Category Archives: Random

Either Laziness or Adaptation

2 Replies

I probably got a lot more done today by not doing what I’d planned. However, I managed to be lazy in a surprisingly rigorous sort of way.

The plan was to go to the bank and get some cash and then, just out of curiosity, check out the local branch of Maruzen bookstore to see if they had the ink I’d already sold. (Sort of. Money had not yet changed hands.) The branch, despite being part of a fairly posh department store, manages to be one of the best stationery shops in the area. They have everything from expensive pens to cheap pens to “Draw you own comic book” starter kits with dip pens, ink and examples.

I found the ink I was looking for and despite cleaning all the bottles off the shelf, was pleased when the lady running the pen section not only didn’t sigh and tell me I could only buy one bottle of one color every seven years, she tried to find a fourth color for me.

This meant that half of the things I’d hoped to accomplish had already been accomplished. Despite that, I walked back toward the station determined to head down to Tokyo. However, by the time I reached the end of the shopping street (a couple blocks from where I started) and approached the station, I suddenly didn’t have the energy to complete the rest of my tasks. Instead I did some shopping for random food and snacks and then went back to the shopping street to have lunch.

After that I ended up at my other favorite stationery shop, Kimuraya, which is the kind of store where the shelves are stacked high enough even I can’t see over them and the only way to find something is to get lost. I found some dip pens and ink which meant I’d accomplished almost all the rest of my intended tasks.

That meant it was time to go home, after, of course, a short pause to try out the new Gelato place on the street.

Tomorrow I actually have to go down to Tokyo. I’m meeting someone though, so the only way to alter the plan is to convince them to come up here.

 

Busy and Unproductive Days

Leave a reply

Today was oddly busy and yet oddly unproductive. The only things accomplished involved old forms and getting the girls out of the house.

As part of my “work” days I’ve decided to update a spreadsheet I’ve been using for over a thousand years. (Note: I made it in 2,000 at the end of the last millennium; this is a new millennium; a millennium is a thousand years; therefore, I’ve been using it for over a thousand years. That’s math.)

Updating the spreadsheet accomplishes a few things: it makes the spreadsheet more usable; it satisfies my “work” day requirement; and it is completely useless to the company I work for. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Of course, dealing with Microsoft always involves swearing, but this time there wasn’t as much as usual. There was some tedium and the promise of swearing later when I find the mistakes I made today. (There will also be swearing when I attempt to use it on my tablet.)

The other accomplishment was getting the girls ready to go. Our oldest, in addition to going full vampire, has also gone full teenager. This means the brain damage is real as is her self centeredness. (Her grandfather gave her some money. She’s spent some and doesn’t see the need to go see him and thank him in person. In fact, she doesn’t understand why she needs to thank him at all.)

In other words, she’s not only the center of the universe, she is the universe.

(Note: She probably inherited this from me, said the man who writes a daily post about his life.)

This attitude disappointed She Who Must Be Obeyed who got angry. This prompted back talk from the vampire, er, our oldest, which increased the anger. I helped pack the care and sent them on their way.

(Note: Because I’m obligated to work, I technically have to be available to be sent out which means I can’t leave town without a vacation request that uses paid holidays. This may actually be the only good thing that came out of this “work” day nonsense. re. earlier comments about self-centeredness.)

Now I have a few days by myself. I’m sure I’ll think about doing something productive.

The Fail and the Lesson

3 Replies

One of the odd things I’ve remembered now that I have a high school student in the house is the way I became a vampire in high school.

Our oldest is now a vampire and today that caused some problems.

I’ve mentioned before how I tend to reverse “polarity” so to speak during holidays. That involves staying up later and getting up later. As Benjamin Franklin wrote: Late to bed, eventually to rise makes a man, something, something wise. (No, really, look it up.)

As our oldest has become a vampire and I’m shocked by two things: 1) how fast it happened and 2) how merciless it is.

That’s what led to today’s Fail and Lesson.

Our oldest, enjoying a very rare actual day with nothing to do, made plans to meet a friend. However, complicating this was her also getting up early (5:00 a.m. ish) to see off another friend who’s moving to a high school in another prefecture where she will study soccer and probably end up on the Japanese women’s national team some day.

