mag_the_great

TODAY I ordered a camera.  It shall be called the SHASHIN MACHINE, and with it I shall observe and record many a tale and wonder of nature.

MEANWHILE, graduate school is OKAY.  Milwaukee is lovely, despite living on the wrong side of the river.  Apartment on said wrong side is charmingly decrepit.  Needs more arts.  Also needs a cat.

"The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money."

Oh hey I guess the economy's fixed.  Time to start blogging again.

Still without any glorious new form of employment, but have acquired good old car.  Character, it has.  Hoping possession of the one will facilitate acquisition of the other.  Meh.  Have most of the paperwork in for the grad program I'm after, so there is something.

Living on a peninsula is... hm.  There is nothing much here, and even the good citizens' brains seem to have limited access to the outside world.  The library is a sad little place, but then I had not even that in Japanland, and so try to be grateful.  Car machine allows exploration of parts better for the lack of population.

Pictures of things... abandoned in grandmother's basement, a drive about the peninsula, a day with my not really niece.




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What's that?

er... Secret Adventure Soup.  Yes.



Secret Adventure Soup.  Desu.


Continuing valiant efforts to eat healthy foods.  Mostly fresh, less animal products, less sodium, no hydrogenated anything, etc.  Results are mixed.

Still on vacation.

In Wisconsin, and fairly comfortable.  I have a room with a bed and an internet.  It is also nice to see my family again.  There is some stress about the household, what with heart attacks and unemployment and other bumps along the road of late, but the general atmosphere is one of well things are better than they could be.  A warm house in a snowy wood is a good feeling.

I passed an exceedingly pleasant week in California with my good friend, despite the conclusion rapidly arrived to that that land is a soul-sucking pit of plastic hells.  Here is a picture of an enticing little plant in a greenhouse within the botanical gardens of The Huntington Estate. 
 
Want to touch.  No touching ;_;

The famous library of the estate featured a Gutenberg Bible, which was very exciting.

Also the sunset was nice.



Door County, Wisconsin has already provided several adventures in food and driving.  My first meal back, on New Year's Day, was stuffed peppers and stuffed shells and Waldorf salad, which is made with marshmallows around these parts.  Glorious.  Yesterday I made okonomiyaki and it was good.  Patriarch took us for a drive along quiet county roads, and let me stop to take a few pictures.  Also stopped to dig his old camera out of storage, that I may claim it for my own.  Now am in possession of a great starter Nikon film camera, and am highly pleased.

( Meanwhile, digital... )

Work is done.  I was honored with many parting gifts, which pleased me.  Departure is in three days, with relaxation, focusing of energies, and last minute sightseeing in the interim.  I have found an LA guidebook and am curiously excited to see a city I would never have visited voluntarily if it weren't on the way to someplace else.

To celebrate, here are some pictures of a graveyard.



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Kobe. Held every December to commemorate the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake.



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Been ill.  Other than fun.  Had my first run-in with one of those mysterious back rooms of a Japanese clinic where people just casually drop by for an IV.  And interesting to note that for the price I paid for this visit plus assorted prescriptions, well, maybe the doc back home could have found it in his heart to give me a lollipop and a breast exam pamphlet.  Health insurance is kind of awesome.

Now I am back at work.  Four Saturdays to go.  Then Christmas on a beach somewhere, and the first of the new year with the genetically relevant.


Here is a mobile phone photo dump:

So someone nearly severing his hand with a chainsaw led to this detour to a smallish island between Honshu and Shikoku.  I took pictures while other people made hospital visits.  Views were facilitated by a very nice lady and her very nice dog.  Dog was fantastically loyal and obedient and really loved fruit but would just sit and stare at it if Nice Lady told him to wait and would also wait to have his feet wiped before jumping down onto the carpet from his window entryway and really enjoyed piggy back rides and apparently I was sorta impressed.



( Clearly some part of me believes that there is a limit to the number of mediocre photos I can take before they start to look interesting... )

We could have floated through the torii ourselves like visitors to the shrine of old, but, um, opted not to.




