Category Archives: Life and Stuff

Dropping Kilograms Pounds and Stones

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I’ve mentioned before how, when I was in Albania, I ended up getting sick and losing a lot of weight. Recently, I’ve volunteered to lose weight have been doing my best not to get sick.

The impetus for this was a discount on a guided weight loss course run by former US Army soldier Vic Magary. I don’t remember how I heard about him, but I remember seeing some of his videos a few years ago and getting some of his diet books and thinking, well, yeah, some day. I like his common sense attitude and the fact he doesn’t try to sell a bunch of equipment or play up his service in the “I was totally Special Forces and please don’t look up my DD 214 and prove I wasn’t” kind of way. (Note: he was in infantry, not Special Forces.)

Then, when the 30 day course went on sale (it was the last time he was offering the course as he is starting a new project.) I decided to try it. I knew there would be resistance from She Who Must Be Obeyed and I also had a trip to the in-laws that would complicate things (hint: beer, beer and more beer and lots of food), but for the most part I’ve stuck to the plan.

Vic required participants to keep a food and exercise journal (daily exercise is part of the plan) and promised to send us angry emails if we didn’t keep our journal updated. He gave us daily feedback on our food journals and also gave us access to different sources of advice.

I found, and still find, the food journal to be the most useful part of the plan. Twenty four days after the official program ended I’m still keeping it. The idea is you enter what you ate, when you ate it and about how much you ate and that can be kind of terrifying in a “do I really drink that much bourbon?” kind of way. You also weigh yourself once a week. If you have a bad week you can review what you ate and never do that again. If you have a good week, you have a plan you can use again.

I went with much lower carbohydrates, meaning I eat a lot less pizza than I usually eat (luckily we don’t order it that often) and I have to go easy on pasta, rice and potatoes. I have to find a way to include vegetables with every meal, including breakfast. I also eliminated a lot of in-between meal snacks and changed the snacks I do eat.

My goal was for this to be a lifestyle change and not just a “I need to get into this suit for one night” plan. I also didn’t want to starve myself. She Who Must Be Obeyed is slowly coming around, although she refuses to join the plan. (She doesn’t need to.)

The results have been pretty good. I started out at 98 kilograms (216 pounds) and as of today’s unofficial weigh-in I’m at 89.5 kilograms (197.3 pounds). I’ve been inconsistent with the daily exercise, but mostly on work days when I do a lot walking (3.1 miles/5 kilometers each work day).

My goal is 84 or 85 kilograms (185 or 187.4 pounds) Then I can moderate things a bit.

Me at 152 pounds. This is what I'm trying to avoid.

Me at 152 pounds a couple days before I was medevaced. This is what I’m trying to avoid.

Wires and Readers and Silly Hats

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A couple weeks ago our internet started taking small vacations. I was annoyed, our oldest was panicked because “NO TWITTER!” (ah, the humanity).

I contacted our service provider and they were like “not our problem, dude, call NTT”. I called NTT and they sent a guy out to check out our internet. The NTT guy blamed everything in our house that runs on electricity and an old phone cord for the problem.

I was skeptical, but I bought a new cord when I was out the other day and then spent today undoing what I’d done and doing something else.

Most older Japanese apartments have two fatal flaws: 1) they have only one electrical outlet in each room and 2) there’s only one phone jack in the entire apartment. In order to hide my desk in the variety room and connect my computer to the internet, I had to stretch a 10 meter long phone cord from behind the hutch in the kitchen to the far corner of the variety room. This involved running the cord along the baseboards, around corners, through the entry way and around more baseboard. I attached the original cord with U shaped nails that had plastic insulation along the curves (at least most of them did before I started hammering away on them).

The NTT guy gave a long list of why that set up was a bad idea but couldn’t explain why it worked until it didn’t. Just in case I tore it all out and replaced it with plastic hooks that stuck on the wall. To do this I had to wear a silly hat with a flashlight attached and had to clean up a shocking amount of dust.

The plan for the next part of the day was to set up a Kobo Touch eReader I bought recently. (It was used and $20 so I couldn’t resist.) Setting up such things usually involves copious amounts of swearing, but after an initial failure, the only swearing happened when I tried to read the f@#king manual which consisted of 1) a “congratulations you bought this device” pamphlet and 2) vague online instructions.

Luckily, the internet and Calibre saved the precious ears of my precious girls and gave me a portable device with several books and a dictionary on it but no blinding back light and no quickly dying batteries.

I would have started reading right away, except that now that the internet is working better I have more distractions.

We Two, We Sickly Two

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I had plans for entertaining our youngest today, but then our youngest got sick. And then I decided to join her.

