I’ve eaten a bunch of junk lately and after skipping dinner last night for a fasting blood test I’m loading up with all sorts of crap. There was a convenient Mickey D’s on the way from the clinic to work, so I got a couple of Egg McMuffins, OJ, and some free coffee. You can imagine how that made me feel this morning, first lightheaded and then sleepy. Lunch wasn’t much better and was a special at Buffalo Wild Wings. Which leads to dinner. I wanted a Big Mac but I knew it usually gives me a stomach ache so I went to Jack-In-The-Box instead. Where I waited, and waited some more, and waited some more, and finally left to drive to buy a Big Mac. Neither option was great, but it was late in the day and I was hungry.

I’m hoping this doesn’t lead to nightmares. This morning I woke up to dreams about eating and the knowledge that I shouldn’t be eating. It was pretty weird, going from dream to dream, where I’d be eating and then telling myself not to and then eating something else and telling myself not to. Even weirder, I had an earlier dream where I was talking to a traditional elderly Japanese man and I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I knew he was speaking Japanese, but it was all gibberish to me. Then when I got to work this morning, I found a bunch of emails in Japanese. So far we don’t know how I got added to the email thread, but at least I was able to tell my co-worker what was happening (it was something he was working on and he wasn’t on the email thread). Weird.

Speaking of work, we’re heading into the year-end vacation times where most of my co-workers disappear and I’m not smart enough to join them. There’s usually weird customer problems that come up and no one else to look at them, so I get stuck with some interesting issues. I’m not looking forward to any of if.

I’m an old cranky guy who has a fairly set routine and I’m back to my old work and gym cycle. I’m not completely happy about it since I enjoyed my holiday more than being back at work, but that’s normal.

The gym I go to is no longer a Crossfit gym, but it can still be pretty painful to take a few weeks off and come back into the daily routine. I get sore on a regular week, but it’s much worse after a break. And all that effort late in the day usually invigorates me and keeps me from getting to sleep on time. Today it finally caught up to me and I overslept. It might just be that I’ve been back for a week and the rapid weather change because my sister overslept as well. I rushed around and realized that I also forgot to plug in the hot water pot last night so I couldn’t get my breakfast going right away, either. I still got out the door on time only to find that the rain had really backed up traffic for the commute. I was pretty late.

Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad a day. We took a long lunch to meet with old ham radio friends at Buster’s Texas Barbecue. It wasn’t the best barbecue, but I’ve been spoiled by Slabtown in my neighborhood. I’m a big geek and so we talked about all sorts of nerdy radio stuff.

My iPhone decided to think that the headphones are plugged in ALL THE TIME, but then it decided to start working on its own. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it’s surely out of warranty and taking it apart is probably a big pain in the neck. Not that I’m not going to take it apart if it happens again, but at least I don’t have to worry about that today.

And now it’s the end of the day and I can’t eat. Not by actual choice, but I realized that if I was going to do my fasting blood test, I’d have to forgo dinner completely tonight. Eating right before going to the gym is usually a bad idea for me, and the ideal 12-hour span would have put dinner during the time that I’m at the gym. I see an Egg McMuffin in my future after my blood test.

Well, I made it back to work and back to the gym. I had a feeling something bad was going to happen after all that and sure enough, I sneezed and my entire lower abdomen started to cramp. It was a uniquely painful experience that I would like to never happen again. I think I can do that if I pick one of the following:

1. Never go to the gym again.
2. Never take three weeks off from the gym again, but I’ve had something like this happen when I’ve been regularly exercising sp this may not be an effective option.
3. Never work on my abs again.
4. Never sneeze again.

I’m sure there are other options, but I can’t think of them right now. Stupid cramps anyhow.

I woke up Saturday feeling a bit like crap. The biggest effect of my jet lag so far is waking up at 2AM thinking I’ll never get back to sleep, and then finally waking up when the alarm goes off. I had a bit of a cold while I was in Japan and came back with a cough which is nearly gone now. It was all just as well since it’s nice to have some time to rest after vacationing.

