of mounds of dirt and stone. I had a good time hiking past rice paddies as they were being planted, and into the mountains, and finally up one mountain via a kind of animal pathway I think, using a big plant frond to cut through the hundreds of spiderwebs before they got plastered onto my face and arms. I caused a heck of a lot of grief to spiders today. I saw a lot of cool k-trucks out there too. Especially interesting (to me) was a preponderance of old Mazdas. I'd seen one pretty old Mazda k-truck before in Toyonaka, and I thought it must be a real rarity. In Asuka I saw three just like it. All of them hard at work in the fields. For some reason Nara is Mazda/Suzuki k-truck country. There weren't many of the other makes. It feels good to be home and showered now and have baked chicken and a grape chu-hi in me. I'm going to watch some Avengers now.11 June 2004
Kumiko and I both have a day off today. We're going to Costco (new to Japan) in Amagasaki. They have olives for cheap, and I want to buy a chicken too. It's the only place I've seen that sells whole uncooked chickens. Early this morning Kumiko's father stopped by the apartment to drop off a bunch of cucumbers he'd picked at the garden. There were ten, all huge. Today'll be a salad day.8 June 2004
The new "Kansai 1 Shukan" magazine came out today with the summer fireworks listings. I look forward to this issue every year, so I can carefully plan for maximum fireworks viewing. This year I'm determined to make a concerted effort at taking photographs of at least one festival. I have all the equipment I need, and I know what to do. It's just that the past two summers, I've been ready for it, but have failed (or been loath to) to concentrate on photos when I'm at the festivals. It's kind of a lonely business, as you really need to dedicate yourself to finding a good tripod spot and then manning it all night. Half the joy of a festival is roaming around, buying big sausages on a stick or roasted corn or giant yakitori and watching the crowds. I think I'll have to go alone to one of these if I'm going to give up all that stuff. I can't haul a bunch of photo gear around and still enjoy the festival as it's meant to be observed, so I could never drag Kumiko or a friend into the same boat. Osaka City's most famous festival, Tenjin Matsuri, is on a Sunday this year, so I'll finally have a chance to go enjoy it. This will be my fifth summer in Japan, but I've never until now had the right days off to see Tenjin Matsuri. There aren't a lot of fireworks, but it's right in the heart of the city and there are parades and festival stuff all day long. I aim to be there! By the way, tonight was lasagna round 2. We had it last night and it was good, despite forgetting to put in the meat. We finished it off tonight. It was even better as a leftover.7 June 2004
I just made a lasagna. My first ever. It's not baked yet, just assembled and waiting in the fridge. Today was a day off, so of course I went out to the garden. Sadly, there's not much to do there now. With the corn and carrots taking two full rows and nothing to do but wait, and nothing to plant, maintenance doesn't really take any time. Today I tied up some sections of cucumber vine to make them grow up rather than out. And I cut back the tomatoes some, so the fruit can get more sunlight. The sky is full of giant fluffy clouds now, another beautiful day in spite of dire prognostications. I spent some time sitting on a wall at the park today just looking at the world and feeling lucky. Summer might be hot, but it's always been the longest season wherever I've lived, and the most memorable. I'm glad it's here again.5 June 2004
We're running a sweepstakes at the office for this year's European Cup. Grant, the creative mastermind behind "Bad Tie Day", put this one together too. Today was the day we'd been waiting for. At 5:40 we all gathered 'round and chose our teams out of a bag. I ended up with Czech Republic, a long shot, but certainly not favored for last place. There will be monetary prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places, as well as last place. Tammie, who proudly holds the Bulgarian card, has a good shot at last, as well as Fiona, who is backing Switzerland. I don't know this soccer stuff from experience. I just asked Grant. We had a healthy dinner tonight: tomatoes, cucumber, white and green asparagus, and some ratatouli (I have no idea how to spell that) courtesy of Kumiko's dinner party last night.3 June 2004
I picked five of the biggest cucumbers this morning! Kumiko's mom emailed us to say they were ready to pick. I guess they're still going by there every morning. I took them home and ate one immediately with Atlantic sea salt from France (we bought that at Zabar's in New York). It tasted like a real cucumber. I don't know why that surprised me. I noticed something else this morning that surprised me. There are two ajisai (hydrangea) bushes near the garden, which I've been admiring for their interesting coloration. Only this morning their coloring had changed. They both looked much more like the typical ajisai which are really common (but still beautiful) around here in early June. It seems the color of the flowers can change throughout the season. I wonder if the color has anything to do with cross-polination. It was a really nice day today. We had spaghetti with tarako (tiny fish eggs) and of course, fresh cucumber for dinner.
