After my 20 hours of sleep, I felt a lot better. I wasn’t sure I was up to heading out but I felt OK after breakfast so I went outside. I was surprised at how cold it was and had to come back and put on long pants.

My first stop today was a controversial one, but not too far from where I’m staying. I went to Yasukuni Shrine, which “was established to commemorate and honor the achievement of those who dedicated their precious lives for their country,” which can be seen as a commemoration of Japan’s participation in World War II, or warfare in general. The nearer portions of Asia that were annexed during WWII aren’t very fond of it in general. Nevertheless, I wanted to see it and today I did.

There was a large police presence in the neighborhood around the shrine, but that made sense since it was controversial and also near the Imperial Residence. There are also several embassies nearby and I did see quite a few policemen around the “Korea Center”. They weren’t there to keep people away, necessarily, since the path around the Imperial residence is a popular running route and was so busy that it looked like a race was going on.

I decided to walk back from the shrine because it would be more interesting than just sitting around for another day. By google maps it’s about 9 miles of walking, but I had all afternoon. Everyone was a bit surprised when I’d ask which direction Shinjuku was, but that was only about 3 miles of the total from when I started asking. On the trip back I stopped at the Tokyo Fire Department Museum and Mos Burger. I only have a picture from Mos Burger. The tempura pork burger was tiny and I could have eaten another, but I didn’t.

I made it back to Shinjuku and looked for the restaurant that my sister wanted me to find which got me sidetracked into a dangerous neighborhood before. I was much more careful this time and had my iPhone and maps running and figured out that the planned renovation was still taking place. And by planned renovation, they tore the building down.

All that’s left is that wall. The restaurant has relocated “around the block” which was a bit trickier than I expected. I found the entrance between a couple of electric stores.

I left to find another spot my sister suggested, the Paul Bassett coffee shop, which is somewhere I wanted to go and have a cup of coffee. It was more popular than I expected and crowded even on a Saturday in the middle of empty government office buildings. I had a machiatto which was tiny and tasty.

After that it was time for the final walk home with a side-trip to the ¥100 store. I also found out that the area I’m in, which I thought was the biggest part of Korea Town, was nothing compared to the area on the other side of Shin-Okubo station. It was incredibly crowded, the signs were in Korean, and merchants were yelling out Korean phrases. But I made it to the ¥100 yen store and bought an umbrella (¥100), a bar of soap (¥100), 500g of possibly-sea salt (¥100), a wash bag (¥100), and a ceramic teapot that I’m going to use as a neti pot (¥100). OK, so I’m exaggerating and there’s a 5% tax so everything was ¥525 total.

The rest of the evening was much more uneventful. I found out that the udon shop on the first floor is a chain and isn’t the best though it is better than most of the things I get in the US and only cost me ¥550. And I figured out how to use my teapot as a neti pot, so I hope I don’t have any more repetitive dreams about having to go find a neti pot in Japan. 20 hours of sleep make for enough dreams that it can feel like you’re hallucinating.

One of the reasons I wanted to stay in a furnished apartment rather than a hotel is because I figured that would let me sit on my fat ass all day if I felt like it. I like sitting around sometimes. I suppose that makes me ridiculously boring but vacation is vacation. I got to try it out today because I woke up with a head cold and decided to take it easy. Then I fell asleep. Then I decided to sleep in all day, 10AM to 6AM. I made it downstairs for breakfast but I did nothing else all day besides playing the MacHeist puzzle before passing out.

So I have nothing to report from day 2, other than that the Hundred Stay is a nice quiet place to sleep in all day (unlike most hotels) and the air conditioner appears to be sized for a much bigger room. It’s either too cold or so hot that I’m sweating through my sheets.

I’m not sure if I’m going to be 100% today, but I plan on getting outside at the very least. Maybe I’ll cough on someone on the train as payback.

