Category Archives: Life and Stuff

Preparing for Tomorrow Never Comes

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I spent part of the day preparing for tomorrow. Unfortunately, I’ve heard that never comes.

After a lazy morning playing tanks with a friend via the magic of the internet, I actually got down to work doing some writing and preparing for my time off/house arrest. (I’ve written about that before, but more on that in another post. Bad language guaranteed.)

I worked out what days will be “house arrest” and which will actually be vacation and outlined what I’ll be doing during my “house arrest” and, for that matter, what I’ll be doing when I’m free to do whatever I want (spoilers: pro-level time wasting).

I also planned tomorrow. It will involve trips to the bank, shopping, eating too much, more shopping, walking, writing reviews and a trip to the post office.

The latter is the most important as I’ll be delivering boxes of ink. This has two results: earn a little money and clear up some space. Right now, clearing up space is the most important part.

Of course, the way my planning goes, I’ll probably end up doing something else. There’s always tanks and if that doesn’t inspire me, there are other games.

 

Whither the Rulins

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I should have done this yesterday but couldn’t be bothered. That tells you all you need to know about today’s topic.

As part of a way to avoid new year’s resolutions, I ripped off Woody Guthrie and came up with 16 Rulins for 2016. The ideas was to come up with general guidelines rather than specific resolutions.

As you might suspect, I have followed a few, ignored others and have accomplished a few that surprised me. The biggest surprise was the first few. I’ve sold myself more and sold some of my stuff. I still resist that as the hoarder in me comes up with uses for stuff or dogs me with memories and sentimental feelings.

The biggest surprise was creating a second source of income, albeit a small one, by creating a small business of sorts. (If refreshing a website and buying and selling a bunch of ink every now and then counts as a business.)

That led to me failing spectacularly when I listed a bunch of ink I had available and even the crickets couldn’t be bothered to make any noise.

The next phase is the “Use it or Loose It” phase. I’ve got bunch of stuff photographed and ready to sell (and have even sold a few things already). It’s also time for a mid-year office decluttering.

My mistakes haven’t been smarter and I’ve not had as many adventures with the girls as I could have and I’ve not been learning something new each month.

I’m tempted to produce a set of mid-year Rulins just to remind myself they exist.

But, I didn’t include a Rulin’ about not procrastinating so I think I have a lot of time to do that.

Cold With a Dash of Humidity

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It’s probably our fault and I’m happy to take the blame. I could have done without the rain though.

One of our annual challenges in our apartment is seeing how long we can put off using the air conditioner. We leave the windows open and run fans but we try to avoid using the air conditioner.

However, this year we’ve had weather that’s decided to bounce around between pleasant, humid, hot, and Really, Mother Nature? Really?

The humidity prompted us to clean one air conditioner (this involves a spray to clean the innards and me with towels and some alcohol cleaning the outside.

However, as soon as we cleaned the living room air conditioner, the weather cooled a bit. (Note: Japan is not keen on central air and we therefore have small air conditioners in two rooms.)

However, the humidity kicked up and we cleaned the second air conditioner. That was Sunday night.

Today, however, the weather dropped from 29 degrees Celsius (84.4 Fahrenheit) to 20 degrees Celsius (68 Fahrenheit) prompting many people to break out jackets and eliminating the need for the air conditioner. In fact, we may have been lucky that we’ve been too lazy to put away our lighter blankets.

I’m convinced that if we hadn’t cleaned our air conditioners, the sky would be on fire right now. (So to speak.)

Eventually, of course, summer will arrive with humidity but not mercy. Until then, we’ll enjoy the cool weather and I’m happy to take the blame for it.

Reviewing, Revising, and Rethinking Sundays

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Thanks to the recent technological failure this site experienced (at least in Japan), I’m still two posts behind on where I should be in this blog. If I were on track this would be post 850 (or maybe 851). Either way it’s time to sit back and rethink a few things.

For a while I’ve been considering taking a day of rest from the regular posts. Sunday is the natural day to do this, especially as I’l be working on almost every Sunday from now until October.

The forced break was refreshing, but I also felt the pressure to produce the daily post. This was mostly out of habit but I took it as a positive sign.

On the other hand, even though I’m technically behind, I still like doing the daily posts and am glad that it’s all become automatic. That said, there’s a thin line between forcing yourself to do something and phoning in anything just to do something.

Because of that, I feel as if it’s time for some small changes. I can imagine Sunday being either a shorter post (under 300 words) or just some photos of some random something or other.

This will be especially true during the coming exam period when it’s best that I avoid computers as much as possible. I’ve also been pre-writing things a lot more, both by hand and on the website, but that has yet to become a habit.

