Category Archives: Random

Christmas Cheerishness

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Today, our oldest had club practice. She Who Must Be Obeyed had work. I had nothing to do. A few presents were opened, but most had already been purchased and delivered.

Tonight, as is our family tradition, we had chicken, lots of bread and cheese, and way too much cake. (Wine, beer, and Japanese whisky might have been involved in a couple cases as well.)

Tomorrow the Christmas lights around Japan will be gone as if Christmas never happened and the focus will be on the New Year’s holiday, which is the real winter event in Japan.

Now, we have a few days to prepare for a trip to visit my in-laws. This means we’ll do nothing for a couple days and then madly pack at the last minute.

That’s part of the fun.

ps: Merry Christmas, everyone. All the best.

If Not Purging Then Modding

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I have a bunch of things I’ve planned to work on over the winter break, including purging a bunch of crap, some via a giveaway, and that means I spent a good portion of yesterday and today modifying pens.

Specifically I have a bunch of gel ink pens that I’ve acquired by various means and although I have no plan to use them because I don’t like the design, I like the refills in some of them and I want to see if I can salvage something by making them fit in my Tactile Turn Mover pen (which takes Pilot G2 sized refills).

The modding process involved a lot of cutting and crumbling of aluminum foil and a bit of swearing. Eventually I found an old Pilot G2 refill and pulled the black plug out of the end of the refill. After a careful bit of shaving, trial and error, and more swearing I made it fit the Sarasa refill and it seems to work in the Tactile Turn.

This means I now have five refills I can swap in and out as necessary. (The rest of the pens, most of which came from various ISOTs will be given away someway, somehow.)

Of course, I didn’t think to record the modding process so there are no pictures. More on that, and  few pictures I hope, in a future post.

 

One Little Piece at a Time

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I was worried our youngest might learn some new words, but in the end, things turned our much simpler than I thought they would.

I mentioned before how my headphones and video card all died on the same day. Via the magic of the internet, and a part of a day spent not marking, I managed to find a part that seemed to fit my ancient, in computer/dog years, PC and didn’t cost more than a replacement computer. I also found easy to follow instructions for installing it.

This means, of course, that I was expecting problems.

The part arrived and I warned our youngest not to listen to anything I was about to say, especially if I sounded angry. However, I was able to get things up and running surprisingly quickly and without any swearing.

I was also informed that I’d be getting a replacement set of headphones. Eventually.

This means all technical difficulties are more or less solved (except for a couple other parts that need replacing).

Then there’s the problem of the dead fly in the cheese. More on that in a future post.

More than Enough is Plenty Enough

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As is typical of the way I do things, I’m once again buried in empty notebooks.

I’ve been making good progress getting through them, but they still abound whilst more get delivered to my door. It’s fair to say I’ve reached the state of STABLE (Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy).

Because of this, I’ve decided not to renew my Field Notes subscription after I receive my last installment. I’ve enjoyed being a subscriber and getting the occasional surprise bonuses that subscribers get, but I’ve reached the point where a subscription is not worth the money and the lack of storage. (I suspect, that now that I’m not renewing my subscription, Field Notes will now produce its greatest editions ever and give the best freebies ever.)

I used to give away the craft versions that accompanied the first installment of every subscription, but lately I’ve been giving away the “Colors” or limited editions because I know I’ll never use them all.

Anything I like I can usually buy here in Japan. (In fact, I’ve got a monopoly on America the Beautiful editions thanks to my favorite source.) Or, if I’m in a hurry, I can order them directly from Field Notes while supplies last.

Letting the subscription die also frees up a bit of cash to try out a copy or two of other brands.

Granted, that defeats the purpose of winnowing the stash, but I find it harder to acquire new notebooks if I have to pay as I go, rather than paying all at once. Also, because I live in Japan, there’s always a cool notebook with better paper that has to be tried.

This time next year I’ll probably still have too many notebooks, but at least I’ll have pretended to try to do something about them.

Another Year Mercifully Gone By

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Well, that was another one I’m glad is now days gone by.

I’ve mentioned before, although I can’t find the post to like to it, that the one year of my life I wouldn’t want to repeat was when I was twenty. I was in a bad mood that alternated between cranky and dazed and then all of a sudden one day I was 21 and the spell seemed to break.

Now I have to add age fifty to the years I don’t want to repeat.

Lots of stuff happened this year that caused lots of extra stress. There were deaths and illnesses and lots of extra crap from work.

There were also pressures from extended family, mostly as a result of illness and injury and that has muddled things up on this side of the island as such things stress out She Who Must Be Obeyed.

As for writing, except for this bit of blather, I’ve been in a bad mood that alternates between dazed and lazy. I’ve asked friends to read things, sent them manuscripts, and then gotten no response at all (I’m zero for three now). That has me feeling down and has Kimberly laughing and saying she told me so. Unfinished projects seem to abound and I’m stuck about what to work on first.