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On route to the post-nuclear city, I heard tell of a young American exchange student who came to a Japanese high school some while ago. One fine day, she made an excursion to Hiroshima, where she must have looked for some time on the ruined Bomb Dome, and wandered about the monuments of Peace Memorial Park. Perhaps she prayed at the memorial cenotaph. She certainly visited the Peace Memorial Museum, with it's detailed models, preserved relics and photographs, scientific anatomy of a nuclear blast, even-handed and dispassionate histories building to heartbreaking tales of personal devastation, and ample English explanations. She might have cried. We are left to suppose these things because shortly after this excursion, the young American fled Japan, some unshakable guilt snapping at her heels. She was a silly, silly girl.

It was with this story in mind that the recommendation was made to my friend that she should not take me to Hiroshima, not if she wanted me to remain in the country. What the third party, the young American, and so many of my bashful fellow nationals abroad forget is that we are human first, and American later. The stupidity of humanity can indeed be terrifying. Anger and empathy with the members of my own species has not resulted in guilt.

Also Hiroshima-yaki was quite nice, but in the end I prefer Kansai okonomiyaki.



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Also, for the similarly bedridden or voluntarily quarantined: bomomo.

Sunday I locked myself in my apartment and spent the entire day and night studying for the GRE and baking pumpkin pie.  The test is Thursday morning.  The pie is okay.  I've yet to find a satisfactory way of baking without an oven, so I split my efforts between reshaping for the toaster oven and rigging something up on the stovetop.  The toaster oven was better.

Yesterday was my second to last calligraphy class, and so we tried to find one character that I can work on making all pretty on nice paper for my last class.  I think we've settled on chrysanthemum (菊).

Last weekend in Kyoto I went round to Kinkaku Temple and Nijo Castle, the last items of major importance to see in Kyoto.  Nijo Castle employs nightingale floors, which chirp under pressure to prevent sneaking ninjas, and are pretty neat.  Kinkaku Temple is shiny.








Upcoming, Halloween party for the kiddies this weekend.  Gonna be an angel lol.  Taking a long weekend after that to visit Hiroshima.  Proper history review to preceed travels.

Old. Don't care.

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Last weekend's barbecue in Juso took place underneath a railroad bridge, which is a classy way to barbecue. 

( I like trains. )

I'll be using the excessively rare three day weekend coming up to visit Tokyo for the first time.  Likely just be wandering around some of the more interesting districts.  Akihabara, Roppongi, etc.  Have to visit a maid cafe and capture a few cosplayers.  Want to see the Ghibli museum and Tokyo Tower, and possibly pop into the fish market.

Any further suggestions?*


Apparently there's an Alphonse Mucha museum that no one ever goes to tucked into one of the outlying districts of Osaka.  Best kind of museum, really.  Needs more cheap weekend entertainments.

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*Let's keep it clean, folks.

The day after Aso-san, the young couple decided they wanted to find a beach, and I happily joined them in the search. There are some famously beautiful beaches on the island of Amakusa, with a delightfully grotesque connection to the Shimabara Rebellion, i.e. tens of thousands of severed rebel heads lie beneath the soil, but we agreed that two and a half hours was too far to travel for a beach. Which is ironic, because it took us a good deal longer than that to actually find one.




The photograph someone has stuck onto that Wikipedia entry is of the very station where we took an unexpected leisurely rest of an hour or so waiting for the next train. That after the ludicrously steep trek from the station down to sea level and back again. There had been a sign that said beach but apparently meant concrete harbor, you see. But in truth I was hardly troubled at all, because I found this perfect thing at the bottom.



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There are two types of hot spring in the steaming land of Beppu, hells and onsen.  Hells are sulfurous steaming pools that entertain tourists, and of course onsen are for bathing.  I had less time time in Beppu than I would have liked, as the message that I had friends who were renting a car the next day to visit Mt. Aso came on short notice, but the onsen I could visit were very nice.  I especially liked the Takegawara Onsen, a Meiji-era building with a very classical feel.  You know what kind of person imagines Roman bathhouses of antiquity while bathing in present-day Japan?  A great person.  A great, sweaty person, who likes baths and history.



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