Today will be the first short post. Next Sunday, we’ll see what happens.

Funny Noises That Should Cause Concern

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I’m pretty sure I heard it happen but didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I probably thought something shifted and fell at the bottom of the pile. Then, today, I saw what actually happened.

Today was “tame the hoard” day and the goal was to tackle the pile of old laptop computers that has begun to stack up. I started with the oldest. Although it is desperately outdated, it has the best keyboard of any computer I own and because of that I’ve held on to it. I installed Linux on it to prevent the “XP is dead. XP is dead. The world is less safe because you are using XP.  XP is dead. You are killing the world” messages I kept getting.

Unfortunately, the flavor of Linux I installed (note to nerds: yes, I know it’s supposed to be “GNU/Linux” so there) didn’t play nice with my wifi and I decided to scrap the computer. (Although I may have to resurrect it temporarily. Long story.) I pulled out the memory and the hard drive and set the rest aside.

Then I took out my second oldest laptop and set it on the desk and was surprised when it wouldn’t sit flat. I thought I might have lost a rubber foot but then realized the battery pack had swollen as one of the batteries dies. I remember, not so long ago, hearing some funny noises in the variety room, but I thought it was just something falling, not a battery pack trying to explode. I removed the battery pack and am now trying to figure out what to do with it.  The devil over my left shoulder wants to put it in the sun for a few days to see what happens. The devil over my right shoulder suspects that might be a bad idea.

The last computer, a Samsung netbook a friend passed to me for free, is still working fine. At least it is for now.

The next problem is my desktop computer. It is also starting to show its age. It’s old school enough to have DVD drive and old enough that the drive only opens when it damned well feels like it and then it lectures about how when it was my age it didn’t have fancy-schmancy optical drives it had a cassette drive that took six weeks to load one simple game and it was happy to play that game. I felt embarrassed for it as I’m 49 and it will never actually reach my age. (Yes, that’s right, I spent the afternoon arguing with a senile computer. So what?)

The decision now is to repair or replace. The truth is the deciding factor isn’t the money, it’s the hassle.

They Were Found, Now Much is Lost

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My trousers started buzzing right around noon but there wasn’t much I could do in front of students.

Eventually I was able to check the messages and discover that I had a mission.

Our oldest went to a concert in Shibuya last night and came home relatively late, prompting She Who Must Be Obeyed to fetch her from the station. This isn’t the first time this has happened.

My trousers were buzzing because somehow, in some way I don’t understand, our oldest realized she’d left her eye glasses at the concert hall. This apparently prompted frantic calls to the concert hall where, miracle of miracles, the glasses were discovered and I was contacted to see if I could go rescue them.

This meant, after five hours of teaching, I had to wander in the opposite direction of home and clean up someone else’s mistake.

(Note: the thought crossed my mind of making her come all the way down to Shibuya to fetch them herself but, without the supervision of SWMBO, sending our oldest to the center of youth culture and fashion in Japan would hardly be a punishment. Instead it would be an imposition on SWMBO. That thought was, therefore, a non-starter.)

I rescued the glasses, after some confusion as someone else had lost a pair, and got them home. I then had a short angry one-sided chat with our oldest that amounted to “No more concerts.” When I got the inevitable teary “why” I had my list ready of how here concerts were work for me and for her mother. I’ve escorted her and her friend to a concert and then waited to bring them home; we’ve gone to the station after dark to escort her and her friends safely home. That doesn’t even include helping look for lost things or bringing forgotten things after she’s left for school.

I expect at least one challenge to this. She better hope she doesn’t catch me after a work day though. I’m kind of hoping she does, though, just to see what happens.

Absolutely Positively Nothing

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For various complicated reasons, all the girls were out of the house this morning leaving me by myself. I responded by doing absolutely positively nothing productive.

In my defense, I’m working tomorrow and having an empty house inspired me to sloth and relaxation when there was no one around to witness it.

(Note: For the record I have no problems with sloth and relaxation even when there are people around to witness it.)

I’ve written before how the introvert in me needs time to recharge every now and then and how those opportunities have been less frequent the past few years. My need for time by myself even stopped me from playing a game with my friends as that would involve donning headphones and linking up via the internet to have my lack of skill mocked whilst getting updated on the latest juicy gossip from Canada.

I did play the game, just on a different server. However, I played so badly that after a few matches I stopped to do something even less productive: watch other people play a game that  wasn’t Minecraft but still involved digging. Zombies were also involved.

Eventually our youngest returned and, having had the chance to recharge, I rallied enough productiveness to produce lunch. I then assigned our youngest to do the dishes whilst I returned to being less productive than one might hope.