Basically I just watched a bunch of football games and today I watched a bunch of teams I was rooting for lose. I guess that’s why they play the games. I also spent a bit of time trying to catch up on all the shows on my DVR. I think that’s going to take a while. It’s good to have goals.

Well, it’s about 2PM in Japan right now which makes it difficult to stay coherent because I’ve been up since 7AM YESTERDAY. I took a couple of 5-10 minute naps in the past 30 hours. I’m also missing my vacation already. I suppose that’s life.

It was a beautiful day today, even though I never made it back outside after getting home. It was, however, in the 50’s and last week Nagasaki was in the 80’s. I didn’t even eat until dinnertime. I probably ate enough for the whole month the last couple of weeks anyway. All I did was go through a bunch of work email and do my laundry. There’s still stuff scattered throughout the house and I did give myself a bad haircut as well. Funny how the day went by so quickly.

I did get hit by a scam of sorts. I tried to pay my property taxes and the web site timed out on me before it gave me a confirmation and then recycled me back to the beginning. So I started over. 10 minutes later I got two confirmations, meaning I have to pay $12,000 and wait for them to refund half of it. There’s no way for the payment company or Multnomah County to stop the bank transfer because, well, they suck. And it was the faulty web page of “Official Payments of Auburn, Alabama” that did it to me. So, don’t pay your taxes online. Send them a check.

This place is incredibly crowded and slightly annoying, especially to a guy who didn’t sleep real well because he was breathing smoke all evening. And the air here isn’t that great to begin with. Anyway, we spent the day shopping, as we like to do. I didn’t really buy all that much, but it was amusing nevertheless.

I dragged my sister to Akihabara, which used to be known for its electronics shops but is now anime central. There’s a girl band based here and all sorts of “maid bars” but I showed my sister all the geek stuff I usually go see. We even made it to Thanko, also known on Gizmodo as “we sell cheap Chinese electronics”. Anyway, the building right under the train station is mostly why I go to Akihabara. I didn’t want to ask people if I could take their pictures, so I just took a picture of the building. There must be a hundred tiny storefronts in this building. One guy just sells transformers, for example. Another just sells little bits of wire. There are larger stores that sell hand tools, etc, and there must be a dozen that sell communications radios. There are also multiple light shops, and multiple video surveillance shops. I wish we had this building in the states somewhere.

We came back to Shinjuku and had Mos Burger for lunch.

I pigged out on a Mos Burger, fries, and chili dog while my sister went vegetarian. Kimpira rice burger (rice and roots).

We wandered around Shinjuku for hours. I found new ways to support the Japanese economy (though not strongly, since I only spent a few hundred dollars) but we were tired after all the wandering around. We met two designer friends for dinner in a fancy restaurant atop the Takashimaya department store. My sister went to high school with Chico, and her friend Hiron is always amusing dinner company. They both have Facebook presences, if you look around enough.

Once again Hiron showed us his photographs of Tokyo and pointed out some interesting eateries he had photos of. He and Chico were trying to convince me that it would be OK to spend several months kicking around Tokyo next year.

And that’s about it for our trip. Our plane doesn’t leave until 3:30PM, but we’re getting on the 10:40AM train to get to Narita around 11:40AM. Then starts the long march to the terminal. We’ll have several hours at the terminal, but that’s better than not getting on the plane. The plane then arrives in Portland at 7AM-ish on the same day we leave Tokyo. It’s going to be a long day.

I didn’t get a great night of sleep in Okayama. There was a fight on the 8th floor, probably right below me. My mom and my sister didn’t hear a thing.

My mom left on the train at 8:12AM for my aunt’s and I won’t see her for another couple of weeks. She actually got to my aunt’s before we even left Okayama. We finally broke from eating the free hotel breakfasts and found “morning sets” instead.

We wandered around the train station for a while and got on the Shinkansen for Tokyo. More bentos for us!

The trip was pretty uneventful and we got to Tokyo around 4:20PM. I didn’t do all that much before meeting an old co-worker from my Mitsubishi days, Suzuki-san, for dinner. Not much to report other than the food was good and the tiny restaurant was filled with smoke. Ugh. I don’t miss second-hand cigarette smoke.

