30 November 2004 It feels like the 29th, but I decided to be official. It's almost 2am. I've been laboring over the new Moon Station Echo. I bought that domain name several months ago with no real plans for it. Then my friend Barron gave me a great idea when he launched a sales-related site for his photography (barronfujimoto.com), separate from his usual weblog (www.takoyaki.org). When I say he "gave me a great idea", I mean I just copied him. Anyway, Moon Station Echo is where I'm putting together the photos that I think might have some artistic appeal to someone besides me and my mom. I'd love to sell something, but if that doesn't happen, I won't cry. I'll just curl up in fetal position and kind of rock back and forth. I'm going to copy Barron even more in the future. His site links to lots of other great photo-journal type websites, which I've been checking out. I think I need to start linking out more. I started with just a few pictures, but no doubt I'll be posting more to that site. Hopefully one or two frames from the 148 shots I took in Arashiyama today will make the cut. Arashiyama is peaking right now. The trees are just the most brilliant colors, and there are all these wooden boats going up and down the river that just scream to be photographed. I certainly wasn't the only photographer answering their call today. The place was chock full of old men toting giant cameras and old women toting tiny digital ones. I've wondered ever since coming here why old men think they need these big 200mm telephoto lenses to take pictures of flowers and trees. It's not like they're going to run away if you get too close! I woke up early and got there before 10am, so the crowds really weren't bad until I was ready to leave. But maybe that's why I was ready to leave. A weekend would have been far worse for crowds, but with half the population of Japan retired old folks, and with most of the married women homemakers, there's never a light day at any tourist attraction or shopping place. Today I decided not to give my train seat to an old woman because she was wearing hiking gear and she had a special hiking pole. There are tons of old people like that. I figure they can start their exercise on the train. Is that wrong?
27 November 2004 Yesterday evening we celebrated Kumiko's mother's birthday at our house. To be honest, I had forgotten that was the reason for having them over. When Kumiko suggested putting up birthday decorations, I had to ask,"Why?". But to be fair to myself, I was the one who suggested having them over in the first place. Anyhow, it was a big success. The food was good, and the party was fun. I drank 4 kinds of alcohol: beer, nihonshu, red wine, rum. I introduced Mrs.Niijima to rum. She really liked it. She drank it straight and room temperature, just like on Pirates of the Caribbean. She's tougher than me. Kumiko's father was in good spirits as well, cracking the same joke all night. They brought us a big poinsettia plant. Now our place is looking slightly Christmasy. I think I'll do the tree-making experiment tomorrow. Kumiko came home around 5:30 tonight, and we had ramen for dinner, at a place just around the corner. The food is pretty lackluster there, but it is just around the corner. We actually take a shortcut through the video store to get there. In the backdoor and out the front, without shame.
25 November 2004 Kumiko and I are watching The Addams Family movie before I go to work. I don't know if this movie got good reviews when it came out, but we both love it. Today's my last day before a long weekend. Tomorrow we're going to have Kumiko's parents over for dinner. This will be the first time we've done that. Usually we go to their house. I'm going to make shepherd's pie. My first since spring.
22 November 2004 I took my camera to the shop where I bought it today, to have them send it in for service. They showed me that I just didn't know how to operate it, and that it wasn't actually broken. Slightly embarrassing, but mosty very good. I don't have to pay anything, and my faith in my expensive camera is restored. Next week I'll put it to the test, as I'll have 5 days off by sheer fluke. Today, Kumiko and I made nabe, which just means something soupy cooked in a big clay pot (the pot itself is called "nabe"). Tonight's nabe was kimchee based, with pork and Chinese cabbage, and turnips from the garden. It was excellent. It was cooked and served on a portable gas ring on the kitchen table. That's how everyone does it. We don't like to break with tradition.