However, with people around I stepped up my game and got a few things accomplished and a few other things written. I even prepared for a post that I ended up not writing. This actually puts me ahead of the game for at least a day.

Tomorrow I’ll be around lots of people but I’ll be being paid to be there. That’s a lot different. I’ll still need to recharge, but it’s a different kind of energy.

Back Doing Stuff More Slowly

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I slept through the migraine but woke up today moving in slow motion.

A post-migraine hangover leaves me feeling weak and sluggish and with the slight remnants of the headache as if the migraine thinks it’s an empty bottle of booze and doesn’t want to be ignored now that it’s all gone. (Something like that.)

The pain hits when I do little things like lean over to pull on socks or bend down to put on and tie my shoes. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just a twinge, almost a memory of the pain which, since I slept through the worst, is especially annoying.

The results in school manifest as either a marked lack of interest in anything that goes on:

I’m not prepared for my next class. Sigh. Can’t be helped. That student just set fire to that other student. Sigh. Now I have to fill out paper work.

Or it manifests itself as permanent annoyance:

Student: Good morning!
Me: Shut the fuck up. 
(Note: the latter comment is more of a feeling than an actual expression.)

Today was minor annoyance at one student although, in my defense, when I checked on him he hadn’t written a single thing the entire class, so I made him stand until he caught up. When he didn’t catch up, I confronted him again and he said, rather timidly, that he didn’t have a pencil. If I’d been in permanent annoyance mode I’d have snapped and reminded him he was in his homeroom and should have easy access to pencil unless he didn’t have one in the school and no friends to borrow one. (That would have come out, though, as “Are you fucking kidding me?” as I walked away shaking my head, triggering more twinges of pain and more annoyance.) Instead I just told him to borrow a pencil from someone.

I got home and took a nap, which helped a little, but the feeling doesn’t go away until I have had  full night’s sleep. Even now I can feel twinges of the “hangover” which means it’s time for bed.

The Pain With Rain Stays Mainly in Dwayne

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A short one today because, after a pleasantly cool and dry beginning of June, the weather responded by entering the season of Humid in a surprising way. The surprise has given me a headache

The weather decided to bring the humidity but left the heat behind. This had the odd effect of making it seem cool enough to wear warm clothes when, in fact, that was just a trap. Even wearing light clothes, at least if you actually had to leave the house, left you feeling sweaty and damp.

The weather also brought annoying mist that made umbrellas useless but only left you annoying wet rather than soaking you. The weather also brought air pressure changes that have messed with my head. In fact, right as I sat down to write this, as part of what seems to be a new seasonal tradition, I got my migraine spot. I quickly took some medicine and am now writing a compulsory post before heading to bed.

The website is still “Banned in Japan” but I don’t have the energy to deal with the host tonight.

I’ll save that for tomorrow. I’m hoping that’s the only headache I have to deal with tomorrow.

 

The Pathos of Things

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An old vacuum cleaner reminded me about an old lamp. Well, actually, a commercial about one.

There’s a great Ikea commercial (directed by Spike Jonze) about a woman throwing out a lamp. We then see the lamp on the street as it watches, through the window, the life of the woman and her new lamp. It all leads to a nice punch line in the rain.

I bring this up because today we replaced a vacuum cleaner that’s older than both our daughters. When we replace something that old (for example, we recently replaced a coffee maker that was older than our youngest daughter) we usually hold a mock ceremony where we salute and make a really bad trumpet fanfare as a send off for the old item before we dispose of it.

We don’t really feel bad about replacing the vacuum cleaner, but we were kind of bummed by replacing the coffee maker.

This all refers to a Japanese concept called “Mono no aware” (“aware” is three syllables ah wah ray) or “The pathos of things / an empathy toward things”.

It describes the odd sadness you feel when you get rid of something you’ve had for a long time. I’ve seen people who claim to be non-materialistic cry when they left their first houses. Actually, i kind of did that, too, when we left our house in Colorado. I also remember my parents being kind of sad when we left our trailer for that new house as the trailer was the first home we’d (well, THEY’D) ever owned.

In our case, there wasn’t much pathos for the vacuum cleaner as we’d worn it out and it was long past due for being replaced. The same thing happened with our old kerosene heater last winter which was also, I believe, older than our oldest.

The coffee maker, though, was different. We both were disappointed when it broke. Some of it was the surprise when the power button suddenly stopped working but the rest, rather than being pathos, was the concern that it would be difficult to replace for less than the cost of a small car. Also, because it was old, I’d had to replace the plug when the cord began to wear out which mean I had some personal investment in it.

However, the new  coffee maker, as with the lamp in the Ikea commercial, is much better than the old one and I’m crazy to feel sorry for it.

That said, I’m kind of sad it’s gone.