Today we took a short train and ferry ride from Okayama to Naoshima, an island in the inland sea where there are three modern art museums and an “art house” project.

Monday is clearly not the ideal day to visit the island since most things are closed, but there is the Benesse Museum/hotel and art nearby including the famous pumpkin.

The rest of the things you can see for free are, well, things you can see for free.

The island was beautiful, and the Benesse Museum was pretty nice as well.

I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures inside the museum, but I did get a picture of a giant (dead) bee outside.

My mom was quite tired from all the walking. The bus drops you off at the bottom of a hill and the Benesse Museum is a ways up. We took a taxi back to the port and looked for a place to eat, but we settled on the cafe in the port building. It was pretty good, actually.

We got back to Okayama in the afternoon and looked for Japanese sweets. For dinner we once again tortured our poor mother by wandering aimlessly and choosing a place to eat that was near where we started. It was a pasta place and nothing of note. I do have a picture of a small crème brulée, though.

Tomorrow my mom is off for two weeks with my aunt and my sister and I are off for Tokyo. Our vacation is almost over!

I’m feeling a bit better today, but I think that’s because I was able to sleep while traveling.

There was a bit of drama at the Tokuyama Toyoko Inn before we left this morning. There were police there and it appears one of the patrons lost a drier full of clothes. The driers are TINY and it couldn’t have been that much. I would have probably cursed a blue streak and then gone to Uniqlo for new clothes, especially a tiny drier’s worth, but the guy appears to have called a half-dozen cops and the manager of the hotel instead. He looked a little off and there was a Mercedes-Benz idling outside, so I wonder if he wasn’t a gangster trying to shake down the hotel. I suppose we’ll never know.

We left Tokuyama on the Shinkansen at 10:30AM and got to Okayama at 11:30. We spent most of the day with my sister’s friend Yumi, starting with lunch at a soba restaurant.

It was kind of weird after being in the gangster hotel, but most of the guys in the restaurant appeared to be of the same ilk and were with women who were at least 25 years younger. I did not fit that pattern. However, I did take a random picture of an old train locomotive in a park.

After lunch we drove about an out to see the world’s oldest free school.

The main lecture hall with lots of people wandering through looking at empty rooms.

We took Yumi’s fancy car with the sliding side door.

We got back to Okayama to do more shopping. We had dinner at an udon restaurant.

We’re at the Toyoko Inn in Okayama (one of three near the station) and it’s a lot livelier here than it was in Tokuyama/Hikari. A LOT livelier. The bookstore (I didn’t even see a bookstore in Tokuyama) is open until midnight on Sunday night, for example. Man my family is from the sticks.

I seem to have caught a cold. Fortunately, today we were just hanging around with my aunt and cousin. My aunt and her kid look more like me than most of the rest of my family, which is kind of odd. He’s the one who my mom and aunt call ??? or “alien” because they can’t understand what he’s talking about. There were several conversations about who is more the alien between me and him.

So we went to my aunt’s house, out to lunch, and to my cousin’s house where I passed out on the couch for a while. Stupid cold anyway.

Not really sure why we had an amuse bouche of spring roll.

Sadly, the food was much better looking than it tasted.

Fancy soup.

We had some cake and headed back to the hotel in the afternoon. I figured we should try going to the mall to find some dinner, and took a taxi. We were trying to choose between “Rock Town” and “Youme Town” and the taxi driver suggested Rock Town had more restaurants.

It was an odd mall that looked more like something in the U.S. than something in Japan. And it only had six restaurants on the mall map, and it looked like one of them was closed. It was a bit of a disappointment and so I talked to a couple of BMW salesmen who were showing cars at the mall. They told me there wasn’t much choice in the area and suggested we go to Mr. Bark, a Japanese steak & hamburger restaurant.

It was the Japanese version of an American restaurant and it wasn’t that bad. The bib is because everything comes on a hot plate and is sizzling and spattering.

So that was the day and another travel day tomorrow. Off to Okayama.

Holy crap it’s a long ways to Nagasaki. Today was a travel day and the first part was on the train from Nagasaki to Hakata.

