What, me worry?

I went to work late today because I had a stomachache last night. Well, it was also because I was demotivated by the prospect of not having a job soon, and knowing that meant that I probably had no work to do because what can they assign you to do in a few weeks?

On a completely different note (COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. REMEMBER, THIS IS NOT RELATED TO THE THING ABOVE!) can anyone who has successfully found a job to give me any hints they have? Since 1991, all the jobs I’ve found have been through referrals. Basically, friends tell me when there are openings and get me in the door. I have been incredibly unsuccessful in finding jobs through other means like monster, the classifieds, etc.

I went to the gym for the first time in weeks and I’m underwhelmed. I suppose there could be other factors suppressing any joy I can get from life, but I’m uncertain what that could be. Certainly it couldn’t be work, or the burglary, or the strife in the neighborhood, or any other such thing, could it?

Woo, I feel weird.

It wasn’t the best of days, but for some reason I’m not feeling all that well. Perhaps my dinner isn’t setting right.

Last night I went to sleep late and I was woken up by sirens! Apparently I slept through the gunshots, but a guy caught someone peeping in at his girlfriend and gave the alleged peeper a beat down. This happened on the other side of the school from where I live. The alleged peeper was armed and fired some errant shots and I don’t think anyone was hit. The news tonight said the fight went on for 20 minutes. The alleged peeper looked like hell in his mugshot on TV, and the boyfriend seems to have broken his hand.

So today at Megacorp, we found out how confusing it is to not have a manager. Our manager bailed on us last week. He’s known for a month that he’s transferring out and he’s been gone for a week without telling us that he’s not coming back. He said he was on a “special project” but really he secretly switched jobs. And today we had a divisional meeting where we were told that our group was targeted for reassignment. Hard to know what that really means when your manager is gone. Fortunately, we have managers “up the chain” who are going to let us know what they know. Well, a little of what they know because they can’t tell us everything. That’s the nature of things. So this means that my sister should really figure out what she wants for her birthday (which was back in August but she keeps changing her mind about what she wants) while I still have a job.

I think I just bought my sixth Mac of the year (two were for my sister and brother-in-law’s) just now. A friend is getting me a discount – a legitimate discount! – and I should have a laptop within a week or so, I bet. Whoopee!

So tired.

Friday night I was so tired that I had a couple of bagel bites for dinner. This is after a spectacular two days back at work which I can’t talk about for obvious reasons. In any case, falling asleep appears to be something I’m getting even better at.

Saturday was Megan’s brother’s wedding. They had a small family ceremony and a bigger reception. Oddly enough, the reception was in a beautiful venue in Milwaukie, Oregon, where it was hard to know that you were in amongst all the auto body repair shops and strip clubs. The only other oddity is how the staff of the venue wanted to hustle us off after 8:30PM. I suppose after the bride and groom left there really wasn’t any reason to hang around. Megan took us all out for drinks afterwards and I almost fell asleep there as well.

Sunday was almost normal. I woke up to watch some football. I went for my painful, I mean INTENSE, massage in West Linn. But this afternoon my brother-in-law wanted me to to take him to the Apple store to get a new MacBook. This is the fourth Mac I’m involved in buying this year. We got it back to his place and started setting it up when my sister and Megan got back. They also had computer questions and it was a weird sight after dinner, the three of them with their laptops on the kitchen table. Even weirder was my brother-in-law checking out iTunes and singing along with old Stones tunes. Yikes!

And here I am, up too late, trying to figure out why I’m trying to catch up on the TV shows I missed while I was in Japan this late at night. I’m not too bright, I guess.

Back on your heads.

I’m back at work now and, well, things are probably going to happen. But I’m not talking about that any more.

I think I’d better go ahead and replace my lost laptop soon. My mom will be back soon enough and want her “game machine” back. I got her a DS Lite and the Japanese version of Brain Age but she’s hooked on Tumblebugs. For that she needs the MacBook. If only Apple would come through with another discount. Oh, well.

I think I’m too sleepy to think of anything else. Megan’s coming up tomorrow because her brother is getting married this weekend. Whoopee!

I’m back and I’m sleepy.

After a poor night of sleep in Tokyo, I got up at 7AM Japan time which was about 3PM yesterday US time. I’ve been up for about 30 hours with only very short naps of less than 5 minutes. We got on the plane about 3PM Japan time and we got into Portland early, at 6AM. Unfortunately, being early didn’t help much because customs wasn’t ready and we had to sit in the plane, on the ground, for almost half an hour. I was at my sister’s house by 7AM and I think I was home by 9. And I did nothing today.

It wasn’t really nothing. I did laundry, got my car out of my neighbor’s garage, checked out some library books, and even locked myself out of the house. Late in the afternoon, my sister called and told me that the weather was going to get bad soon. I decided to “rake the leaves” (run the leaf blower) and mow the lawn. The mail arrived in the middle of this all and I realized I didn’t have the house key. Fortunately, two different neighbors had the key and I wasn’t out for very long. I even had time to clean some of the gutters before it got too dark.

And this evening I went to the Apple store to exchange my “old” (2 week old) MacBook with one of the new ones that just came out. I had to pay a restocking fee, but now I have a fancy new motherboard or some such thing. Hiron, the graphic artist, told me that in Japan all you can do if they come out with a new version soon after you bought your computer is go home and cry. I figure a restocking fee was a little easier than than.

I tried the US version of the Green Tea Latte at Starbucks and it wasn’t quite as good, but good enough. The sweetener tasted like Japanese apple juice for some reason. And my first dinner back in town was at Jack-in-the-Box. Lunch was a chili dog from a cart in my neighborhood. Do I know how to live it up or what?

