Today’s plans were much different than what happened, but what happened was necessary.

The plan was to sort the posts from this bit of blather into something resembling a book and then to work on the final exam for high school second year students.

Instead, because, well, because, I ended up organizing and reorganizing emergency kits and even managed to assemble a get-home bag to take to the school where I work. This started because I’ve been wanting to do this for some time and because I had a bag tucked away in a drawer and I suddenly decided to dig it out of its storage place. That’s when plans changed.

Once the bag was out of the drawer it started a cascade of cleaning and organizing. The bag had stuff in it, but a lot of it was old and needed to be updated. This is the good news, as it means that six years after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami it hasn’t been needed.

Of course, a lot of it was crap, too. A shocking amount of it fell under the “at the time seemed like a good idea” concept. Also, the bag had originally been organized as a “get home from Tokyo during a disaster” bag and that meant it had a lot of fire-making and cooking related items that I most likely won’t need to walk home the seven miles from work.

Instead, I decided to turn it into a large first aid kit with a few emergency items, including flashlights, water, and multi-tools.

This required lots more extra work than I thought it would and led to me reassembling first aid kits for other bags. It also led to a couple trips to the internet to order replacements for things.

Somewhere in there I sharpened a couple knives and figured out in which order I’m going to eat the outdated emergency food.

I set out to do some prewriting about notebooks for this bit of blather, but distracted myself by installing a new operating system on my notebook computer.

That was not my intent, but after a few technical snags trying to install it into a partition, I finally said a few choice swear words, I finally decided to just to do a full install. That took a lot of time, and a few heavy sighs, but i’m pleased that it’s all working now.

However, as I approached the end of the install, She Who Must Be Obeyed decided it was time to Summer-ize our apartment, which is what we’d reserved the day to do before SWMBO started doing something else.

Summer-izing involves swapping the heater for the fans and hiding away the winter blankets. This requires clearing out the space in front of the variety room variety closet, removing stuff, putting stuff back, and swapping out dehumidifiers. Then everything has to be put back.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any extra dehumidifiers and SWMBO had to run get some. This left the variety room looking like something out of a TV show about hoarders. Eventually we got everything swapped and restored, and even threw away an old suitcase that hadn’t held up well under long term storage.

The house is summer-ized now. Which of course means that tonight is unseasonably cold.

Today I got the chance to see a double feature which is something I don’t think I’ve done since the Jimmy Carter administration.

I was able to do this thanks to a day with no classes falling on the first day of the month. Most Japanese theater chains offer discounts on the first of every month. Prices drop from around $18 to around $11. Since both Logan and Guardians of the Galaxy, Part 2 were showing at convenient times, I decided to see both back to back.

(Note: Since I am technically under house arrest on days off according to the rules of the company I work for then, officially, I was doing research on local entertainment facilities and will write about them in the future. Really.)

For complicated reasons I’ll mention in a minute, I had to choose a theater chain I’d never been to before. This had me worried about the popcorn. As I’ve mentioned in the past, part of my critique of a movie includes the quality of the popcorn served by the theater.

The morning started with Logan which, although it is a great movie, is not a particularly good breakfast movie. That said, the only actual flaw with the movie was the popcorn. I don’t blame this on the theater though as I chose poorly. My Hokkaido butter and soy sauce choice turned out to be some kind of dry spice and not something buttery. Luckily, this didn’t ruin the movie for me. Also, since this served as my breakfast, I was hungry enough to finish it all.

The only other flaw was people.  When I chose my seat via the chain’s website, I chose the exact center of the theater, which put me far away from the nearest person. However, five minutes before the movie started, in a large theater with only a dozen people in it, a guy sat down in the seat immediately to my left. Right as the lights went down for the trailers, a second guy sat in the seat immediately to my right. My space was suddenly reduced and the popcorn wasn’t that good.

Luckily, the theater has terrific seats with adequate space and armrests so that it was still comfortable if a bit unnerving. Also, the movie was terrific and I barely noticed the company.

For the second half of the double feature, I chose regular salted popcorn as my lunch. (Note: this theater chain’s biggest weakness is they don’t have an actual butter-like substance dispenser.) This turned out to be a good choice, though, as the popcorn was good.

No one sat next to me, which surprised me, as it was a much smaller theater. However, it’s been hard to find subtitled versions of Guardians of the Galaxy, Part 2–my usual theater didn’t offer any at all–which tells me there must not be much demand for English with Japanese subtitles. As such, there were only a few of us in the theater.

Luckily, it was another terrific movie. In fact, these were the best major studio movies I’ve seen in a long time.  Unlike the original Guardians of the Galaxy, which I liked despite a weak third act, I may actually remember events from Part 2.

Tomorrow, though, it’s back to regularly scheduled work.