20 November 2004 We're getting excited planning a Christmas party at our apartment. I'm thinking of building a Christmas tree out of evergreen scraps I find at the park. I'll have to do a test version pretty soon, to get the technique down, then build another a day before the party. I guess it will fade really fast with no way to get water. Yargh, I agreed to work for a friend tomorrow morning! Now I really don't want to. I might hate him by the end of the day. I'll have to plumb the depths of my patience, but I should make it through. This evening I put together a collection of past fall pictures. Looking forward to this year's show. It won't get into full swing until around the end of this month. Thanks to my friend, Patrick, I'll have an extra day to get out in it. Okay, I forgive him for tomorrow.
19 November 2004 Wow! My CDs came in today's mail. All it took was writing it in the journal. Should of tried this 3 weeks ago. I'm listening to the first, "Benny Goodman's Rare Songbirds", on random mode now. It showcases the female singers who sang with Benny but never achieved real fame. I've listened to a whole lot of big band vocalists since about 1996, and there are some nice tracks here from voices I've never heard before. The second disk is Maxine Sullivan's recordings from 1952 to '59. Looking forward to this one. I have one Maxine Sullivan compilation from earlier years, and I really love her treatments. She's was so mellow. I'm anxious to hear where she went from there. She was already middle-aged in the 1950s, but I know she recorded until she was very old and gray. I don't get exposed to much new music in Japan, besides what's on MTV, which is crap on a stick, and new Japanese pop, which is crap wrapped in 3 layers of plastic film. My tastes in music are frozen in the year 2000. I have discovered a few cool newer things thanks to illegal downloading. The best is probably "Goldfrapp", who do fantastic trip-hop kind of stuff. Really nice. For the past dozen or so rolls of film my Contax hasn't been detecting the DX coding on film cartridges. It just sets everything to ISO 200, which I rarely use. I'd been thinking I mis-set one of the custom functions, and just never got around to switching it right, but today I tried to fix it and realized it's a genuine problem. There's no DX detector override on the custom functions. I'm going to have to get it serviced. Got to figure out how. I suppose I'll take it in to Yaotomi Camera on Monday. How much is this going to cost? It's times like these when you wish your Mercedes was a Honda and your Contax was a Pentax. Then again, Contax is just Kyocera nowadays, so maybe I'm OK. Now I wish I had a Mercedes to wish was a Honda.
18 November 2004 Today, my friend/colleague Brian bought me a Coke. Thanks Brian! Tammie bought me a Coke last week because I found her misplaced important documents. Thanks Tammie! In keeping with one of the original themes of this journal, and by repeated request from Brian, I'm going to try to remember everything I've eaten for dinner in the past week. For me, dinner is not the meal I eat on my 5pm break at the office, but the one I eat when I get back home at 10. Today, I had a meeting in Kobe, and after the meeting we all went to a local bar, where I had a cheeseburger with fries, a beer, and a free Coke. Yesterday I had an tuna onigiri (triangular rice "ball" with tuna salad inside), from Assoonas at Sone station (the convenience store in every major Hankyu train station). When I got home, I ate some pickles from a big Costco jar. The night before, I also had the tuna onigiri, and probably some pickles at home, though my memory is fuzzy. On Monday I had a day off, so I ate dinner at a new ramen shop near Sone station. It's actually a chain, called Rakuhachi which I experienced years ago when I worked near Shonai station. It's a really great shop with a vending machine payment system, and free hard boiled eggs on the counter. You can eat as many hard boiled eggs as you want. In fact, I suppose you could just go in and order gyoza for 220yen and then complete your meal with egg after egg for a cheap and delicious dinner. Or just a beer, and free eggs. I wish the eggs were soft boiled, but beggars can't be choosers, right? Soft boiled eggs are called "onsen tamago" here because the mild heat of an onsen (hot spring) is enough to cook them. In fact people do, on occasion, cook eggs while they bathe. I wouldn't be averse to it, myself. The night before that was the 14th, and as I've written we celebrated my birthday by cooking steaks on the balcony. Kumiko also bought me a fancy chocolate cake from an Austrian bakery. It was super chocolaty and it had apples inside! Great cake. Saturday was my actual birthday and we ate yakitori from a fancy local joint. That's only 6 days. The last of the week would be Friday night dinner, on the 12th. I've lost all memory of that night. I just asked Kumiko, and she remembers! We had baked chicken from Costco with broccoli and weird spaghetti. That's it! A full week of dinners. There you go, Brian. I'll try to be a little more responsible from now on. On another note, I ordered 2 CDs 6 weeks ago from a store in the U.S. I chose surface shipping (4-8 weeks) because it was cheapest, but I had no idea it would actually take as long as they said it would. Usually those shipping times are gross exaggerations. I'm getting antsy! How could any shipping method take that long? Perhaps they're using a rowboat. I just did a spell check on my entry (first time) and found some interesting suggestions (pumice and kamikaze) for what I could have intended with "Kumiko".
