Not much happens when we’re in Toyama, and that’s still better than being at work. So today we went to a small, local coffee roaster for coffee and spent not too much money at Uniqlo (the Japanese equivalent of the Gap). It’s hard to spend much money at Uniqlo, because everything there is very inexpensive.

But really, that’s about it.

Today we finally made it to Toyama. We started off with a breakfast at the onset and it was as impressive as dinner.

The picture doesn’t show the rice or miso soup. Unfortunately, that also meant we overdid it a bit. My digestive system wasn’t feeling that great, and my mom wasn’t feeling good either. My sister and I think we were also feeling the effects of the lack of coffee in the morning and passed out on the drive to Toyama. Every time I was awake, it seemed like we were going straight downhill.

We had a lunch of Mos Burger in Toyama, and we went shopping at Uniqlo. That might be the only stop at Mos Burger for this trip, but it certainly isn’t the only stop at Uniqlo.

Today we started off on the way from Maebashi in Gunma Prefecture to Toyama in Toyama Prefecture. It’s an easy day trip but we’re stopping off at Shirahone Onsen on the way.

We went through Matsumoto on the way and here’s a picture of the highway parking area with the Japan Alps in the background. The highway speed limit is only 80 kph (about 50 mph) but it’s also a toll road which means lots less traffic than you’d think.

Matsumoto appears to be a wealthy town of which I know very little. It is a castle town and the castle has been standing since the start and didn’t need to be rebuilt from the ground up like a lot of other castles.

The inside of Japanese castles is quite similar. Lots of incredibly steep stairs to keep your enemy from rushing up to kill the head honcho. You usually get a great view from the top, but I sure wouldn’t want to be THMFIC because it is a long ways up. This is also the season for chrysanthemum contests and you can see the tent at the very left where that was happening. 

We made the trip into the hills to Shirahone Onsen. Shirahone means white bone, and the water of the springs appear to be full of calcium and sulphur by the smell. You can see the bluish color of the water in the tub, which was part of our room! There were also communal bathing facilities on a lower floor.

Everyone but my sister tried the tub in the room. We all went to the big baths downstairs later, though.

Just like most place like this, the dinner was fancy and there was way too much to eat.

I thought this was quite a lot, but this was just the appetizers.

Some very tasty sashimi (including salmon) was brought out.

 The teapot held something special. 

Matsutake and ground chicken meatballs.

 After that there was soba and they lit the heat underneath the wrapped tray. 

It was steak on miso and some vegetables to grill.

After that, we had a grilled fish that I destroyed before taking a picture.

Some onsen croquettes.

At this point I think I was in a food coma and don’t know what I was getting (but I do remember it was good).

And then, about the time we were thinking “please stop”, we got a seafood gratin baked in an apple with some gingko nuts.

 And then, to finish us off, miso soup and rice. We asked for very little rice.

We still had matcha cake for dessert!

After that was when we waddled our way to the “public” bath. There were two baths at the Shirahone Shintaku Onsen, one for women and one for men, and both had an inside bath and and an outside bath. You did all your washing inside, warmed up in the big bath, and then walked down a long, cold wooden path to the outside bath. Unfortunately, the men’s outside bath wasn’t all that warm.

And there you go for day 3!

I’ve been having a bit of trouble sleeping but what would you expect after the 9 hour time change? Heck, I even have troubles when daylight savings time starts.

We went on a trip to somewhere in the middle of nowhere yesterday, and by the middle of nowhere I mean Costco. Actually, we also went to the mountains to see the scenery.

It’s quite a ways up there, and more a mountain range than just “a” mountain so there’s no one mountain. We even went up to the top of a cable car ride to see more.

Of course, at the top you could walk up even further to get to a shrine. The shrine and the view were not worth the extra walk, nor were they worth more pictures.

Here’s the view from the top of the cable car ride. Here I present a view of Mt. Fuji the haze from China.