It is a tradition I have that I start feeling sick the night before the start of a long holiday. This time, though, I put that off a couple days because I was actually working one day during the holiday. As soon as that was over, though, things started to change.

I’m not sure what causes it. Some of it is disruption of routine. I usually don’t sleep late on weekends so it’s not a change in sleep patterns, but I’m also not doing my usual walk to the station and back. Also, all the stress of work builds up and then gets released which increases blood flow to the brain which triggers a migraine, which is exactly what I got today.

Oliver Sacks, in his book Migraine, referred to migraines as “nerve storms” (or he quoted someone as calling them that, I don’t remember) and that’s as good a description as any.  They start suddenly and can disappear just as quickly but they always leave a small bit of mess that clears away over time. Even today’s, although it was reasonably mild, has left me with random flashes of pain and nausea to remind me that it’s still here.

Throw in the changing weather and autumn pollen and that’s a big mess of nerve storms waiting to happen. Our youngest seems to have a mix of autumn allergies and a cold which had her napping most of the day. I’ll be watching her again tomorrow and I hope she’s feeling better so we can go out and get some sunlight.

Luckily, it appears as if tomorrow will be bright and sunny. However, if I have a migraine, that’s the worse possible thing it could be.

Silver Week is Here

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Thanks to Japanese law, I have lots of time to be lazy this week.

Monday is Respect for the Aged day. This is the day when everyone is expected to call their grandparents and/or parents and wish them love and respect. It used to move around, but now, thanks to a Happy Monday system designed to increase the number of national holidays, it takes place on the third Monday in September. Wednesday is Autumnal Equinox when everyone is expected to, well, be happy it’s Autumn and not August.

That leaves Tuesday.

Luckily, Japanese law says that when two holidays are separated by only one work day, that work day becomes a “People’s Day” to honor the people who were going to take the day off anyway. That means we are now enjoying a very rare five day weekend in September. This configuration occurs every five to six to 11 years or so. The last one last occurred in 2009 and the next one will occur in 2020.

This configuration is dubbed “Silver Week” in honor of/contrast to Golden Week when four national holidays occur in the same week.

Golden Week is traditionally the time when Japanese sneak away for short trips. If the holidays fall right, they can use a couple paid holidays to get eight days off to party and do some travelling. Because they’ve already done that, it’s hard to sneak away from the office for another week in September. Silver Week thus becomes more of a shopping time.

Oddly, both She Who Must Be Obeyed and I are working this week. She’ll be on her regular schedule and I will work tomorrow as a substitute teacher for a six hour English intensive class.

Starting Monday, I’ll end up babysitting for a few days, but since the weather is suddenly cool and dry, I may take the girls (or perhaps just our youngest depending on our oldest’s schedule) to a movie. Or, we’ll just sit around and do nothing.

Losing Track of Days by Day

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I sent a text today that I soon regretted but it wasn’t technically my fault.

My schedule sent me home at an unusual time and because it was raining I wasn’t in a good mood. I got home and was surprised to see She Who Must Be Obeyed was not at home as it was her day off. I figured she was out getting groceries and I immediately, and diligently, set about to wasting time and accomplishing little.

Around lunch time, it dawned on me she hadn’t yet returned from where ever it was that she was. I quickly texted her and asked if she was at work as sometimes she will pick up an extra day, especially if our girls are going to be at school late.

About a half hour after sending the text it suddenly dawned on me what the problem was. It was Thursday, not Wednesday as I thought it was or Friday as I hoped it was. Thursday is one of her usual work days.

This phenomenon happens at certain times of year at the school where I work when the schedule is full of gaps caused by exams and sporting events. In January and February during entrance exam time, not only do we have a number of odd days off, but we also have different grades finishing at different times. At one point we’re passing back exams for one grade whilst we are still teaching another and waiting for their exams to begin.

During those months a typical response is to wake up and suddenly doubt yourself. You think “Holy crap! Am I really off today?” and you check and recheck your schedule–the paper and the electronic version–several times. It’s also common to get an email from another teacher along the lines of “Holy crap! Are we really off today?” In the past more than one teacher has missed a final class by losing track of the days.

What worries me is that the real crazy times don’t start until October. If I’m already having trouble, I’d better keep good notes about my schedule and start tattooing key information on my body so that I don’t forget where I’m supposed to be.

One Day to Recover or Not

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Today three of the four of us took the day off and did nothing. The one who probably needed the rest, though, was busy.

