Entries this day: Finished Hat Last_OM_day TJ_Bike_babysitting_service

Finished

12:04pm JST Sunday 08 May 2005

I'm basically finished with my rob_update mailer. The final touch was allowing me to remove names from the list. I'd like to add a bit of functionality to sort that list by name or by email, but right now it just prints the names in order of retrieval from the database.

11:14pm

Today during OM I added the ability for it to write English or Japanese text (for the removal link) depending on the preferred language of the recipient.

Still haven't added a sorting ability to the remove thing.

Hat

8:25am JST Sunday 08 May 2005

On the way home this morning I stopped by a bus barn and asked them about the hat I think I left on a bus on Friday night. They called the bus barn where I was and that barn has a hat that seems to fit the description.

I should be able to get it tonight.

18:16pm

Got my hat! Two women at the train station helped me by calling and drawing a map to the bus barn where my hat had been taken. They conferred with the train station guy who got the phone number and tried to print a map from the internet. He was unable to do that so they sketched out a map. This is an example of something I appreciate about Japan.

Last OM day

5:36pm JST Sunday 08 May 2005

Today was my last day at OM. I've really had fun hanging out with Jen without OM there; we sing and joke and read / write lots of emails and such. Today we played the Question Game and other days we've played other games (usually involving questions "What would you do..." and "Who would you do..." etc. We hold everything together while OM imagines he's helping slash doing something worthwhile by dialing in from the Philippines. We are so funny!

"How do you spell Philipeans?" I asked as I typed the above in various combinations. She whipped out a frequent flyer card or something and showed me "Philippine."

"Oh, I want 'Philippines' not 'Philippine'..."

"Oh, well, I have no idea, then."

We sing variants of Humphrey B Bear lyrics to the tune of the FOX world temperature map music when the US goes to commercials and we don't have to watch them.

We continue to jokingly say The Pope Died as if he really did, and mock with earnest all the dramaticized "news" on FOX.

We sometimes randomly burst into dance or finish each other's sentences and constantly amaze ourselves with such incredible humor.

"Can you imagine if I bought a $50 train card and then lost it?"

.. [thinking carefully] .. "oh man, that would suck."

We think of small things we could do that would annoy, disturb, or freak out OM. We make sure he believes Jen has been helping me do the quintark exchanges. We also hope he never reads my website.

She set up a filing system to help hold the ship together and we got everything organized for his return during the week, practicing answering the questions we imagine he'll ask, just so she has a chance of defending how things have changed a bit in his couple month absence. Like we set the printers to output to the top instead of to the back, and we made a filing system instead of leaving papers in a huge pile on the desk.

I did a cartwheel on my way back from the last quintark transfer.

I'm leaving Japan soon.

TJ Bike babysitting service

11:18pm JST Sunday 08 May 2005

Rode TJ Bike to Kellie's house today, by way of her station where the two women helped me retrieve my hat, and by way of the bus station, where I retrieved my hat, which, ironically, was basically on the way from my house to her house, though I didn't go that way. It could have been on the way.

I used my GPS to get to her station and to her house. That made it *reallllllly* easy.

Kellie made foodage for us; chicken fajitas with baked corn chips instead of non-existant-in-Japan taco shells. I brought cheese, but it was the wrong type. I thought it said チェダー　チーズ but it said チーズ & チーズ. Damn. It was gouda and cheddar mixed instead of cheddar. Silly rabbit.

- - - -

We chowed and then I carefully archived TJ Bike on her back porch, locking him to the thing and to himself, then putting his bags and stuff into a big storage box and lining it was plastic and a wrapper, then putting the lid on that, wiring a blue tarp over TJ Bike and the storage box, then putting a box on the box and blessing him and it's all good.