My mom and my sister left for parts north of Tokyo, or at least north-ish, to visit friends. I decided that if there were going to be just all women there, I’d go by myself to my old neighborhood in Osaka instead. This also meant that I could visit with people from my old job and about ten of us went out to dinner at a yakiniku restaurant.

We did the traditional exchange of business cards even though my cards are wildly inaccurate at this time. Most everyone is a manager or even above. The tall guy second from the left has lived in the US and I keep in contact with him through email from time-to-time. He’s also the only one who still works for Mitsubishi. Everyone else works for Renesas, a company that’s was started by 55% Hitachi and 45% Mitsubishi.

I stayed at my not-really-my-aunt’s place (mom’s sister’s husband’s sister’s) and they took me to their garden where they’d won one of the prizes for having one of the 10 best out of 450 gardens.

Their vegetable garden is in a community garden that used to be an old bamboo field.

Afterwards they took me to a Japanese cafeteria where I got to eat lots of things I haven’t properly had since I left Japan 16 years ago. Certain kinds of fish, croquettes, etc, that we usually get frozen in the US. They didn’t make much money off of me. It only cost about 1000 yen for two of us and I slipped on the way out, dropping my tray and breaking my dishes.

Later on in the day I went looking for places I spent a lot of time and didn’t recognize much. In sixteen years and one huge earthquake, they’ve torn down buildings and put up new ones. They’ve also widened the roads and made new ones, which really confused me. Nobody’s moved very far, but lots of stores have closed. Fortunately, both the bicycle shop and the scooter store I went to are still around. The guys at the motorcycle store still look the same, but Mrs. Maeda passed away a couple of years ago.

The kid at the bicycle store, who was in middle school, is now running things as his dad had lung cancer. The “kid” is now in his early 30’s.

They’re tearing down buildings to widen the road and I thought the bicycle store was gone but luckily they were still around.

The funny thing is how everything in Osaka is getting to be 100yen stores. Even McDonald’s has a 100yen menu. The weirdest thing, beyond the teriyaki burger and the shrimp-fry wrap with 1000 Island Dressing was the “MegaMac”, a big Mac with doubled-up patties (4 patties!)

And what am I doing? Hiding in my hotel room. Things have changed in 15 years (my hotel room, for example, has a desk in it and isn’t just the size of my bed) but I remember things don’t open until 10 or later. In any case, I’m not brave enough to get on the train during rush hour with all my luggage. I have my laptop bag, a carry-on-sized-bag for my clothes, and a carry-on-sized-bag for all the presents I brought. As any good Buddhahead knows (and my Korean friends as well) you have to bring a lot of gifts for all your friends and family. Maybe that’s why I shouldn’t have that many friends. I suppose, I don’t, really.

The bathroom of my hotel room is still the weird one-piece-molded-plastic thing, but the toilet has the bidet feature. I’m afraid of most of the water in Japan, so I’m not trying it.

After fifteen years, I finally made it back to Japan. But it took fifteen-and-a-half hours of sitting and my ass always hurts after I fall asleep sitting up. I’ve only been asleep for three or four 10 minute stretches, once on the plane and the rest on the bullet train. It wasn’t all that easy to find the hotel, either. The map was cartoonish and the roads were small and not well marked. Just like the Japan I’m used to.

It’s now 6:30AM US time and I left the house at 11AM yesterday. I better get some sleep while I can.

I’m trying to post from my PC, which I only use because it’s all I got. The keyboard I’m using is this old eMachines POS that I got back in the 90’s and really, I’m not sure why I still have the thing. It was the new hotness last Christmas, but now it’s just a computer. I built up a “game machine” but I never did play any games on it. Come to think of it, I still have two unopened games for the PSP I no longer have. Huh.

I didn’t have to spend too long on hold to do all my insurance stuff for the break-in, and I’m not exactly as upset as I probably should be. Most of the stuff is replaceable. There are deductibles and other nonsense, so I’m not going to get full replacement cost on anything, but at least I’ll get some money for some of the things. And I was just thinking that I had too many watches. I didn’t want to just throw them out, but I was wondering what to do with them all. Ah, well.

Thursday, at work, I noticed that I couldn’t get to my laptop over the internet. I thought about it for a second, whether I had it in “power saving” mode, and I realized that someone probably stole it. Unfortunately, I was right.