After sports day yesterday, She Who Must Be Obeyed, our youngest and I took our sunburns and sore legs (from all the standing/and or sitting on low brick walls) and did nothing that was useful. Our oldest, who actually participated in sports day, didn’t get to rest as she planned to attend the festival of one of the high schools she is considering.

I managed to make myself breakfast (long story) and clean my computer and work space (this involves compressed air and vacuum cleaners) and now my computer doesn’t sound like an idling truck.

Some time after that I played a game and watched other people play the same game because I realized I was too lazy to actually play the game. Instead, I caught up on some actual work which involved opening a file I plan to use tomorrow in order to prepare it for tomorrow and discovering I’d already prepared it. I changed the font of one word and saved it and that counts as doing actual work today.

Because I had done actual work, I felt it was no longer necessary to do anything useful and/or feel guilty about not doing it.

She Who Must Be Obeyed did laundry and went shopping leaving me with the instructions to rescue the laundry if it started raining. I promised to attempt to remember and to attempt to notice if anything unusual was happening outdoors. After SWMBO returned I made my lunch (well, part of it; again, long story) and heated some leftovers for the rest.

Somewhere in there I started playing the game again and SWMBO decided to argue with a 10 year old for over an hour (long, long story) and then argue with our oldest when our oldest came home.  (Our oldest fell asleep on her desk and then woke up and argued about the wifi being down.)

(Note to teenagers: snapping at your parents over technical difficulties beyond their control neither inspires nor persuades them to fix the problems.)

Eventually, that fight ended and SWMBO asked what I was having for supper. I asked her what she was preparing so I could decide if it was something I could eat and she said “nothing” The three of us (our oldest, our youngest and I) were on our own because she was tired and/or because three of us (her, our youngest and I) had done nothing all day it wasn’t healthy to eat supper (Something like that; I’m not making that up).

This means, if I understand it, that her arguing with a teenager and a 10 year old for over 2 1/2 hours had worn her out and that it was somehow my fault. (The longest story yet.)

I made my own supper, which I’d probably have had to do anyway (I will tell this story some day) and the girls cobbled together some sandwiches. We’re still not sure if She Who Must Be Obeyed ate.

The Older She Gets The Less it Matters

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Today was our oldest’s final junior high sports day. I managed to avoid half of it and wanted to avoid more.

I’ve written before about school sports days in Japan and the types of people who attend, but it occurs to me as I write this that I don’t think I’ve ever written about our oldest’s sports days.

This is partly because it is, if I’m doing the math correctly, our oldest’s 12th sports day (3 kindergarten, 6 elementary school, and 3 junior high school). This means that by now we’re pretty much sick of seeing lots of people dance and do sports. We’re interested in seeing how our oldest does, but have little interest in the spectacle.

That said, we arrived dutifully at 8:20 a.m. and watched the opening ceremony. I then discovered, to my horror, that our oldest’s first event wouldn’t take place until 10:20 or so. I considered going home, but stayed around taking pictures–I even manged to get a few good ones that I will post somewhere else (long story).

Luckily the crowd at the sports day has traditionally been very laid back. There’s little fighting to get tarp space as most people stand. Today’s crowd seemed larger than usual but they were polite. Even the precious places in the shade were not fought over.

After lunch–which we had at home and not at the sports field–I conferred with She Who Must Be Obeyed and discovered that there’d be nothing to photograph until after 3:00 p.m. I volunteered to stay home and process pictures whilst she went back to the junior high and filmed the dance routines. (These can be interesting, but you have to have exactly the right spot to take pictures of your child and they are usually only in that spot for a few seconds.)

Even after I came back to see the “Giant Jump Rope Competition” our oldest and the rest of the girls were facing away from me. I got a couple good pictures but nothing with our oldest.

I’ll be interested to see what the high school sports days are like. I’ll try to find out how seriously the school and the parents take the sports day. If it’s too serious, our oldest won’t be able to attend that school.

White Noise With Texture

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I horrified my colleagues today, although not for the usual reasons.

Typhoon 18 (aka Typhoon Etau) hit the center of Japan today and we in the Tokyo area were cursed with all the rain but none of the train cancellations. This meant I had to go to work. I didn’t get horribly wet when I went to work, as the rain was in “start then stop then pour then stop” mode (I believe this is an actual scientific term).

In fact, I didn’t get wet until I went to the grocery store at lunch time and my umbrella decided to express its inside-out self.

What horrified my colleagues was my decision to walk to the station when it was clear that the sky was about to fall. I predicted it would fall about 10 minutes after I left the office. They pointed out there was a bus and I pointed out that 1) I’d end up like Totoro standing in the rain waiting for the bus or 2) I’d get packed into a hot sweaty bus full of students and end up wet and stinky rather than just wet.