16 November 2004 The weekend moves fast. I have a tough week ahead with lots of special responsibilities. Hopefully that will move fast as well. I need to get an early start on them this morning, but it's now 8:53am, and The Simpsons are on at 9. That Finnish forest is still calling. I suppose a Norwegian wood would be alright too.
14 November 2004 Yesterday was my birthday. I had to work until 6pm, but I met Kumiko afterwards in Sone, and we went to a new chicken place that specializes in a breed of chicken called Nagoya Kochin. It's supposed to be better than regular chicken, but we had both kochin and regular side by side and found them equally delicious. Kumiko's mom payed for our dinner as a gift, which was really nice. Nagoya Kochin doesn't come "cheep". Ha ha. Alright, today was a new day, and we went to an exhibition that I wanted to see several months ago when it was in Tokyo. I missed it then, but thankfully it came to Osaka. The show was a kind of retrospective of the lives of the founders of Sony and Honda, and had displays of the products their companies produced over the years. Lots of cool motorcycles and cars from Honda, and old tape recorders and radios and stuff from Sony. It was really cool. I love old technology. They had TVs playing old commercials as well. I finally got a firsthand look at one of my recent favorite cars, the Honda T360, which was actually Honda's first truck. It had a 360cc engine. I only knew it from magazines and a plastic model I'm building. Now I've met it for real. This evening we cooked steaks (Aussie beef) out on the balcony. They were fantastic.
11 November 2004 We had a nice, refreshing rain this morning. I took the bus to the station, which is pretty rare, but the walk is too far in the rain wearing a suit. I wore a special tie to work, thinking today was Bad Tie Day competition three. It wasn't, so I got stuck being the only one at the office wearing a silly tie. The contest is next week. By the time I finished work, it had stopped raining, and I accidentally left my umbrella at the office. Hope it doesn't rain tomorrow morning. I got my geisha pictures back yesterday, and found that they were boring, so I had to do a bit of creative display to make them look nice.
10 November 2004 Today's my sister's birthday. Happy birthday, Anna! We grew up as happy but violent siblings, mostly watching tv for endless hours side by side, completely ignorant of whatever was happening outside. Occasionally, one of us would breathe wrong, and then the biting and hair-pulling would begin. More accurately, the hair-pulling was the end of every fight because it was so painful. We had some brother-sister friends named Jana and Christopher, and they were always hugging and kissing, and we just couldn't imagine it. Now Anna's a ripe old 33, and she has two kids, and I don't think they fight much like we did. It's late at night now. I have to go to bed. Actually, it's already the 11th here, but I don't count the change of date until I've been to sleep. I finished another Moomin Valley book today called Moominpappa's Memoirs. This was a good one. Better than Moomin Summer Madness, which was just pretty good. I want to live in a Finnish forest (and not work).
