Here’s day 2 of my trip to Japan, posted on day 4. I’m up early because we didn’t get back from the hospital until about 12:30AM but my aunt kept calling around 7. The people I’m staying with like to sleep in and I’m OK with that, but my jet lag makes me get up early. Right now my tentative plan is to ditch my mom here if it’s OK with the people I’m staying with and go meet my aunt in Osaka. She has my mom’s bank passbook (for people old enough to remember passbooks) and I need to get that anyway.

We took the “Jet Boat” to Sado Island today. The Jet Boat is a hydrofoil made by Boeing in Seattle and goes about 50mph, cutting the trip from 2 1/2 hours on the regular ferry to just 1 hour. We spent the rest of the day driving all the way around the northern half of the island. Sado Island is an interesting place. There aren’t many people but historically there were interesting people exiled there, like the founder of the Nichiren sect of Buddhism and former deposed emperors. There are a lot of historic sites but you don’t see many cars until you hit the touristy areas. The coast of the island is quite rocky, and you can barely see it in the picture of me horsing around (which was requested by the brains behind the gym). We never stopped down by the water, but if we did you’d see some pretty rough beach.

The picture is next to the “two turtles”. They’re next to another “turtle” that happens to be “One of Japan’s three Largest Rocks.” I’m not sure what that means. It wasn’t the season for the “Gregariousness of Yellow Day Lilies” either.

After we looped around the northern half of the island, we went to the highest point on the island. Just like most of Japan, Sado Island has a lot of steep volcanic hills. Here’s a picture of the plains that are located in the wasp-waist of the island.

We’re staying at a traditional Japanese minshuku tonight, which means no intarweb, sleeping on the floor, and a communal bath. We did get a spectacular dinner with more fish than I should eat in several meals. Crab, a dozen types of sashimi, tempura, zarusoba, shabu-shabu, turban shell, and the grossest thing was a pair of live abalone we grilled at the table. The worst part about it is that I don’t even like abalone that much.

I hope to have more pictures as well, but I forgot to bring a charger for my camera and it doesn’t seem to charge via USB. Phooey.

We made it off the island and survived the traditional Japanese inn and the abalone being cooked alive on the table in front of us, but as soon as we hit the train my mom started having stomach pains. By the time we were off the train she was shivering uncontrollably and we had to call an ambulance. I have now experienced a Japanese ambulance (chaotic and 3rd world) and a Japanese ER waiting room. She’s now in a room with 3 other people while she recovers from pneumonia.

So I guess the rest of my vacation may be spent sitting around a hospital. And then figuring out how I’m going to pay for my mom’s hospital stay because we don’t have Japanese insurance. Hooray.

I’m pooped. The worst way to start the trip was to wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night having to rush to the bathroom, but I’m not the one who gets to decide these sorts of things. We left home at 10:30AM for a flight that turned out to be later than my mom thought, and we left Portland at 1:55PM. We arrived in Narita around 5PM Japan time, which makes it around 4AM Portland time. We boarded a train to Tokyo which took about an hour, and here’s a picture of my mom’s friend in the train. She came to meet us at the airport and is going north with us.

Here’s a picture of Tokyo’s train station which doesn’t look nearly as chaotic as it really is because you can’t see all the people rushing around. You also can’t see the sheer number of dark suits people are wearing. Probably because they’re all rushing around and hide from my camera.

When we got to Tokyo, we waited for the bullet train for another hour, and then took four hour trip to Niigata. Or at least I think it took that long. It’s like 7AM Portland time right now and I’m beat. I’m recharging all the batteries on all my various crapola, and posting this nonsense when I really should be sleeping. It’s been over 24 hours since I rolled out of bed and brushed my teeth. What’s a geek to do?

Well, it’s off to Sado Island tomorrow. More later.

So I’m leaving for Japan tomorrow and I haven’t started packing. In fact, I doubt I’ll do any packing at all tonight. I’m planning on going to bed early and doing it all at the last minute. Honestly, it’s the way I usually pack. It’s a vacation, after all, and last year I even packed a pair of slacks that just went to Japan and then came back with me without being worn. All I really need are a bunch of t-shirts and a couple pairs of jeans, I think. Long sleeve shirts for the days it’s colder. No big deal.

The hard part is deciding which laptop to take and backing it up before I go. Pretty geeky.