I had a couple of things on my list for Day 1. I wanted to buy the things I forgot (like toothpaste), buy an electric travel toothbrush that took batteries, buy a data SIM for my iPhone that’s ¥3480/month instead of ¥1500/day, look for my mom’s stuff (a magnifying glass and a pencil sharpener), and look for a couple of locations that my sister told me to check out. I know it’s too early to hit the hay at 4PM JST (midnight at home) so I had a very expensive cup of coffee (¥510 or about $6.50 USD) so I could rally and find some dinner. For that cup of coffee I had the right to camp out for a while in the coffee shop, but I just wanted a hot cup of coffee rather than a cold one out of a vending machine. It’s still too early for most vending machines here to start selling cans of hot drinks.

I got a bit of a late start today. I got up at 6:30 but puttered around, mostly on my computer until 10AM. Heck, most stores aren’t open until 10AM anyway and I’m on vacation. During that time I had the “free” hotel continental breakfast this morning of little tiny bread and yogurt.

It wasn’t too hot when I first got going but the direct sunlight was incredibly hot. It reminded me of what my aunt told my sister, that the rain here is different than the rain in the US. She might be right as it is a lot further south than Portland. But just walking down the street was making me happy. It’s different and I’M ON VACATION!

I walked from my hotel to Shinjuku, even after being warned it was around 20 minutes away. Meh, Mos Burger was only like 12 minutes and I wasn’t in any hurry (and Mos Burger looms large in my psyche and is only a couple of minutes from Shinjuku Station). I went by our usual hotel, the Nishi Shinjuku Hotel My Stays and decided to finally visit the Buddhist temple next to it. Coincidentally, a neighbor is the daughter of one of the people at the temple and I’m guessing it’s someone important.

Walking around the neighborhood, I saw a guy who was dressed in white going into a modern-looking building and thought it was a dentist’s office, but it was a tonkatsu restaurant! I love tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlets), and I even order it in Korean restaurants in Portland knowing that the tonkatsu there will be thin slices of pork that aren’t what I’m used to. The special was oroshi tonkatsu, or tonkatsu with shredded daikon radish and I had to try it. It was great and just around the corner from the hotel we usually stay at. I was the only customer at 11AM which was good, since every table had an ash tray on it.

After that I wandered around geek shopping. I got my data SIM, I checked out the things my mom wanted but didn’t buy them quite yet, and wandered aimlessly looking for a curry restaurant my sister talked about. I ended up in the “scary” part of Shinjuku’s Kabukicho, where the people finally stopped trying to get me to come into their restaurants and were hocking girls and illicit DVDs instead. Walking back towards the train station, I saw a bunch of huge Japanese guys in the nicest suits I’ve seen in a long time, which is weird because they weren’t lightweight summer suits. They were built like linebackers and looked exactly like what I’d cast as Japanese gangsters, two on each side of the narrow street. They were talking in a friendly manner with oddly simple language to another group of big guys who were dressed in more thuggish clothing. At that point I decided I never wanted to be on that street again. I found a police box and checked the map of where I was, and it was only halfway to the hotel my sister asked me to find. I don’t think I’ll recommend that hotel to anyone unless they can find another route there.

I spent much of the rest of the afternoon trying not to fall asleep (hence the coffee). For dinner I went to a Nepalese/Indian restaurant where I ate too much. There were other Nepalese people there and they were eating all sorts of things I didn’t see on the menu that looked like yakisoba and shumai. Who knows. All I remember is that it took forever for them to bring my check, not that I was in a hurry.

Tomorrow may be more shopping, or not. It’s supposed to be rainy so I may just hide out. But there’s so many things to see, even where you’re not expecting them.

What a long day. I got on the plane around 1:30PM PDT and got off after midnight PDT. Then I got to navigate the airport, then the train, and then make it to my hotel which is a lot nicer than I thought it would be but is in an odd part of Korea town. I did spend the afternoon and evening sitting on my ass watching movies, Battleship, The Avengers, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and Tower Heist so it was more like a vacation than I’ve had lately.

Here are some pictures of my room:

With useless closets:

But a fairly nice mini-kitchen:

And a real bathroom, not one molded out of one piece of plastic!