9 November 2004 Good day today. I always dread my Japanese lesson, not because it's bad or boring or anything, just because I have a long history of being unprepared for private lessons (piano, tuba, Japanese), and a general aversion to organized learning. Actually the lessons are usually very good. Today's was fine. I learned how to add "need to/should" to various verbs, as in "I need to cook this fish because it's getting old". When the lessons are over I feel relief anyway, which makes the rest of the day feel less pressing. Today was really relaxing afterwards, because I worked at a brand new school with no students. I'm half watching a soccer game on MUTV (Manchester United's own station), and it's so funny because the announcers are so biased. Every call against Manchester is denounced as undeserved. Every turnover the wrong way "should have been a penalty". Each bit of faux agony by a Man U player gets sympathy. I like Man U, but this game is boring. What else is on? Ahh, a Jimmy Stewart movie on the Mystery Channel. It's "Vertigo". Kumiko recognized it before me. She usually does.
7 November 2004 It's nice to have a full weekend. I've been repaying shift-swaps lately, so I've had a few 6-day work weeks. Today's a beautiful day. I've been goofing on the computer for most of the morning, but I do at least have all the windows open. I put up a new photo gallery of Nagasaki pictures. There are a lot of pictures on this one from two cameras, and they're all mixed together, in alphabetical order. Kumiko was in charge of the digital on this trip, so there are many more pictures of me than there have been for past vacations. We had dinner last night at Kumiko's parents' place: shrimp with bean noodles, oden (slowly boiled vegetables and eggs), sashimi, green salad with squid, plus beer and Glennfiddich. We also watched a freaky movie with Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, and L.L. Cool J, about a toy factory. I don't know the name of the movie, but it was enjoyable. A perfect compliment to Glennfiddich and pistachio nuts.
6 November 2004 It wasn't boring! I had my reservations about the geisha dance, but now that I've seen it I'd recommend it to anyone. There's another dance in spring, and I think we'll go to that one too. All in all it was a very good day in Kyoto with Patrick and Tammie and Mairwen. We all ate lunch at an Indian buffet after the performance, and then went to Uni-Qlo (Japan's answer to The Gap), which is my favorite place to buy socks. I'm very close to having all of the pictures taken in Nagasaki back from the photo labs, so I can put those up this weekend. I also have the photos from the Halloween party. Here's a peek:
4 November 2004 I picked some big, beautiful turnips today. To be honest, there aren't many out there now that are big and beautiful, but the ones that were, I picked. I'm getting lazy about going out to the garden, becasue recently there's been no urgent need. It never dries out before the next rains. Lots of folks have neat, barren plots now. Perhaps there's something lurking beneath the surface, but many of them are just neatly shaped dirt rows. My rows are certainly not neat, and my harvest is not abundant, but it still feels good to pull a full-grown turnip out of the ground and wash it off. Some day very soon though, I'll have to face the barren winter. I don't think I have the gardening energy left to make those plastic tents that keep the soil warm. I was reflecting last night before I dozed off, on my plan to buy a bow and arrow, and realized that it's no longer a probability at all. Once I finished The Bishop Murder Case, the daily reminders of archery were gone, and my interest has flagged. I've also put Robin Hood aside for awhile, favoring the Moomin Valley series for the past several days. I love that series. I love Robin Hood as well, but the problem is that my copy is a great big hardcover affair, and my normal reading time is during my commute. When I get home from work I want to see Kumiko and watch TV and play on the computer, so I rarely pick up a book. On the toilet is another great reading time, but that's limited to magazines - usually Sky&Telescope. Tomorrow, Kumiko and I are going to see the Gion Odori in Kyoto, with Tammie and Patrick and Mairwen. It's a geisha dance recital that happens once a year, and apparently the geishas are going to serve us tea. Sounds like a mysterious and oriental experience.
1 November 2004 I went to a great Halloween party last night at my friends, John and Tomoko's place. John made the stipulation that everyone had to wear a costume, but they had to make it from items purchased at a 100 yen shop, and the total price couldn't exceed 500 yen ($5). I went as a gambler, Tomoko was an alien, John was some sort of West African dignitary. There were also two witches and some indescribables. The title of the party was Gyozaween, which meant we ate a lot of gyoza. The highlight of the party was the communal trip to 7-11 in full regalia. The clerk just didn't know how to act. Photos were taken.