What I didn’t tell them, because this would horrify them, is that I actually don’t mind walking in the rain, as long as I’m going home. (Walking in the rain going to work is a different problem.)

Because I can’t smell it, rain to me is sound and touch. The constant burr of rain on my umbrella and the road and the taps of rain hitting my shoes and my legs and the water splashing as I walk and the cold water on the back of my legs combine as a kind of white noise with texture. A heavy rain also washes out the colors on the street which makes the experience even more about noise and texture.

My walk home. (Not an actual photo.)

A depiction of my walk home. (Note: Rain not to scale, but that’s what it felt like.)

Then I get home and have to peel off my shoes and figure out a way to dry them (unless it’s raining again tomorrow which means I’ll just wear the same shoes since they are already wet) and I leave wet footprints across the floor.

By the time I get dried off and changed and sat down with a cup of coffee I feel as if I’ve had a shower and am much more relaxed than I would have been from just walking home. I sip coffee and hope it’s not going to be raining when I go to work tomorrow.

Not So Summery Summer Days

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Things finally reset today, and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing.

It is a tradition in Japan that every summer the Japanese press go to one of the major airports and film the reactions of foreigners as they walk out of air conditioned comfort into a level of cruelty they didn’t anticipate. There are legends of people arriving to Japan to work, suddenly rushing back into the airport to get tickets home after encountering the heat and humidity at even 9:30 in the morning. I’m convinced at least one of my friends was broken by the walk from the terminal to the bus and that ruined his entire tenure in Japan.

The previous 10 days, though, it’s been cloudy and cool and the foreigners have probably been more worried about where they could find a sweater or a good fleece jacket.

This has forced the press to the beaches to interview die hard beach bums and parents who couldn’t convince their young kids it was a bad day to go to the beach.

To give you a sense of the difference, the temperature the last 10 days has averaged, by my personal records, a high of about 23.1 Celsius (73.5 Fahrenheit) and, despite random rain, it has not been very humid. The usual temperature for this time of year is “Scorched Earth” (35 Celsius or 95 Fahrenheit) with a humidity level approaching liquid.

Today, the humidity returned with a vengeance and the sun appeared, after an annoying morning rain, to let us know it was still kind of important to the survival of the Earth and to make us annoyed that we had to carry umbrellas for no reason.

The temperature also returned and it got up to 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) which is great if you can sit on the veranda sipping mint juleps but is bad if you actually have to work or move.

What worries me the most is that, despite the gloom (we didn’t see the sun for 10 days) the cool weather had everyone in a good mood (well, at least I was in a good mood) but the return of hot weather will put me in a bad mood just in time for the start of classes.

Maybe that’s for the best, though. A Scorched Earth mentality isn’t a bad thing to have at the start of the term, especially after summer vacation.

Paper Work for Me and for Thee

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Today I was confused about what I was supposed to do and where I was supposed to be so I just did what I wanted and then did some paperwork. I also sent an email that created work for other people.

I blame them for that, not me.

I’ve mentioned before the odd things the company I work for has done with my days off. This year was more confusing than usual because rather than talk to the department head to get my schedule, the powers what are spoke to the school admin. Unfortunately, the school admin doesn’t know that much. All it knows is “These are the days Dwayne is teaching. These are the days he is not.” Those are then broken down as “School Days” and “‘Work’ Days”. On school days I’m actually working and on “work” days I’m not actually working just doing busy work and have to fill out a couple forms and send stuff in to different email addresses.

The problem is, on some of the “work” days, I’m actually doing stuff at the school to get ready for the school days. The problem with that is that I’m not supposed to be at the school without “permission” because “hiding from government” or something like that. The problem with that is not really my problem, but it could become a pain in the rear.

However, sometime this past year the company I work for actually spoke to the department head who gave them an “earful” if “earful” is defined as “loud unholy hell”. It is possible, therefore, that today and the next three days are school days and not “work” days.

I sent in today’s “work” day forms and the emailed the person in charge of my schedule. I knew what would happen and about how long it would take. She would contact someone above her who would freak out. That person would contact my immediate handler (he’s not a supervisor because supervisor’s actually have authority to make decisions) and my immediate handler would contact me to get more information. After talking to me my immediate handler would contact my actual boss who would contact the school.

I’m predicting the school will not understand the problem and say “we sent you the schedule” and this will start a few more processes rolling. (If you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of layers above the layers above me.)

I have no idea how it will all work out. My immediate handler will call me with some BS explanation that doesn’t actually solve the problem. The only good thing about all this is I’m not the only one doing extra work and paper work.