Category: general

Take a look at this picture, the largest size. See that kind of white oval thing on the shelf?

That’s my wedding dress :>

The day after the fire (technically the day of the fire, since it happened at 2 am), Brooke and I went to the apartments so I could take pictures.

As we were leaving, we saw a fireman standing in my apartment. He was trying to put out a small fire that was still burning. He picked up an object and it fell open, and papers fell out and fluttered down to the ground next to the pond.

I recognized that he was holding my medical records mini-file, that all my documentation about my cancer treatments was still there…albeit some of the pages were slightly burned, and some of them likely went into the pond. I regret not trying to go over there and pick some of them up.

But what I really regret is not yelling up to the fireman and asking him if he could toss my computer down.

I think back to that event every now and then, and every time I berate myself for being so stupid as to think that someone would retrieve my hard drive for me “later”.

Asahi: Weekend Beat: Wooden toy maker starts from scratch, carves out new niche

“Did you know that picking up beans with chopsticks is a good rehabilitation exercise?” one family member said.

“It’d be good practice for children, too,” another added.

And thus “Ohashi de Dozo” (With chopsticks, please)–a game in which players pile up cylindrical wooden pieces with chopsticks–was born. The toy, which has proved popular at kindergartens and day-care facilities for the elderly, is a product of [Harumasa] Ono’s firm Heiwa Co., a wooden toy maker based in Nagoya’s Showa Ward.

It would also be good practice for people who don’t use chopsticks daily. I wonder where I could get a copy of this game?

The picture in my last post came from our honeymoon photos, which I have uploaded here. Bear in mind that they have not been preserved in their original size, but I think the quality is okay for viewing at least. [I was able to pull the full size photos from PhotoWorks! Yay!] I spent a few hours captioning and tagging them and wishing desperately that I had the rest of them. I took so many pictures on that trip; these 52 are just the ones I uploaded to PhotoWorks because I wanted to make prints to put in an album. I’m glad I was at least able to recover that much, but it still hurts to think of pictures I know I took and have lost forever. I can still see a lot of them in my mind…

Anyway, I originally selected these for prints because I was proud of how they turned out, so you might enjoy them as well. This was of course back in my “point and shoot” era, so don’t expect anything fancy like yesterday’s shots ;>

Japanese houses don’t have central heating and air, as many Japan blogs have been noting recently (here’s Amy Nakazawa’s take from last year; it’s nice and thorough). Today, Simon points to an article by Amy Chavez about how gaijin can survive this:

The first thing you’ll need is a wall-mounted heater and air conditioner, which the Japanese refer to as “aircon.” This will keep the average person warm enough, but not the average gaijin. Therefore, supplement the “aircon” with a “kotatsu,” a small table with a heat lamp under it, to keep your legs warm. If you turn up the kotatsu high enough, it’s almost like sitting around a bonfire. You’ll find that almost all of your body is warm now, except your fingers. Therefore, sit on your hands. Now don’t move until springtime.

Read the whole thing; the ending is funny (and scary).

I haven’t actually experienced much of a Japanese winter. Our honeymoon took place in March, and when we were in Kyoto it snowed (boy was that neat).

However, our ryokans were warm and cozy for the most part. In the ryokan on Miyajima, which was the coldest, we had a heating mat under our futon. The bathroom was freezing in the morning.

As my experience is limited, I’ve never had the opportunity to try a kotatsu, though I’ve always wanted to. I imagine that if Sean and I ever move to Japan for any length of time, he’ll spend the winter sitting at the kotatsu with his computer.

TGIF!

I’m kind of shocked that I haven’t posted yet today. I was pretty busy at work, and during my breaks all I did was chat and websurf, and I didn’t really take long breaks anyway…and after work I went straight to the Greeneway with Brooke, and we walked until it was dark, just like yesterday. When I got home I settled in and did some reading and ran some errands and made dinner, and we just ate, and now here I am.

Of course, I also uploaded pictures: yesterday’s and today’s.

Those last two aren’t very good, but I felt bad for the last few pages in today’s gallery, as they weren’t getting much exposure ;> I am really happy with the lichen photos, though.

Well, they do:

Kuniko Inoguchi, the recently named minister for gender equality, said companies need to respond more to the needs of working mothers by granting child leave for fathers and not encouraging pregnant women to quit.

“If you decide to have a family, and eventually you decide to go back into society, you’re never fully employed and never fully paid,” Inoguchi told a small group of reporters.

“So the opportunity cost for many women is very high,” she added. “My suggestion is that we have better policies for a work and life balance.”

This isn’t just an ethical concern:

Japan’s population of 127 million began to fall for the first time on record last year, fanning worries that future generations of workers won’t generate enough tax revenue to care for the growing legions of elderly.

At the center of the population debate is the question of how to encourage women to have more babies. Japan’s average fertility rate of 1.29 babies per woman is one of the lowest in the world.

Asahi: Key figure in Livedoor scandal kills self as prosecutors start questioning officials

Noguchi’s death came as prosecutors started questioning officials in the Livedoor conglomerate over the suspected stock-price manipulation of an affiliate, Livedoor Marketing Co.

They also plan to question Livedoor President Takafumi Horie not only about the affiliate’s actions, but also about suspected window-dressing of accounts at Livedoor group companies.

Noguchi would have likely been one of those questioned.