After our oldest came home, She Who Must Be Obeyed encouraged her to go back to bed and then I was instructed to wake her up at certain time so that she could meet the friend.

I made breakfast, hung the laundry, did my “work” for the day (no really, I did actual work that will help me with the school year) boxed some ink, filled in some mailing labels, washed dishes and made lunch for our youngest.

Our oldest woke up at 2:30, which was three hours past the time she was supposed to leave and well past her meeting time with her friend.

My reaction was something along the lines of “How did you get there I thought you went out oh crap I was supposed to wake you up why the hell didn’t you set your alarm if today was so important to you?”

She rushed out and eventually met her friend and a good time was had.

I felt bad about things until I found out that she had, in fact, set her alarm, but had slept through it. Unfortunately, no one else in the house heard it or we’d have found her asleep.

Now, though, having slept until the mid-afternoon, our oldest may have turned full vampire. We’ll find out in the morning when we expose her to sunlight.

 

 

The Pens and Cases of Others

Leave a reply

It says a lot that I’m more interested in my students’ pen cases than I am their actual education.

In my defense, I do actually attempt to educate them and then use the “free” time I have whilst they are working to spy on their pen cases.

The most interesting collection, which earned the owner bonus points, featured a red Mead Composition Book, a Mead standing pen case, and Sharpie Accent Highlighters. He didn’t have any fountain pens (the Mead notebook was the hint) so he didn’t get full bonus points, but it was a very manly try.

The ugliest pen case, that was still kind of cool, was some kind of red creature. The eyes were on the side of the bag and the mouth and teeth were the opening for the pens. It then had long, colorful arms hanging off the side. The arms were long enough and floppy enough, at least to my eye, to 1) allow the owner to tie the pen case to something and 2) be annoying and get caught in stuff.

The other pen cases were small and sleek and carried only a few pens and pencils and cost their users several points. (Only a few? Really? Here’s “only a few” points. Your homework: go buy some pens.)

The fuzzy My Melody and the fuzzy Hello Kitty pen cases lost points for being fuzzy and obvious. At the least the My Melody appeared to stand and to hold a lot of pens.

If Japanese phones and tablets didn’t have built in audible “shutter” clicks on their cameras (even in manner mode) I’d have quietly taken some pictures. (Now that I think about it, I should have taken some video. Maybe next time.)

Of course, I could also ask permission to take pictures of all these, but that might make me seem kind of creepy.

 

Special Delivery With Scattered Inventory

Leave a reply

The variety room could best be described as 1) earthquake aftermath, 2) where the stolen mail goes or 3) signs of struggle.

This means I’m either the most disorganized ink dealer in the world or I’ve got more business than I expected. I definitely have more inventory.

Because I’m reselling inks that are, as of right now, only available in Japan and are, as of now, only produced in fits and starts by a company that knows they will sell locally and couldn’t care less about exports, I tend to have to acquire bottles of ink as they come available. My research method for this involves frequently checking the website and buying stuff when it’s no longer marked “sold out”.

I also tend to order a substantial amount of stuff I know will sell as the popular inks disappear quickly. When, I started this small little service, for example, the available “flavors” from the morning were unavailable by the end of the day. Other inks always seem to be available and I find myself as their biggest cheerleaders.

This acquisition method means I have stacks of ink, and the boxes they came, and the extra packing/protection material filling up a corner of the variety room.

A photo posted by DL on

This particular store has 20 flavors of ink in four series: Japanese Birds; Japanese Crustaceans; Japanese Insects; and Japanese Fungi. Each series has a variation of blue, orange, and brown, with other series having black, green and gold and each has a picture of the fungus/creature that inspired the color.

This means the stacks include pictures of insects. Given the insect friendly nature of the stacks, I should probably be worried that insects will see this as a welcome sign. For example, at the top of this picture you can see a pair of rhinoceros beetles: 

A photo posted by DL on

Rhinoceros beetle, Kabutomushi in Japanese, is an awesome brown ink, by the way, if you’re looking for such a thing…

I have a few packages to send out on Monday, and hope to convince a few more people they can’t live without the ink currently in a box in my office.