In any case, it’ll be different than the usual work-gym-Powell’s routine I usually write about. Andiamo.

First, I have a question: who’s the fat sleepy looking guy on the inside of my passport?

I had to leave work early today and even skipped out on the gym because I feel like doodie. Mainly it’s something that you could call the “stomach ‘flu” which means I really can’t get very far from a bathroom. This is even after all the weird concoctions I’ve been drinking to try and stop this. Seirogan, Pepto Bismol, etc. The worst part is that the bathroom next to my bedroom still isn’t finished.

And, of course, I’m supposed to leave for Japan in two days. Yeesh.

Speaking of bathrooms, I went out to look at medicine cabinets today. All I wanted was a nice recessed cabinet with a mirror in front of it. No frame, no wood, just mirror. I found one I like except it’s $1126. Yeah. It’s a mirror, opening up to a cabinet with mirrors inside. Electrical outlets inside, too, and a nightlight built in but I’m still not about to cough up a grand for medicine cabinet.

I really need to be making more money if I’m going to shop for house parts like that.

So it’s three days until I leave for Japan and there’s a big question as to what the contractors are going to do to the house while we’re gone. Nothing bad, I’m sure, but everything always looks so much smaller after the walls start going up. The shower stall, for example, looks smaller now that the framing is going in. The contractor said, “You aren’t going to have any three-ways in here, that’s for sure.” That’s never happened before and I doubt it’ll ever happen to me. I like disappointing women one at a time, thank you very much.

It’s also a good thing that I made sure how much it would cost me to use my iPhone in “roaming mode.” I figure a month of minimal data use (email, some surfing, etc) would cost me about $9750. I’m glad I did the calculations before I decided to try it.

THMFIC at the gym always tells me my blog is getting boring. Unfortunately, even the embellished version of my life isn’t all that interesting. (The other thing he always tells me is to buy longer shorts. Mine are the “mid-thigh” ones, not the long basketball ruffian version that go all the way to the knee.) I mean, really, go to work, go to the gym, take things to Goodwill, what else is there? I could talk about the non-date that I had the other week, but I didn’t think it would amount to much even before it happened. Others were talking it up but when it kind of fizzled I wasn’t surprised. At least I wasn’t directly insulted at any time, just annoyed.

The difference between annoyance and insults are quite clear. Bringing along a friend to dinner at the last minute and then having that friend not able to eat anything because of dietary restrictions and personal preferences is annoying. That can be overcome by drinking several beers and gin and tonics. Insulting is when you ask someone out and they say, “Hah. With YOU?”

So, really, I haven’t heard that one for a couple of years, but I really haven’t asked anyone out, either. Oh, wait, I did have someone give me her phone number and then when I called she said, “Who is this? Todd? Todd who?” Like THMFIC at the gym says, over 40 means you’re invisible. Actually, MIT Engineer means you’re invisible, too, though my actual super-power is the ability to make a woman’s eyes glaze over in less than a second. Now if only that was a useful skill.

I’m sure we’ve donated a lot of fairly valuable stuff to Goodwill and the library, but I’m convinced that if I really want any of that stuff again, I can just buy it. I’ll probably have to pay a premium, but at least I won’t have to store it in my house. In the mean time, I hope it’s helping SOMEBODY and not going to the landfill.

Unfortunately, it turns out my sister wanted some of the stuff we just took to Goodwill. We had some Japanese prints and maybe some wood block prints that we ditched. Turns out she wanted one of them. We’re always telling her to come and take some of the stuff before it’s gone and she hardly ever comes over. So too bad for her. One of the things she didn’t want me to ditch is her old LPs. It’s just lucky for her that I haven’t gotten to the room that they’re in. Otherwise, they’re out the door.

So, if you’re in the market for Japanese pottery or art, try the Goodwill on 22nd and West Burnside in Portland. Books on Buddhism are at Title Wave books on NE MLK Jr and Knott. The stressed guy trying to jettison stuff while also wondering how he’s going to afford all his house renovations is in NW Portland.

Today I tackled another bookcase and one of the boxes of books I took to the used book store was full of coffee table books. This is always a bad idea because coffee table books are heavier than most and they’re also less likely to be taken by the used book store. I suppose if the coffee table books didn’t all say “National Geographic Society” or something else semi-pedestrian, they might be worth something, but really I was just adding to whatever workout I had at the gym by carrying these things around.