Meanwhile, the plot thickens:

Mainichi: Livedoor repeatedly made false takeover announcements of firms it already controlled

Mainichi: Tokyo Stock Exchange looks to de-list scandal-tainted Livedoor

I previously mentioned the Livedoor scandal here.

Yesterday I got up freakishly early and came in an hour early to work.

Today I got up freakishly late and came in an hour late to work.

(“Early” and “late” are just based on my usual time, 8:00, because technically I can work whenever I want. Earlier is better because that means I have more daylight hours to do things I want to do, but it also means if I want to stay up late like a normal person I end up overtiring myself.)

I’d like to see what hours I’d keep if I could go to sleep when I was tired and get up when I wasn’t tired anymore. I’m guessing there would be patterns, but I’m also thinking that I would be awake longer on some days than on others.

And I don’t mean I don’t want to have work, just that I’d like to see how my life would go if I didn’t use clocks to determine my sleeping patterns. So I’d get up when I got up, and wake up and go to work when I was ready to work.

Theoretically I could try it out now, but I’m afraid I’d sleep in too long :>

Mom sent me this picture today in an email forward:

The original sender of the email (Mom’s cousin) wrote alongside it, “Can someone interpret the Chinese? Japanese?” (Actually, who knows who the original sender of the mail was. But I digress.)

I took this as a personal challenge!

First of all, for the record, it’s Japanese. We have lovely examples of hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

Here’s the text right-side up:

The text is:

and it apparently means:

The kanji is a pun. They use 館, which is pronounced “kan” and means hotel or guesthouse. But the word 頓珍漢–same pronunciation as とんちん館, different kanji–means “absurdity” or “contradiction”.

You will find many such puns in the Japanese language. :>

[Here is what seems to be the original image. Here’s a tour of the place, and here’s another one. According to this, they serve meals of fish curry and rice omelets. It also lists their address, 長野県松本市島内5030 (Nagano prefecture, Matsumoto City, Shimauchi[?] 5030). I may have to stay there someday if they have their own restaurant and karaoke…]

HappyNews.com/PRNewsWire: New year promises to be sweet for orange lovers

This season in particular, California navel oranges will be tastier than ever, as a beneficial delay in the Central Valley harvest has boosted the fruit’s sweetness. “The oranges were slower to acquire the rich color associated with our fruits this year, so we picked them a few weeks later than normal,” noted grower and CEO of the California Citrus Growers Association, Mike George. “By allowing the oranges extra time to mature on the trees, the fruit took on a sweeter taste that families are already enjoying.”

Reid has been buying navel oranges like they were stock in Microsoft. I have one in my lunch today :)

Scientists are working on a medication to suppress the hormones that go wild after a traumatic experience. Though Slashdot spun this theoretical pill as a way to immediately forget painful memories like Hurricane Katrina, the real purpose of this work is to eliminate Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (There is a distinction there; one of the scientists, Pitman, says, “The important thing to know about this drug is it doesn’t put a hole in their memory. It doesn’t create amnesia.”)

Memories, painful or sweet, don’t form instantly after an event but congeal over time. Like slowly hardening cement, there is a window of opportunity when they are shapable.

During stress, the body pours out adrenaline and other “fight or flight” hormones that help write memories into the “hard drive” of the brain, McGaugh and Cahill showed.

Propranolol can blunt this. It is in a class of drugs called beta blockers and is the one most able to cross the blood-brain barrier and get to where stress hormones are wreaking havoc. It already is widely used to treat high blood pressure and is being tested for stage fright.

The only thing I’m concerned about is what might happen when the formula is perfected. After all, we are an extraordinarily over-medicated country. I could easily see us going nuts with this, trying to “erase” even the smallest things that happen to us. I’m also concerned about how you would know when to give someone the pill.

For example, I don’t think I needed to take this medicine after the fire. It was very traumatic to lose everything, but I have not developed PTSD. I am still upset about it, and there are definitely things I need to work through, but I am still able to function, and I don’t have horrible flashbacks or anything of that nature.

I’m interested to know what the purpose of the elevated hormone levels might be. Is this an evolved trait meant to help us avoid danger? Or is this something that just happened to come along for the ride in our genes? Regardless, would it be detrimental to suppress these hormones when it’s unnecessary?

>:(

In 2005, I spent a great deal of time cataloguing my health issues and general feeling of wellness (or lack thereof). I was hoping to be able to chart patterns, or later have a record of my conception. (Even when I give up hope, I don’t give up hope!)

I don’t think it’s bad to have a good record of how I feel, but I do think that making note of things like that ended up causing me to be overly sensitive to discomfort. That, in turn, has affected my working life.

Yesterday I realized that if I keep getting so concerned about every little thing, I won’t be able to work properly. I’ll keep thinking that there must be something wrong, that I need to rest, that my “symptoms” mean something. It’s distracting. It causes me to lose my focus.

Last week, I felt a little ill, and went home early one day.

Yesterday, I felt run down, but I changed my attitude. Instead of concentrating on how I felt so I could analyze it, I thought, “I feel fine.” And I was amazingly productive yesterday.

So, even though I just had a sudden twinge of pain in my abdomen (on a scale from 1 to 10, I’d rate it maybe a 2), I’m not going to obsess about it. I’m going to just get on with things.

After all, that’s what normal people do, and I want to live a normal life too.

(By the way, after my freakish 99.whatever temperature spike and freakish 96.whatever temperature drop, I’m back in the 97s, which is my average temperature. I have no idea if this means I’m ovulating or not, but I haven’t had a period yet.)