And views from the window:

I walked around last night looking for something to eat but this is Korea Town and busy enough that there are people trying to drag you into their restaurants. And I bet all the restaurants are full of cigarette smokers. So I chickened out and went to a chain restaurant and got something I can’t get in the US anyway: a seafood doria.

I’ll try to be braver tonight.

Every year, come September, I am a prisoner in my house. It’s not just me; my neighbors are in the same boat. The f*cking swifts blow into town and everybody and his brother decide to come to see them.

Some of my neighbors are even more annoyed and actually do something about it. One got signs for the bottom of the street that say “Local Access” but that just meant that when the hill was full, people would stand in the street. It was nuts today.

But I did see a friend who hasn’t been in the gym since last winter, and my old General Chemistry professor from 1992-ish whose husband happens to meditate with my neighbor! I didn’t know that. I also saw some mylar balloons stuck in the power lines and called it in to the emergency number around 6PM because they were near some pole transformers. I wasn’t sure if it warranted a call to the emergency number, but a repair crew came about 9:30PM and took them down. The mylar balloons just being near the power lines caused a sizzling sound and could have cause a blackout.

I’ve been talking a lot about getting rid of a bunch of stuff out of the house and here’s a picture of my dad’s desk back shortly after he passed away in 2007. You can see all the stuff that I had to sort through and may understand why I gave up at some point.

There’s more of my dad’s stuff all throughout the house, and that’s the reason I took extra time off to get rid of some of it.

I knew I’d probably laze around and be lazy about doing the only difficult thing of my day (besides waking up), going to the gym. Wednesday I had breakfast with Megan and the combination of staying up late reading a bad thriller, waking up every time I rolled over onto my arm where I got my tetanus shot, a greasy diner breakfast, and way too much diner coffee made me feel kind of off all day. I figured, what the heck, I’m on vacation, and I took another day off.

Every day I’ve been taking furniture to the Community Warehouse and miscellaneous other stuff to Goodwill. Today I think I sorted through the crap that was in and on my dad’s desk because it was random and uncategorizable. They’re beginning to recognize me at both places. The guys at the Community Warehouse are more friendly, and one asked me if I just wanted a key so I could bring stuff in when I felt like it. Goodwill isn’t unfriendly, but just a lot more businesslike.

I have a lot more stuff to sort through, but at least I made a dent in things. The problem is that I keep finding interesting but useless things, like this menu.

It’s probably not worth anything, but it is interesting to look at.

I almost got up a little early today because my spider alarm went off. I’d call it a smoke detector but the only times its gone off, spiders have crawled out of it (plus, no smoke).It’s all a bit ridiculous if you ask me.

I also had my normal plans disrupted because of a trip to the doctor. What I thought was a problem turned out to be not much of a problem so instead he gave me a ‘flu shot. Then, just for fun, he also gave me a tetanus shot since he didn’t have whooping cough boosters without the tetanus mixed in. We’re protecting all the weird Republican/religious kids whose idiot parents don’t understand what vaccinations are for.

In any case, my arms were sore, more from the ‘flu vaccine than the tetanus shot, and I felt a bit tired so it didn’t make any sense to  miss the Monday night football game go to the gym so I stayed home tonight.

Oh, and I did get rid of 57 more books, most of which were coffee table books. I was going to get rid of more stuff but, hey, I can’t do everything at once, especially with two sore arms.

I didn’t get much done today besides going out to dinner for my brother-in-law’s birthday. I thought about clearing out some more stuff from the house, but really just ended up watching football. I got some gardening fabric down on my new dirt farm, also known as the front yard, but that didn’t take much doing.

Yesterday I got rid of some more furniture and a bunch of books. I tried to take the books to somewhere I like to take books (Title Wave Used Books) but they were closed, thanks to budget cuts I’m sure. They don’t answer the phone, the web site is useless, and the only way you could know when they’re open is to drive up to the sign in front of the door. Instead of driving around with books all weekend or carting all the books back into the house, I took them to Goodwill where they treated it all like garbage. I’m not sure why I even try taking anything even slightly fragile there. At least the Community Warehouse has been super nice and I expect Title Wave will be nice as well (they have been in the past).