Someday, if sales remain consistent, I plan to approach the store for a better deal and a more regular inventory. (Slim chance, but worth a shot.)

In the mean time, I’ll be watching the website for more bugs and more fungi.

 

 

 

A Lightbox in the Darkness

Leave a reply

If She Who Must Be Obeyed had come home an hour earlier, she probably would have turned around and gone back to work.

Instead, in keeping with the motherly tradition of following “I’m home” with a critical “What the hell is that?” whilst still in the entry way, she questioned why no one had opened the curtains.

I stated there were two reasons 1) it was raining so there was no sunlight to let in and 2) I needed the darkness. Oddly, this latter reason didn’t seem to comfort her.

I needed the darkness because this morning was an exended photo shoot of  pens and random stuff I plan to review and/or sell. This involved breaking out my lightbox–a Foldio 2 I got via Kickstarter–and testing the limits of the camera on my Samsung tablet. I almost broke out my tripod and DSLR but decided I wanted to see what the tablet could do. (This also meant I didn’t have to charge the DSLR batteries, dust off the tripod or wrestle with its aging parts.)

The Foldio 2 works well, but it requires the room be as dark as possible. That meant I kept the kitchen and variety room curtains closed and turned off all the overhead lights I could. Our youngest was practicing piano and doing homework and didn’t notice the darkness in the rest of the apartment. This surprised me as she usually has a natural scanner that tells here when is the best/worst time to interrupt someone else’s project in order to achieve maximum disruption.

After almost two hours, I emerged into the light with over 300 pictures. The next stop was to upload them all to my desktop and load them into Lightroom. That was followed by a brutal, occasionally depressing culling. The tablet didn’t do as well with ink swatches as I’d hoped. More on that in another post. I’ve scheduled other Saturday photo shoots, some that will involve my DSLR and the old tripod, in order to learn how to solve that problem.

The next step is to post the pictures along with some prices and sell some of the stuff. But I also have a lot more pictures to take. I just hope I can convince She Who Must Be Obeyed not to be afraid of the dark. At least for a few hours.

 

Watch Where You Sit or Watch Your Diet

Leave a reply

My plan actually worked better than expected, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Today was a farewell party for teachers leaving the English department at the school where I work. Four young teachers were moving on to permanent positions at other schools and one teacher was retiring after 37 years at the school. There were a couple odd things: One teacher is going to be an extra in an upcoming Godzilla movie, another teacher was having her second farewell party as she’d already left once and then come back. I hadn’t spoken to any of them more than a few times but thought it best to be there because of office politics.

By accident, I arrived before everyone else and chose my seat carefully. The plan was to pick a small table with only four chairs because then we’d get plates designed to serve six people but only have to share them between four people.

This turned about better than expected because the people I was sitting next to started rejecting their portions. They did this because their portions contained mushrooms and/or were staring back at them. (Today’s meal featured whole shrimp and a lot of whole tiny white fish which look suspiciously like little white worms.) I and another colleague suddenly found ourselves with more food than we expected. Japanese parties are usually long on beer and short on food but we were suddenly getting full.

We made up for the extra food by passing on things our colleagues did eat (well, most of it anyway).

This, of course, busted my usual diet–although I managed not to eat more carbs than usual, unless you count the beer…

I was also on my best behavior–not that my usual behavior was that bad–until I ordered whisky as my second drink. I ordered two glasses of whisky (straight, of course) which prompted two reactions:

1–Straight?
2–Two?

When the glasses of whisky came they understood. The portions were quite small and I combined them into one glass to make a normal single.

This means, at the end of the day, I had more food than I expected, and will probably pay for it tomorrow, and had more whisky than anyone else expected, although it wasn’t actually that much.

 

 

Once More Into the Maze of Style

2 Replies

I was there for almost four hours and I only saw one gothic lolita, and even she was, technically, sweet. I’m either hanging out in the wrong place or the place I was hanging out has changed quite a bit.

Early in this millennium my job used to take me to Shibuya quite frequently. Shibuya is an odd intersection of youth culture, fashion, restaurants and sleeze that somehow manages to feel like a college town. One of its most gawked at features is the Shibuya Scramble when countless thousands of people cross intersection at Shibuya Crossing.