You can kind of see the edge of the lake from the view up top (it’s at the right edge) and here’s a better picture. That’s my mom and sister at the left.

Another view from the trip was the stairs at somewhere I forgot the name of. These are famous stairs, as I’ve seen them on Japanese TV. There’s really no end to these stairs (I exaggerate, they’re just very, very long.) We went twice as far as you can see in this picture and we weren’t a quarter of the way up the stairs. I think the top of the stairs leads to another path to another shrine. Very Japanese of them. This picture needs some enhancing too, but that’ll have to wait for later.

I’m not sure how they decide what sort of restaurants are on these mountains. Two years ago we went up a mountain that just had soba noodles. This mountain was all udon noodles. We had way too much udon for lunch.

Oh, and here’s a giant moth for you from the parking lot.

We got back to town in mid-afternoon and my mom and sister had never been to a Japanese Costco. I have no idea why they sell some of the things they do. A lot of things are just like what they have in the US, like those giant pizzas that won’t fit in a normal refrigerator or a normal oven. I don’t remember seeing a Japanese oven, so I’m not sure why they’d have that for sale. Why not get the cooked pizza?

You’re not going to find another giant drink for ¥60, or another giant hot dog for ¥180 in Japan.

I also don’t think I’ve ever seen 48 pieces of sushi for ¥3000 in any country.

My sister isn’t huge, but this bag of potato chips sure is. They also had those giant bags of tortilla chips they sell in the US and I saw this white dude with two bags of them.

I’m not sure who is going to eat this much bread.

Afterwards my sister and I went to the cheap eyeglass store and I got computer-tinted glasses for about ¥12,000. ($120) My sister’s were ¥7990. It took them 15 minutes to cut the lenses for both sets.

Dinner was at a yakiniku place and then I fell asleep watching a baseball game. While the World Series of Baseball is over, the Japan Series of Baseball continues with The Sendai’s Rakuten and The Tokyo Giants.

Not much to report. Get off the plane. Rent SIM cards for phone use in Japan. Get on a bus for a friend’s place. Fall asleep. That’s about it.

 

HEY MEGAN, THIS IS AT THE AIRPORT. DID YOU NEED ANYTHING FROM JAPAN? 🙂

I can’t even keep up a once-a-week pace on this thing. I have ways of pissing away my evenings and that’s even after I gave up Facebook for the most part. Keeping up with all my RSS feeds and twitter pretty much kills all the time I have left. That’s even after avoiding the gym more than normal since I was feeling poorly the past few weeks. Or, as my brother-in-law says, I had the punes.

I think most people were expecting Apple to announce new iPads and maybe an Apple TV today. Well, the announcements were more like what you’d expect at WWDC. New OS X Mavericks. New laptops. A ship date for the new Mac Pro. New iLife. And finally, new iPads.

I seem to buy a lot of new laptops, like one a year. I think if I can sell the one I have now, I’ll get a new one. It’s a silly thing to be doing year after year, but it’s what I do. And for all the time I spend in front of the darn thing, it’s probably not a bad purchase. If nothing else, this is what I meant when I said I had something new to lust after.

Oh, and I spent a lot of time this weekend trying to figure out something on my radio. I finally have confirmation that I’ve talked to all 50 states (something that’s supposed to be easy to do, but has taken me since 1978 to accomplish) and I’m pretty happy about that. I should probably spend some more time fiddling with the radio since I have spent countless hours and tens of thousands of dollars on equipment and antennas. Plus, I actually enjoy it. Yeah, that means I’m a super-nerd. Most people have nothing on a guy that has to put up antennas for his hobby. ARE YOU LISTENING LADIES?

September is the best month, statistically, in Oregon but this year it’s been a bit dreary. And I welcome the dreariness. You might wonder why I’m waiting for the end of summer when the next thing is nine months of rain, but I’m an Oregonian and the heat and I don’t get along. That’s only the partial truth and most of my complaints are about the m*th*rf*ck*ng birds going into the m*th*rf*ck*ng chimney at the school across the street. The birds poop all over my car and … wait, I no longer have a fancy car. Poop on my Prius isn’t so bad. The truth is, 4000 birds attract 20000 people (not on the same day) and that gets to be a huge pain in the ass.