There are a lot of decisions that keep getting put off.

That said, I got through October better off than normal. I haven’t been productive, but I’m finally getting ink inventory out of the house which has picked up my mood some.

Now we’ll see what fifty-one is like.

 

Back in Business More and Less

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Ready or not, and I’m talking to myself mostly, today marks the end of my five-ish week hiatus from this bit of blather.

For the most part I did miss writing it, although, oddly not at first.

I thoroughly enjoyed the time off for the first couple weeks. The hiatus also bled into other projects that I suddenly felt compelled to postpone. As Julian Barnes writes in his novel Flaubert’s Parrot: “It’s easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren’t writers, and very little harm comes to them.”

October thus became, in an odd way, the opposite of National Novel Writing Month. It became Not Writing Nothing No Way Month (NoWriNoNoWay).

After a couple weeks, though, I found myself assembling topics (there was a typhoon and flood, for example, that might have made for an interesting topic) but I stuck with the hiatus.

Also, I decided that since I’m paying for the site, I might as well keep using it in some form or another.

The plan from here until the next hiatus is to move to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule. with Monday featuring pen and stationery related posts and Friday featuring more personal posts.

Wednesday is officially designated as “Sure, Fine, Yeah, Whatever, That Works as Well as Anything Else” posts.

Tuesday and Thursday will be used for other projects, possibly even my long-neglected other site (which may get a complete scrub and reboot rather than an upgrade) or other long neglected projects. I also will be writing posts for other sites, if they’ll have me.

Weekends will be for rest and/or other projects. (i.e. booze, games, and time wasting to name just a few).

Welcome back those of you who’ve come back. I hope it’s worth your time and attention.

Preparing For the Next Culling

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Spent part of the day cleaning pens and making a new list of things that I want to get rid of.

The goal is not just to try to sell stuff, but also to toss out a couple pens that have been more trouble than they’re worth. (They were cheap, which means they weren’t worth that much to being with.)

I’m still stuck with a bunch of ink, but hopefully I can start whittling that down now that some of it is not longer available except through me.

There are also a couple projects I have to decide what to do with, but more on that in a future post.

There’s a lot of crap that needs cleaning, and now’s a good time to clean it.

Only Tuesday Already

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We just came off a three day weekend and today everyone was already going “Is it really only Tuesday?”

This is partly because the typhoon messed up schedules and created a dreary weekend that should have otherwise been fun. We’ve also got marking to do and new lessons to plan and, in my case, a handful of students to chase down so I can force them to write speeches at odd hours. (Granted, I usually do this for sport, but I’ve been feeling out of sorts for a couple weeks to it feels less like fun and more like work.)

I’ve also been giving the future of this little bit of blather a lot of thought, but I’ll get to that in a another post.

Luckily, my schedule actually gets easier as I go along this week. But this doesn’t mean I’ll be more productive.

One Dreary Day in Autumn

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Between typhoons, missiles and rain, it’s been a pretty dreary weekend.

The missiles don’t bother me as much as they probably should, mostly because they don’t trigger migraines. (Yeah, I know, death, destruction, and mayhem, but when you have a migraine that’s pretty much what you wish on the world anyway.)

The typhoon, though, triggered a migraine yesterday and offered rainy, gray, dreary weather today.

This, as you might imagine, inspired me to do very little.

I got some writing done, but mostly I researched a bunch of nonsense based on one or two random notions that got stuck in my head. I also finished watching season five of Angel.

Now the big worry is She Who Must Be Obeyed and our youngest getting back from Niigata safely. They plan to travel back tomorrow and I’d tell them to wait, but I’m not He Who Must Be Obeyed and any suggestion that they should wait might actually trigger the opposite reaction.

Instead I may tell them to rush home. Either way, I’ll probably spend the day worrying.

Always Forgetting What You Forgot Before

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Neither I nor She Who Must Be Obeyed seem to be able to remember that I’m supposed to take lunch on Tuesdays.

For SWMBO it’s a power thing. She always tells me the night before that she forgot to get anything for lunch. She’ll got out at near midnight to get something for our oldest’s lunch so that she can complain about having had to do so (long story) but I get an early announcement that I’m on my own.

This doesn’t bother me that much as I always pledge to grab something on the way to work. (To do otherwise risks the wrath of SWMBO in the form of heavy sighs and “I was saving that for X’s”.)

This also would not be a problem except that every time I’ve been on my own I’ve gone directly to school without stopping to pick something up. It’s only after I’ve arrived at school and begun prepping that I remember I was supposed to remember to get something.

This leaves me a short time to rush across the street to find food, carefully pick a line that’s not full of little old ladies who will spend hours trying to make exact change, and then get back to the office in time to eat and prep for class.

I always vow that next week will be different. Thus far it hasn’t been.