Friday, March 16, 2007
Latest addiction and update
I am not sure if it is a sign of homesickness, or just one of those things, but lately we've become addicted to "24", the TV show. I never got to see the show in the US, but last week we started watching the first season on DVD, and we've averaging about a show a day. We're even losing sleep to watch it. Isn't that one of the signs of addiction?
The other big news was that Yukie's mom, who felt about me the way, say, George Bush might have felt about Nanci Pelosi the night before the election night, i.e. one step down from the anti-christ, unexpectedly decided she "doesn't hate me anymore."
click here to expand/contract
The other big news was that Yukie's mom, who felt about me the way, say, George Bush might have felt about Nanci Pelosi the night before the election night, i.e. one step down from the anti-christ, unexpectedly decided she "doesn't hate me anymore."
click here to expand/contract
Labels: life in japan
permalink posted at
8:33:00 AM 
When Yukie's youngest sister finally decided on a college, her mom got a sudden case of empty nest syndrome and Yukie got a tearful motherly call. After some coaching on her english by Yukie, she evev talked to me on the phone. Interestingly the first thing she asked was do I like Kyoto (that is, am I adjusting to life in Japan) and the second thing was if I am happy (are Yukie and I happy). She told me to take care of Yukie well (if so, then I guess maybe this is OK). The coup de grace washer saying she wants to meet me sometime (after having rebuked our earlier attempts to visit). Quite a turnaround. She was very very sweet and touching. There was a kind of bittersweet happiness in her voice.
Global warming may indeed be a good thing after all.
Aside from that, on a technical note,
I have also been working on some minor adjustments to the website to make it more usable for me, such as the cool "expand/contract"function...
I am also working on making it possible for people to sign up to get a notification by email when I make a new post. I am just testing out the different services to see which one is the best. If you have a news reader you can already sign up for an atom or rss feed (see links in sidebar), and you can use an rss-to-email service to turn that into an email, but they don't always seem to work if there is a password on the feed, like on mine. Therefore, I am checking out another solution, called Zoodoka, that might be better.
I went downtown to have my taxes done tuesday. The taxes were simple, but I needed a bit of help, cause the forms are in Japanese and even Yukie doesn't understand them. But a nice theater student at the tax office helped me do everything on the computerized forms, and voila. He had a strange watch: it was an analog watch with two faces. I asked him about it, and it turns out he lived in Vienna for a year and used it to keep track of time back home.
It's returned to being pretty cold, and this morning we are out of oil. I had to bring the downstairs heater upstairs, but I am afraid it too will soon run out oil. I hear it is still pretty cold in the states...I miss snow. We had a few flakes...I mean flakes...and that's it.
We also did a major reorganization of the upstairs bedroom. I got some pull out drawers and we managed finally to make it so Yukie can get to all her clothes from one place, and still keep it all organized. This felt very satisfying.