It’s actually not that bad if I leave for the gym while they’re all here and get back after they leave, but who wants to plan everything around a bunch of people hanging around the neighborhood?

Today was National Cheeseburger Day! $1 burgers at Ringside! Two for one Tillamook Cheeseburgers at Burgerville! What did I have for lunch? A teriyaki chicken sandwich. And for dinner? Natto (the fermented beans that smell like a mop bucket and are slimy and gross but taste pretty good). I figured it was amateur hour and skipped it just like I skipped burger week. In fact, I was at Pause during burger week and I had a pork chop instead of their $5 burger special! That showed ‘em. (Whoever ‘em is.)

This is sad ham radio geek news but Wayne Green (who started a bunch of magazines I read as a teenager) just passed away at 91. Yeah, I’m not talking about pr0n, but totally geeky stuff like 73, Byte, Kilobaud, and other very nerdy magazines. I saw him once at the ARRL National Convention in Seattle in 1980. In fact, when I was at the VICA National Skill Olympics in 1981, my buddy Roger and I had code words set up so I could make a collect call to tell him if I won or not. The code word for #1 (which I actually pulled off!) was “Wayne Green”. It’s been a long time since I thought about Wayne, and he’d gotten a bit wacky, but he will be missed.

I just had drinks with my buddy Il and his wife Anna. I got a last-minute text from them and I figured that the new parents probably had a grandparent give them a date night out. They wanted to have a quick drink and so I went to hung out for a while. Three drinks cost me more than dinner, but it was worth it, of course. They still seem more excited than overwhelmed and that’s a good way to be.

The only other excitement today was that I got to use my new lawnmower on my new lawn, and that my mom and I got ‘flu shots. Only trivalent and not quadravalent, but you get what you can get.

I thought I’d be posting more regularly again, and by regularly I meant about once a week. Somehow I decided that keeping up reading all the things I have on Feedly and on Twitter (though I have been avoiding Facebook) would give me more time. That wasn’t the case. I’ve also been a lot more tired this summer possibly just because I’M OLD. I should be glad that I’m not one of my friends who is welcoming a baby into the family because, honestly, I just don’t have the energy. I also don’t have the ovaries, so the argument is merely academic at this point.

My grand experiment to stop eating oatmeal at breakfast and to start drinking an awful concoction of whey protein isolate and water continues. It was mainly started to try to lose some body fat and all it seems to be doing is making my wallet lighter. It does seem to keep my appetite down and is easier to eat than the paste-like instant oatmeal that I was “enjoying” previously, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I guess maybe it just “is”.

I’ve been avoiding writing on this thing because I didn’t think I had anything interesting to write and also because I thought I’d get more sleep instead. But what I really did was start to read a bunch of crap on Facebook that also kept me up late. I’m trying to give up Facebook again but there are good reasons to be on it. For example, last weekend we had another grade school reunion and it was great fun. Once again we were snubbed by most of the “rich kids” and the middle-middle class was partially represented. The kids from the poorer part of the neighborhood were well represented and seem to be doing as well as the rest of us.

I was late, again, because I went shopping downtown for a telephone and window shopping for really expensive watches. I really want a Grand Seiko GMT, which is about $6000 new, but they’re only sold in Japan. A used vintage Rolex is about the same price and can be re-sold without losing a whole lot of money. The Grand Seiko probably isn’t something that retains its value.

I had to get a telephone because I am old and I have real telephone lines in the house. One is my mom’s and the $7 telephone I bought 15 years ago works fine but doesn’t hang up right. So sometimes I’m at work and get messages from my sister that the line has been busy all day and is our mom OK? Finding a phone is harder than you’d think. Fortunately, Office Depot had 2-line and 4-line wired telephones. Sheesh.

