Ah cripes. I think it's been a really long time since I've written a State of My Life Address.
I got me a job. I'm working for an IT company in Shibuya. I'm glad to get away from
teaching for a while, and officially I can use Japanese at work, but so far I haven't really used
much. I've not had a whole lot to do; my task now is to "learn CSS," which I'm pretty
happy to do.
I wasn't 100% happy about it when I first started; I thought it a bit demeaning to waste
braincells with flashy crap, but now that I've been messing with it some, I'm becoming more
intrigued, and wanting to learn the language more precisely and fully than I had in the
past.
As a result of Getting a Job, I should be Getting a Paycheck on the 25th of this month, and
for the forseeable future.
If I recall correctly, I have about $3000 in debt on one credit card, and $200 in my US bank
account, and 16000 yen in my Japanese bank account, plus perhaps 8000 yen in my wallet.
I've not really been in touch with my fam since getting back from the US. (Did I write an
entry while in Texas? (( I "just" got back from visiting friends and family in
Houston/Austin/SWUUSI for the first time in 4.25 years )) I'll have to check later, not that I can
do anything about it in a SoML.) But I've emailed with Fred a bit, and got an email forwarded from
Ma. Dad's birthday is coming soon to a calendar near me, so I gotta hook up some Skype with
him.
I've been playing ultimate pretty consistently. Ami has been coming out as well, though she
hasn't really been playing, as such. We've been riding our bicycles to the field (have done so for
the past 2 weeks) and basically determined that it's faster (and cheaper) to ride our bikes than to
take the train (if we include walking time to the station).
I've not really been meditating much recently, but I've been pretty careful to get enough
sleep such that I don't have to use an alarm in the morning. I think that's pretty good for the
ol' bod.
I've painted about an hour worth on my paintings since I unpacked them from storage during
my Texas Travels. I'd like to get some more consistency on doing that. It would be great to put
them up in a show in October, or at least by the end of this year.
With Ami's help, we've been eating pretty well and inexpensively. She cooks and I clean
(actually she dries the dishes) and we seem pretty happy with that arrangement. I don't always go
shopping with her, but it's not really worth sending two people out to get just a couple
items.
I'm looking forward to digging in to XHTML; I'm confident I can get my site to validate as
XHTML Strict, though it might be a bit tough to get all my old old links to validate that well.
Not sure if I'll "have the time" to do this little project, but under the guise of
learning XHTML for work, I think I can do a great deal.
I noted today that while there's a declaration on one (probably most) of our
sites, it's got a bunch of errors in its links and style sheets and various others.
My apartment is pretty clean; part of it is trying to live up to my imagination of what Ami
would like, and part of it is just enjoying living in a clean apartment. But I sure wouldn't have
vacuumed without Ami's pressure (haha) last Sunday.
I currently live in Sakura House Motosumiyoshi, which is hella quiet compared to living next
to 246. The place is hella small compared to that apartment, but for now it's basically all the
space I need. Except for the shower; that shit is cramped.
Though Ami comes over most evenings, she doesn't actually *live* with me, and basically never
stays over. There's a strict policy of registering (and paying 2000 yen per night for) guests
before they stay. I'm continuing to be quite happy with our relationship, and keep finding new
things about her mind that I really appreciate.
Just last night she pointed out that I've been asking permission for setting my own schedule,
which is something that I learned from my parents, my relationship with Wende, watching
Maggie-n-John, Molly-n-Will, and Christine-n-Nathan, my relationship with Hitomi, and likely other
sources to the point that I didn't even notice how much it had pervaded my brain.
She was like, "it's your schedule; if you wanna do something, just do it. If I'm invited
and I can and want to do it, I'll join."
Wow. Um, wow.
Man I love that girl.
I'm still quite aware that we've not made it 6 months, which is how long I was happy with Hitomi,
according to the stories in my brain. But my sense is that we'll make it easily
easily.
My computer hard drive died some months ago, so I've started a policy of getting pics
uploaded ASAP when I put them on my machine. I still don't have a automagical backup system, and
certainly not something as cool as SVNing my entire machine, but I'm pretty well sorted on getting
pictures off here and safely (?) onto my site without a huge backlog in iPhoto.
Yeah, actually, I should do that tonight.
Anyway, my HD died, but was still under warranty so they replaced it (and the case for good
measure), and fortunately I had backed up all my shizzle just prior to that. Unfortunately,
though, my pics of CDF were among those that were lost.
My computer is my second Macintosh: white MacBook with 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, 1GB 667 MHz DDR2
SDRAM, 74GB HD of which 40GB is free, running OS X 10.4.10. Just today I installed X11 and The Gimp.
Internet access is pretty solid. Sakura House supplies a free connection, and when it fails
(more often than one might like), there's usually a Yahoo!BB connection floating into my room from
outside. Plus free fast internet at work, to which I'm connected all day.
Currently in Sakura House, not including Suzuki-san and his wife, plus there dog Santa, though we
basically never see them; they've got their own entrance, etc: Max, the tall German guy; Jergen, the
not-as-tall German guy; Karen, the Brazilian woman who I almost never see; Q, the Chinese guy who I
even less often see; and me.
I-group will no longer be meeting at Enio's place near Shibuya, but at Enio's new place near
Ebisu. We're about to have 4 days of training next weekend (Steve Kushner and his Emotional
Mastery course)
I've been studying a bit of Japanese, or.. studying Japanese a bit more now that it's way
more important at work. I was told I need to beef it up or I'll likely not make it past 90 days,
but we'll see how it goes.
Part of me wants to get canned for that, not that I hate working there, but I might by then.
Recently, I modified some code I found that will allow me to (re)create thumbnails for all
my images online. I'm really happy about this; I had wanted such a solution for a long time. How
easily it was written with css and exec() calls. Dang. I'm pretty sure it could have been written
in perl as easily as it was in PHP.
I'm not going to link the code until I get it a bit more polished. Actually it's pretty good as
it is, but I'm being lazy.
Once that code is incorporated with my imagesadmin, I will be able to slog through the
images on my site bit by bit and adjust the thumbnails to focus on specific parts of the picture.
My left tonsil seems to be getting infected again. Not fun to swallow right now.
I don't have any pets, but I did get to see Spot in Houston. That was nice. I wouldn't
call him "an old man kitty" as Jennifer did. He still seems very Spot-like. Perhaps
she was just saying he's not as active as he used to be.
Maggie's Marble Track has been safely delivered to her house. It survived the trip well
enough to be called a successful journey. It didn't quite survive the first time a horde of kids
came over and started to play with it. I think they said, "it started coming apart."
Haven't had any good earthquakes recently, but I remember a pretty good one about a month
ago in the middle of the night.
It's been rainy for the past couple of days here in Tokyo. Actually it didn't rain today,
but it did yesterday and I think it's scheduled to rain tomorrow.
This Saturday (day after tomorrow) I am planning to visit Chigasaki to meet some peeps
from Couch Surfing: Sonnesse (sp) and Alex(?) have invited
people over for BBQ type things a couple of times. This will be the third such event,
I hope my tonsil gets better before then.
It doesn't seem to be getting better. Sigh.
excited
dreams
runes
YRUU
ultimate
KTRU
skate
sleepy
nihongo