Last full day in Japan.

I’ve been offline at my aunt’s house in the sticks. Seriously, she lives at the end of the bus line, and there aren’t many houses further down than hers unless you get on a boat and cross over to an island. My uncle, before he passed away (the big brother of my not-really-my-aunt) built a big house out there near the ocean with a beautiful view.

Aunt’s view.

My uncle spent a lot on the house and even the garden. I heard he might have spent tens of thousands on the trees in front.

Part of my aunt’s garden.

The house is a little hard to use, but it made my uncle happy and I suppose that’s what matters. We spent a lot of time just hanging out with my aunt, but my mom, sister, and I took a brief shopping trip to Fukuoka where we got sort of lost and couldn’t find any stores or food that were worthwhile. Of course, after resorting to lunch at Mickey D’s, we ended up finding plenty of things we could have eaten. I had a meeting with the Colonel, but we ate dinner from a bento stand on the way home.

Me and the Japanese Colonel Sanders.

This morning, my sister and I loaded ourselves into a train for Tokyo. I’m not a big fan because I spent most of my time in Osaka and there’s a difference between the two. But undeterred I took the train to shop in Akihabara where they looked at me funny when I asked if they had RFID readers.

Akihabara.

I was looking for Thanko which is really called the “Rare Mono Shop.” I was lost and I even resorted to going to an “internet cafe” which isn’t a Starbucks with free WiFi like in the US, but dark closets with computers where homeless kids spend the night. I spent the minimum for 30 minutes trying to find the Thanko store but it didn’t help. It took me about an hour and a half to find the store, which was closed! Fortunately, they had a second shop that was open, and a Japanese guy with a cowboy hat was looking for it too. With his help I found the store.

I barely got back in time to meet friends for dinner. Chico Hayasaki went to high school with my sister and she brought another artist friend, Hirofumi Nakano, or HiRON. We had dinner, and then more matcha latte’s at Starbucks.

Meet the artists.

I should shut the hell up and get some sleep because tomorrow we’re heading home. Fortunately, I crossed the last eating thing off my list: I made it to Mos Burger!

Another day wandering.

We all went to visit my not-really-my-aunt and not-really-my-uncle today. My sister ditched us to go shopping, but my not-really-my-uncle drove the rest of us around the area and I got to drop off the gifts I had for my old neighbors at the butcher’s shop and Naniwa Cycle, the racing bicycle shop I used to frequent. I also gave my buddy at Maeda Cycle some American coins I had for his kids. After that we drove around Takarazuka City which was hit pretty hard by the Kansai Earthquake and changed quite a bit. We even went to Kiyoshikoujin which is a mixed Shinto/Buddhist shrine in the hills of Takarazuka.

Kiyoshikoujin gate.

I’d been there lots of times and it always has festival stores out front. Today wasn’t a holiday so it wasn’t all that busy and many of the shops were closed, but it was still a uniquely Japanese spot from my old memories.

Festival stores in Japan.

Afterwards we went looking for a place to eat and even drove through all sorts of places near my old neighborhood that used to be rice fields but now look like the city now. We just missed going to a fancy Japanese restaurant because it was too late for lunch and ended up at another “family restaurant” chain that was pretty good.

We got back to the hotel just before rush hour and hung out near the hotel for the rest of the day. I guess this means I won’t get to see the inside of the weird building with no inside but hopefully I can come back soon to see it.

Umeda Sky Building

This waiting 16 years to come back kind of sucks. Too many things have changed. I know the reasons I didn’t come back, including personal failure, getting dumped by my Japanese fianceé, and not wanting to see my cousins when I was jobless, but it’s not so bad any more. The rest of my cousins aren’t doing much better than I am and I’m too old to let my failures keep me from coming back more often.

Tomorrow it’s off to my aunt’s house in the country (my real aunt) and so I probably won’t be online for days. It’s probably for the best. But right now I have to listen to some more Euro dance music on my iPod to try to get the religious chants I heard at my cousin’s place out of my head.

Wandering around Umeda.

We didn’t go very far today. We started out wandering around looking for a Starbucks. The coffee in the few places we’ve tried was disappointing, so we thought we’d get something that we knew was bad. On the way we found some ridiculously expensive stores, Gucci, Swarovski, Bulgari, and, oddly enough, Sony. Sony has a neat new Organic LED video screen coming out but I think it’s $1700 for an 11″ screen. The picture was beautiful, but I don’t watch anything that requires a $1700 screen. We finally found the Starbucks and I had the Matcha latte, which was surprisingly good.

We met an old friend from Portland for lunch and she took us to an okonomiyaki store. Her family and our family go way, way back. I think her mom moved back to Japan for a while and she grew up here, even though her grandparents were in Portland. I had “modanyaki” which I guess is really “Modern Yaki.” It has soba mixed in with the okonomiyaki.

Modanyaki.

She also took us to get some Japanese sweets, dango and matcha bean paste.

Matcha shirotama.

Her kids are both going to college next year, so we didn’t get to see them or her husband who almost got his PhD at Portland State University. A.B.D. is a sad place to be. I think he even had his thesis mostly finished before he moved back to Japan to take care of the family business.

After that we just did some more random shopping. When I first tried to buy a new PSP at one of the local stores and the lines were horrendous. It’s the start of the month and I think they released some new games. I did finally get the PSP, which is a replacement for the one that was stolen last week. Now to see if it will work in the US. I’m still just randomly punching buttons instead of reading the instructions for these Japanese games.