I also made a stop at Nordstroms to replace the shoes I used to walk all over Tokyo and Osaka last summer. Then I got on the bus.

I figured since Portland has one of the better transit services, riding the bus wouldn’t be as scary as all the other times I rode it outside of rush hour. I was wrong. I was also probably the only one on the bus with a Nordstroms bag. I was seated behind a girl who looked like she came out of central casting for an eighteen-year-old 90’s Puerto Rican hoochie mama for a Spike Lee joint. (Another reference for old people.). Frosted hair that had work done with giant hair curlers, tight white tank top, jeans, and platform sneakers. During the ride a guy got on who looked like he had some hard miles put on him. Sinewy and a little dangerous. He and the hoochie mama started talking right away and as I incautiously stared at them, he yelled, “TODD FUJINAKA!” The scary dude was my best friend in the summer of 75 or so and I hadn’t seen him since grade school. I made a joke about his big brother being a criminal because I knew Mike is a physician at Mass General and he didn’t think it was funny. I hope he’s forgiven me.

So I was taking my stuff home before I walked the block-and-a-half to the picnic when my next door neighbor told me his new baby had arrived 3 weeks early! Yet another delay, which did make me miss a guy I hadn’t seen since grade school.

But I did make it and I saw a guy I hung out with all the time in 7th and 8th grade. Rumor was that he was strung out on heroin, but that seemed like nonsense, as he looked a lot like the guy I knew back then, just lacking the crazy eyes he had back in early adolescence.

There was a kid from Boy Scouts whose mom I used to see in the neighborhood but who I hadn’t seen in years (neither him nor his sisters). My next door neighbor’s nanny was there with her baby who grew up to be a really nice and not-so-tiny 12-year-old. And it was weird sitting around and having memories come back to me after talking to a person for a while. One of the organizers was wearing a safety patrol jacket and when I realized what it was it made me remember when I was one of the morning crossing guards and she was one of the little kids who crossed the street with her twin sister.

So all of this is to promote going to reunions. Grade school reunions are good because even if someone wasn’t nice back then, you were all kids. I wouldn’t try to talk anyone into going to a 10-year reunion because everyone is still pretty competitive but at 20 years everyone is pretty set in their career and it’s just nice to sit and reminisce. I know many of us have lost really good friends this year and there’s no reason to avoid seeing old friends that you’ve lost track of. I guess there really is a good reason to stay on Facebook, even if I’m not going to look at it all the time.

The past two nights I’ve been going out to dinner after tearing out carpet for a few hours. I really shouldn’t be rehydrating with beer but, then again, there’s plenty of other things I shouldn’t be doing.

Look at what I found tonight after cutting out carpet, pulling out carpet pad, and sweeping up sand-like remnants of the carpet glue:

There’s wood flooring underneath the carpet but I didn’t think it was this cool.

I wish I could say things are just going peachy and I have good news and better news. I paid a THOUSAND DOLLARS to get my first set of progressives (i.e. OLD MAN GLASSES) and TWENTY DOLLARS for a haircut ($2 less than at Bishop’s and a hell of a lot better). I got a much better deal on the haircut, but glasses are glasses and I’d rather see than just stumble around hoping the fuzzy things in my vision are what I’m imagining them to be.

 

I’m home alone because my mom was in the hospital for a week and there’s one of two reasons for it. One is that they needed to perform a trephination to let out the evil spirits. The other is that non-resolving intracranial bleed and the neurosurgeon had to put in a drain. She’s out now and at my sister’s since my sister works from home. She’s doing better, but she’s still not her perky self.

Some more good/bad news is that the Industrial Café is open on Friday. Turns out it wasn’t a bad reason they were closed, but it wasn’t good news either.

Yeah, that’s right, they were filming for the Food Network and that means there will be lots of food tourists there. Good for the restaurant, but bad for the regulars.