Ah well, I’m on vacation.

The reason I took a couple of weeks off BEFORE leaving for my holiday is so I could move a pile of dirt to the back yard (done), and to take a bunch of stuff we don’t want to Goodwill or somewhere more deserving. In my head I decided I was going to do the yard work on the weekends and the getting-rid-of-stuff during the week, so Tuesday was supposed to be my first day of sorting through all the crap that’s been accumulated in the house. Unfortunately, I got sick on Tuesday and my ailment precluded any efforts that took me further than several feet from the bathroom. Or is that farther? Anyway, you get the idea. Wednesday I still wasn’t feeling that great and I noticed that my lymph nodes were swollen. Hooray, I’m sick around Labor Day again.

Today, I finally got a chest of drawers and a fine Solid-State Stereo with an 8-Track Tape player to the Oregon Community Warehouse. My sister had never heard of them, but here’s a description:

Community Warehouse is a volunteer-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit agency that collects and redistributes donated furniture and household goods to low-income people in Oregon and southwest Washington.

I’m not sure they can use the stereo, but the chest of drawers was usable. Lots of my other junk is probably going to Goodwill, even though I know they’re not the best organization, I figure they can sort through my crap and make money off of the stuff that they can sell and dispose of the left. Everything on the household necessity list (pots, pans, dishes, etc) is probably going to the Community Warehouse, but the everyday detritus of life is going to Goodwill.

My first real day off is probably Tuesday, but my last day at work until the week of Thanksgiving was Friday. So Saturday is my first day of vacation. On the first day of vacation I had a nightmare that I was getting fired. In reality, I think they’re going to have to wait two months to do that. Then, of course, I went to the gym and then I started moving a really big pile of dirt.

The picture is actually from the END of the day when I had most of it moved. The second day I finished moving it but it took all day. The reason I had the big pile of dirt is because I had a big hole in the back yard. Now the big hole has a bunch of dirt in it.

I didn’t count, but every one of those lumps is another almost-immovable wheelbarrow load of dirt. I should have hired someone to do this, but sometimes I’m not all that smart about such things.

I hope the rest of my vacation isn’t going to continue in this manner.

I went to the dentist today and I couldn’t really describe what he was going to do. I was told he was adding something and I had no real idea until I got there.

I guess my teeth are wearing because of some reason-or-another (most likely grinding my teeth while I’m asleep like my mom and my sister) and my canines were some weird shape. The red arrow points at a non-modified tooth. The green arrow points at a nice, pointy tooth that the dentist fixed.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to think of it. It’s easier to think about fixing the driveway.

I got up this morning and I was a bit tired. I bet it was because I was trying to move dirt around all day yesterday. This dirt pile is smaller than it was when I started, but still pretty darn huge. I t used to go as far as the sign.

The reason I had them leave the dirt pile was to fill in the backyard, which I am reconsidering at this time.

Instead of doing either the digging or going to the gym, I ended up cleaning up some of the overgrown curb across the street. My neighbor Richard and I usually guilt each other into cleaning the curb but we haven’t done it for a couple of years. I was lazy and I believe he had a boyfriend for at least part of the time. Today was the day for me, though, and I had to clean up 250′ of curb.

I didn’t take a before picture, so you can’t see how far the vegetation grew out into the street, but I do have a picture of how the turf grew over the curb, or a least some evidence of the sod after I threw it back into the grass.

This is all part of the school yard, and the school district can’t be bothered to do this because the taxpayers can’t be bothered to pay for the schools.

Oh, and I should mention that I cut out several azaleas and a rhododendron (once again there’s no “before” picture) and that took a bit of work as well.

And the star of the show is the new driveway. The fill dirt on both sides is something I also moved this weekend.

Any question about why I’m tired?