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?