Sometime during the day, between 8:30AM and 3PM, a burglar came and threw a brick through the glass in the back door and broke into the house. They also pulled off and broke a storm window, but didn’t go through that window. They stole 3 Mac laptops which were all the working Macs in the house. They also took my mom’s old coins, a handheld ham radio, and a bunch of wristwatches including the one my dad used to wear. I can replace most of the things they took except for the novelty wristwatches (including an In-N-Out anniversary wristwatch) and the watch my dad used to wear. You can guess what I miss the most.

The police came to take a report, and they even sent someone to check for fingerprints. I figured they wouldn’t bother, and they didn’t find anything smooth enough to take fingerprints from, but it was nice that they sent someone. And a friend who is a contractor came by to help me board up the broken door window.

I’m fairly sure I have a recent backup of my laptop, so I should be OK there. Unfortunately, I got my MacBook Pro on a developer’s discount and replacing just one laptop is going to cost, without the discount, at least $2500 + $330 for the memory. The ham radio only gets used once a year at the Portland Marathon, so I can just quit volunteering for that and I won’t need to replace it. Or I can just borrow a radio from my buddy Greg. And I had too many watches anyway.

Still, what a pain in the ass.

I guess I wasn’t too busy, but I wasn’t too happy, either. Someone threw a brick through the back window and broke into the house. So far I can tell they took 3 Mac laptops, my mom’s coin collection, a PSP, a bunch of watches, and a laptop backpack.

I’m taking the day off work to call repairmen, etc.

What fun!

I find that I’m much more likely to ride public transit to work when I have something to read. And that’s even though it’s so loud that I can’t read sometimes. Today it was too loud because there were lots of kids going downtown to see the US Women’s Soccer Team play an exhibition match. I moved away, but they were all through the light rail yelling at each other. I’m not sure what the point was, but it would be like, “Ashley! Ashley! Ashley! (then another joining in) Ashley! Ashley! Ashley! Come sit over here!” Then someone in another part of the group would start with another name. Then there were some adults right next to me complaining about their McJob, which sounded quite bad, but what do I expect taking public transit? Certainly not lawyers and doctors.

So my buddy just called and had to tell me he was on a date. He doesn’t date much either, and the woman he was out with knew the NBA ref that crashed into the back of his car a few years back. I’ve told that story before, so I won’t repeat it. But there it is, three degrees of separation from the NBA ref this time. Last time I was a passenger in the car during the crash. I have two degrees of separation to Sam Elliott, who my sister saw shopping in Target. Apparently he grew up in these parts. The Target in question is one with semi-hot young girls working there. Well, they’re “Gresham” hot, if you know what I mean.

Dave the Trainer was going on and on about the chiropractor who was teaching some exercise class this weekend and I had to tell him just how little I thought of a group of people that eschewed the scientific method. Basically, I think they’re a bunch of loons who make things up. I thought about it for a while, wondering why I was so against them and I realized a couple of things. I don’t like people who believe in a lie, and this includes certain core beliefs that many people share that I do not.

I also don’t trust my medical care to people who did so much worse in school than I did. I was a big geek and I worked pretty hard for my grades. Well, at least I worked for my grades. The problem is, some of the naturopaths, homeopaths, chiropractors, etc, are those guys who were stoned through my chemistry classes. I’m sure there are those in those fields who did well in school, but I’ve found them to be the exception. Their disdain for Western medicine also translated to a disdain for Western learning. It’s a matter of trust, I suppose, and I really don’t trust someone to look at my bloodwork if they didn’t do well in Biochem.

Ah, well, I can chalk this up to another one of my issues.

I was told last week by someone that they would call their sister and tell her before they wrote about her in a public forum. I’m guessing they’re either very close to their sibling and call them all time, or they don’t have much of a sense of humor. In any case, here’s some more secrets about her. Well, I’m even exaggerating more than I usually do, because it’s no secret that she has a sweet tooth. And my brother-in-law only likes things made of chocolate. So that means she eats EVERYTHING HERSELF. And she’s tiny. Well, she runs a lot (and I mean a lot) so she burns it all off, but does she share those desserts with her brother across town? (7.9 miles by google maps, about 16 minutes) Not at all.

I think I’ve been losing some weight. It’s pretty simple: I started taking public transportation and walking 20-25 minutes, each way, to the light rail station. I think I’ve decided to drive more often, even though it’s working well for me, because I can do the whole commute in ~35 minutes and I can spend more time at work that way. The more time I spend at work, the less time I have to spend working at home, even though it’s easier working at home than in the lab at work. It’s so comfortable to work on the computer in your underwear, and they kind of frown on that at Megacorp.