Among those people at the crossing used to be droves of young people dressed in various costumes, including rival gangs of lolitas. There were also the Gyaru (or Gals) who pushed fashion to remarkable extremes. This made Shibuya one of the most visually interesting places in Japan to people watch. Today, though, well.

I was there because it was my mission to escort our oldest to Shibuya and drop her off at a short concert. It was then my job to wait a couple hours until the concert was finished and then escort her back home. (Without a specific mission, I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for me to be in Shibuya.)

While I was waiting I took the time to walk around and people watch and to enjoy a meal at the newly opened Taco Bell. The Taco Bell food was pricey but good (the spicy fries are to kill for; yes, I know I’m supposed to be on a low carb diet, so what? I’ll still kill you for your spicy fries.) but the people were kind of bland. There was lots of black and brown and gray and I suddenly felt out of place in my red sweatshirt. In the old days, a red sweatshirt would have seemed boring.

I ended up in one of my old haunts, the maze-like Tokyu Hands main building and walked off the tacos and the burrito by taking the stairs up to the stationery sections. I ended up buying a couple notebooks, one of which may become my next food and exercise journal.

I then went back to retrieve our oldest. While I was waiting, a young woman dressed in a Sweet Lolita costume walked in. I thought, finally, this is Shibuya, but then I found our oldest and it was time to go home.

 

Land of Confusion and Mistrust

Leave a reply

I wouldn’t trust me either.

I lied to someone twice today. Actually, the first time I conveyed a lie. The second time I was just flat out lying.

I’ve mentioned before how this time of year leads to confusion and mistrust and it didn’t help that there was a distraction. I found out on Friday that one of my speech contest choices (long story) had voted himself off the island, so to speak, and was refusing to go to the speech contest. He claimed I’d chosen someone else (not true). I suspected that he’d merely improvised his speech (and did quite well) and that’s why 1) he hadn’t given me a written copy of it and 2) was resisting going to the speech contest.

Turns out, that was all true.

However, that was the only thing I was right about today.

First, I sent our new people to another building to deliver cards–repeating what someone else had said–only to be there when the cards were returned as it wasn’t necessary to turn them in.

Then, I stayed later than necessary because I thought had to check final marks because the schedule I had listed today as final marks day. At about four o’clock, it was revealed that, in fact, final marks had been moved to tomorrow and that my schedule was well past the “use by” date.

I then exploited Canadian Guilt–which I just learned existed–to avoid having to go in early tomorrow. (Long story.)

All this makes me, arguably, the least trustworthy person in the school.

This, however, may be a good place to be as it guarantees no one will ever come to me for advice and I’ll never be responsible for anyone’s actions.

Now if I could just figure out a way to scale this to other parts of my life…

Paper Work and Friendly Strangers

2 Replies

One of the things that happens with simple plans is a few simple things can make them rather complicated.

My plan today was to open a Japanese PayPal account so that people could transfer funds from an overseas account to my new Japanese account. Setting up the new account was no problem and only took a few minutes. Then, as an experiment, I tried to send money from my US account to my new Japanese account.

Nothing ensued except a series of  “I’m sorry, Dwayne, I’m afraid I can’t do that” messages. Those were followed by some web searches and a lot of swearing.

Eventually I figured out what I had to do, which wasn’t that complicated: change the account, prove I am who I am and that I live where I live and do this all with photos of documents wait five-seven days to get a pin code and then enter the pin code and then everything will work. (Well, maybe it was more complicated than I thought; suddenly BitCoin seems like a good idea.)

I did all the required changes and sent it off to the Mysterious Forces of PayPal (actual job titles) who contacted me with further steps to take that involved the odd notion of entering the information in my Japanese PayPal account in Japanese. (What evil is this?)

That seemed simple, except the system wouldn’t allow me, even after I changed languages, to enter the entire address in Japanese. This prompted a message from me.

Oddly, at this point, I received a positive message that said I didn’t have to worry about that one bit of English. The same message said the friendly stranger had also made another change (putting my full name as it was on my submitted documents) which made my life easier.

It all ended so well that I’m now convinced a disaster of some sort is about to occur.