We had a weird compartment on the train. It didn’t shut, but it did have a little cramped area for us to sit in. The leg room wasn’t ideal.

We saw some inexplicable views of the ocean, like the poles in the water.

Also, they tend to beach their boats for some reason.

And they stop at stations with ham radio antennas for no reason (actually the reason is that there is a single track for much of the trip and the trains can only pass each other at the stations.)

We had a SIX HOUR layover in Hakata, because my mom doesn’t like riding the Shinkansen that stops at every station. Don’t ask me. We could have been in Tokuyama much earlier. The food was pretty good, though.

We spent a lot of time wandering through a department store and then having dessert to have a place to sit down.

We also got massages and then got on the train to Tokuyama. Tokuyama is the shinkansen station closest to my aunt’s house and is quite depressing. What used to be a bustling little town is now a ghost town. This is happening all over Japan as the arcades move to the malls. The only restaurants we could find were drinking establishments and though the food was actually pretty good the fact that it was the only sort of business open was really pretty depressing. Next time we’re going to find the nearest mall and eat in a restaurant there.

OK, so I thought someone was running some sort of engine outside or trying to start a chainsaw for the last hour. It turns out it was the guy snoring in the next room. Tokuyama is turning into a kind of nightmare for me. At least we get to see another cousin and my aunt.

Before I start talking about my day, I am going to complain about my hotel room. I’m right next to the elevator and here’s my view.

The video-on-demand was also spotty and when I tried to watch Harry Potter or Sucker Punch, it just stuttered. I was tempted to see if it stuttered on the pr0n as well, since that’s probably what most people watch on it, but I figured I had better things to do with my time, like try to sleep. Fortunately, the room is fairly quiet, and the elevators are not noticeable.

We spent the day walking around Nagasaki with my sister’s online friend Jan. Jan’s been here for 20 years but she hadn’t been to the Museum of the 26 Martyrs for almost 18. We talked her into going in with us. It’s a serious Catholic museum, but heathen me found it to be a celebration of the ridding of Xtians. My sister wanted to see pictures of the Xtians hung upside-down over pools of excrement and my brother-in-law was curious about the practice of trodding on iconography. (They’d let the Xtians go free if they would step on religious images.) There were drawings of both, and also the casting of Xtians into the boiling volcanic pools. It must have happened; at least 26 of them were recognized by the Pope after all.

Across from this image was a giant root and a plaque that, paraphrased, read: “This is a camphor root that has nothing to do with the 26 martyrs, but it’s interesting nevertheless.” We also saw some kids hanging out in the corner of the green space in front of the museum and didn’t have any idea what they were doing until they broke out some dance moves.

After that we walked to downtown Nagasaki for which I have some quick observations:

1. Nagasaki is smaller than I thought.
2. Nagasaki is hilly as hell.
3. They sure like their stairs in Nagasaki (probably because they’re used to walking up and down the hills).

Of course we did the touristy thing by seeing the meganebashi.

But a few steps away was the shopping arcade which was much livelier than most I’ve seen in Japan. The arcades seem to be closing in favor of the giant malls. I like the arcades better a lot of the time.

And, of course, lunch in a traditional and busy Nagasaki restaurant.

Jan left us after lunch and we continued on to Dejima, which was a small artificial island that was Japan’s only contact with the outside world for a time. The buildings behind the re-creation of Dejima shows how much more land has been reclaimed since that time. What was harbor is just land now.

We were pretty tired, and after a bit of rest we continued on to an Indian restaurant named Milan. I guess it means something else in the dialect of the chefs.

So my sister threatened to make me buy her an outfit if I didn’t start spending money. I bought a plastic “shitajiki” (just a thin piece of plastic you put under paper notebook pages so you don’t have to push against all the other pages) but she said ¥105 didn’t count. I then got a membership to the hotel chain we’re staying in, Toyoko Inn, for ¥1500, but she said that didn’t count. I did finally get off the hook by buying a t-shirt for ¥3800. I’m not converting that into dollars, because it hurts too much. Plus, you can’t get a t-shirt from a traditional Nagasaki shochu company for any less.