I went to another session of my “Structural Integration” again. Man, did it hurt. But the pain is temporary. For example, I was getting work done on the bottom of my foot. If I stepped on a rock that hurt that much, I’d be in pain for days. When Fred stops, the pain stops. So that means he’s doing something that hurts that doesn’t really damage anything. There are places that are sore for a couple of days, but if anything else made me hurt that much initially, I would be in great pain for days. I wonder if I explained that properly? Today was some work on the abdominal muscles and it’s really hard to breathe through the pain there. Especially since it kind of pulls on the diaphragm.

In any case, that’s the fun I had today. It was a beautiful day and I did make it outside to put some leaf screens into the gutters, but I even woke up late today. I blame the ‘flu shot I got yesterday. It’s probably really just because it’s sleeping weather.

I’m not sure why there are so many unpleasant people in the world. I suppose there just are, and you have to put up with it. I just got another comment on my blog from one of the unpleasant people, and I decided just to delete it and quit thinking about it. Heck, it’s my blog. I didn’t go to his house and start calling him an asshole in his living room. He came here and started telling me about my life. And, by looking at the comments and the email I got, nobody wanted to hear what he had to say. It’s kind of a weird coincidence that he showed up about the same time with all the other random non-knitting people.

I’m not the only one with weird problems. A neighbor had a flyer glued to her front steps about a missing dog with the note, “I know you can give me more info!” When she called the number on the flyer and asked what they meant, she was told, “You know what I mean!” and the person hung up. She was kind of disturbed by this and called me to see if I had seen any bulldogs lately. For some reason, I can only remember pugs, a few beagles, some terriers, and a whole lot of Golden Retrievers.

My next door neighbors had problems with the light in the laundry room, and they had to use the hall light. But the hall light would wake their very young kids, so they had to do laundry in the dark. Eventually they were so annoyed that they were calling electricians on a Saturday morning, knowing that if they found one to come out on the weekend they’d have to pay through the nose. Fortunately, they didn’t find one, because it was easy to fix.

It’s going to be harder to fix my chimney cap. I took the pieces to the hardware store and they think it’s just epoxied together with JB Weld rather than being a specially made chimney-cap-doohickey. I don’t know the knitting/sewing equivalent of this (knowing the usual audience of this blog), but I do remember seeing someone use a hot-melt-glue-gun to put jewels on a wedding dress. I remember thinking, “Is that really the way they do that sort of thing?”

Normal life away from computers continues, and it’s a life.

I am amazed by the number of morons I’m attracting lately. I suppose the number is only really two or three since “Jason” and “Sam” appear to be the same person and Greg is the other one. Ah, whatever. I’d think they’d be better served surfing the intarweb looking for pictures of Britney Spears’ cooter, but I’m not their boss. Or they may be here hoping I’ll have naked pictures of myself online. Not happening (and I’m sure most of you are happy about that.)

My Mac laptop is still in the shop and I’m not real sure why Greg is so ignorant about getting computers serviced. In most of the world, people only have Dells and Apples. A couple of people have Sonys but they’re aberrations.

• If you need to get a Dell fixed, you call India and are put on hold until they can string a phone wire from the border to the call center to service your call and they tell you to reboot a bunch of times until they’re convinced you’re serious about getting your computer fixed. Then they might start to help.
• If you have an HP/Compaq, you just junk it and buy a new one at Staples or OfficeMax.
• If you have an IBM/Lenovo, you cry salty tears or just get your company to fix it for you because real people don’t own IBM/Lenovo computers, just corporations.
• If you need to get a Mac fixed and you’re lucky enough to live in a town with an Apple Store, you go online to make an appointment and then you show up, in person, to talk to a tech support person who isn’t really a genius but is called an “Apple Genius” who will at least look at your computer and see the problem first-hand. The face-to-face interaction is key. If they find something wrong they just take the computer in for repair right there. They can even ship the thing back to you if you want. Elapsed time is 2 minutes to fish around the web site for the appointment link, travel time to the store (15 minutes for me), wait time at the store (usually 5-20 minutes for me), time to talk to the genius (10-15 minutes), and travel time back (10 minutes for me because I don’t have to look for parking when I get home). Then I wait.

So, basically, it’s a lot easier for me to get my computer fixed, and I don’t pay extra for support. I know I’ve paid a huge premium up front, but I like the fact that I don’t feel like throwing the thing through the window like I do with things running Microsoft OSes. I even got my mom one. Or two, if you count the replacement MacBook Pro I got her this year.