On the positive side, one of my dad’s lesser purchases (a bookcase that broke as soon as he started loading books onto it) is almost empty and just about ready to be taken to the dump. The cleaning of the house slowly progresses!

So getting up early at 5:30AM to catch a flight and then arriving back home due to travel complications at 1:15AM is probably a good reason to be tired. (You should also notice that I wrote yesterday’s post from my iPhone in line at the ticket counter. It’s very choppy as most iPhone postings are.) I went to the gym today after a nap and I knew I was tired during the warm-up. I slogged on, however, and didn’t end up DFL though I tried.

And now I would like to post a picture of the hideous yellow rental car I had yesterday, but I’m too tired to go through all the gyrations I usually do to scale the picture and copy it and paste it and etc. Alamo was really kind of strange and said, “You want a compact? Go to that row and just pick one out.” Since I’m always forgetting what the hell my rental car looks like, I just got one that was bright yellow so I could find it in a parking lot. It worked out pretty well, actually, though it was kind of smelly and gutless like a good rental car should be. You all will just have to wait for the picture.

I’m still in the midst of my business trip. I got to the customers site OK even though they didn’t have any customer parking or a clear way to get to the main entrance. I had to park across the street at the Carl’s Jr and wander around the building until I found a way in. The receptionist was loath to call the person I was visiting as well. It took some time but we did find a workaround for their problem and I was out of their office probably six hours before my flight. I thought it was safe to have dinner with my friend Megan. Unfortunately, luck was not on my side.

Megan and I had a nice dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant but we didn’t notice the time until too late. Traffic didn’t cooperate either and, even better, the plane left 13 minutes early. This is in sharp contrast to my morning flight which was delayed for 50 minutes.

So now I’m in a long line hoping to get on a later flight with another airline. It’s not my idea of fun, really.

We’ve had a lot of plumbing work done, so we thought it was odd but possibly normal that taking a shower caused the toilet to bubble. Actually to me it sounded like there was something wrong with the venting of the drains, something I never had thought of before. Maybe this had something to do with the slow-draining bathroom sink that I’d been fighting with for a couple of years. Well, yesterday the toilet almost overflowed after I took a shower and flushed the toilet. Today it actually did overflow. Not the kind of surprise you need in the morning. The contractor and the plumber were over, trying to figure out what was going on. They even had a drain specialist come out with his high tech cameras and the snaked all the vents. Turns out the sewer line was partially occluded and that may even have been the problem with the sink.

So you can guess what the drain was plugged with. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to deal with that. Maybe eat LESS fiber so my poo is small and marble-like and just rolls down the sewer line? I’d rather not think about it. In fact, I have three different snakes of my own and I know why I’d pay a guy hundreds of dollars to do it for me. A couple of weekends ago I had to snake out the drain from the gutters and that was bad enough. Snaking out the toilet drain is something I have to convince myself to do over a period of days, and then afterward there are times I have to wash my hands until they’re raw because they still smell funny.

Really, I like having a job and I like paying other people to do the things that I’m too lazy to do. That’s what keeps the economy going. I learned that in high school Social Studies and there’s even a stupid song that’s stuck in my head now that I said that. “The people who live on Market Stre-e-e-eet.” Ugh. Now I have to listen to something else to get that out of my head. ELO? Fleetwood Mac? Curse you VH1 and the ideas you put in my head!

A regular heat pump heat exchanger is probably the size of a half-sized file cabinet. Our furnace is finally finished and I went outside to see what our new heat exchanger looks like. Holy hell, it’s like the size of a refrigerator. OK, not as tall, so it’s like a refrigerator without the freezer. I stood in front of it and was pleasantly surprised to feel cold air blowing out of it, like it’s supposed to do. It moves the cold air outside and the hot air inside, at least now that it’s winter time.

I’ve been hungrier than usual lately, but I’ve still tried not to be the pig that I used to be. I’m failing right now, but earlier today I walked by a box of doughnuts repeatedly. I’d look in at the chocolate glazed doughnut and keep going back to my cube. Back and forth. I made five or six trips before work intruded on my little fantasy and I had to quit my shenanigans. The doughnuts were from Safeway or Albertson’s so I think THMFIC at the gym is right: I need better fantasies.