The rivers of central Wisconsin are in full flood these days, so all the grown men are filling sandbags to keep the rising waters off the main streets of their towns. No, only kidding. Nothing's going to keep the floodwaters off main street, so when the waters of Wisconsin rivers rise, the men do the only thing that makes sense — pack up their tackle, put their boats in the river, drop a line in the water, and pull in as many walleye as they can.
Or, if you're like my dad (though few people are), you get a big old raft made of about a dozen 50-gal. oil drums lashed together under a platform with a chicken coop on top for shelter. You tie it up on a river bank, stock it with plenty of junk food, and go fishing all night long.
Although it sometimes happened that my dad caught quite a few fish when he went into the great outdoors, I got the impression that he was not in it so much for the fish as he was for the cooler of beer and sandwiches. This impression was especially strong when he was ice fishing. He went ice fishing a lot, but I don't remember him catching more than a few fish, while I seem to clearly remember that there was always a beer on hand. I might be doing him wrong, but I don't think I'm that far off the beam. And that wasn't just my dad, by the way. My impression is that Wisconsin fishermen were all like that.
But back to the walleyes. When my brother and I went walleye fishing with dad, it was quite an adventure. Although I would later in life be paid a great deal of money to stay awake all night long for the Air Force, it was a novel experience for me at fourteen or fifteen. And so, for that matter, was being on a river in flood. You'd be hard-pressed these days to get me to go upriver into the teeth of free-floating semi-submurged elm trees and jagged chunks of broken-up ice in a wooden boat, but back then it was great fun.
The nights were about a million years long, because walleye fishing, like war, is 99.9% boredom, and one-tenth of one percent all-out batshit chaos. We would sit in the chicken coop, staring out at the cane poles with bloodshot eyes, wondering when the next walleye run would come by our raft. Walleye move upstream in startlingly large waves; if walleye were birds, they'd be carrier pigeons, blotting out the sun as they passed. Instead, the sign that you were smack in the middle of a walleye run was when all of the cane poles suddenly went BOING! and bent into huge question marks.
Then the raft became a scene from a Keystone Cops movie as we climbed all over each other, trying to pull in the poles, unhook the walleyes, and swing the hooks back into the water. Because there were so many fish in each run, the cane pole would BOING! as soon as the hook hit the water. It was a Mad Minute that went on and on.
When it was over, there was a huge mess of walleyes on the stringer and three huffing, wide-eyed guys who were awake and upright only because of the huge jolts of adrenaline surging through each of their brains.
I've tried many kinds of fishing, and they were all lots of fun, but if I had to chose, it'd be something a bit more relaxed these days.
Barb talks to the kitten. Even spookier, the kitten talks back.
(Hell! He's gonna write about the cats again! Duck and cover!)
There's a time of day, which unfortunately happens to be about four o'clock in the morning, when the kitten decides to wake up and begin to clean herself. To be accurate, there are several times of the day when this happens, but the one that concerns me is the time while she's sleeping at my feet. Sometimes I can sleep through this, sometimes it's pretty annoying. Boo wears a collar with a bell and a tag that make one heck of a racket in the wee hours. Barb can always sleep through it. Barb can sleep through anything short of global thermonuclear warfare.
When Boo's been at that for about twenty minutes, she gets to feeling a mite peckish, so she starts dropping subtle hints that she'd like me to wake up and feed her. Cat subtlety starts at biting my toes at the low end, and moves up to standing on my chest and breathing up my nose. At the high end, she braces herself against the dresser drawers and starts clawing at the box springs, which sounds like a drum and bugle corps warming up.
And this is just one of the many things she does that makes her such a dear. So we never miss any opportunity to mess with her, just a little bit, especially when she's napping. Barb likes to get real close and blow in Boo's ear. Gosh, she loves that.
The easiest way to get under the kitten's skin is to call her name. For some reason, she feels she has to respond to this, even when she's curled up in a cozy little furball, right in the middle of her early-mid-late-early morning nap. "Boo?" Barb will call. Boo will open her eyes and look around for the source of the irritation and emit a grouchy little mew. Free translation: What?
Barb will smile. Gotcha. "Boo?"
A somewhat grouchier mew is the reply this time.
Barb will move closer and coo, "Boo?"
This time, the reply is unmistakably cross: Do you mind? It's not quite a growl, but pretty darned close.
Barb can do a reasonably good imitation of this almost-growl, and when she does, Boo gets really torqued off. It must be a fairly agitating thing to say in catspeak. Sometimes, they come to blows, when Boo gives Barb a swat with a paw across the nose.
Bonkers is another matter. For some reason, whenever I see him, I have to say his name, which leads me to believe that Gary Larson was right; your pets think that your entire language is limited to just one word, which happens to be the pet's name.
Your friendly neighborhood O-Man took his PT test today. This is a new Air Force program that's been dubbed "Fit to Fight," which translates to, "We're a tiny bit embarrassed to admit that nearly everything you've heard about flabby, out-of-shape airmen is true." So we're going away from the "ergonometry test" — riding a stationary bike — and back to running a mile and a half, with push-ups and sit-ups thrown in for good measure.
This old man scored 88 points out of a possible 100; I came within two crunches and two push-ups of maxing out for muscle strength, but the run kicked my butt — I would've had to run the mile and a half in ten minutes, thirty seconds to max it, but could only manage twelve minutes, thirty-three seconds.
We've got snow. I blame myself. I should never have waxed rhapsodic over the gorgeous summer weather we've been having, and now I'm being smote. Smitten. Plagued. It was raining when I left for work yesterday morning, and on the way I noticed that some of the raindrops looked, well, kinda mushy. I'd been at work only an hour or so when somebody came in and announced in a loud, disgusted voice that it was snowing, and when I left for lunch, it was sticking on the ground. It snowed all day and all night. There's a couple inches still on the ground as I type these words, and it's freezing outside. So much for spring.
The seasons are all messed up now. It rained day in, day out all last summer, we hardly had any snow during the winter, and now spring comes along and it's snowing. My inner clock is all veklempt.
Boston Public was on last night. What is with these guys? Can't just one of the teachers have an appropriate, fulfilling relationship? Do they all have to be emotional screw-ups?
I'm reading Bob Woodward's Bush At War, the kind of book that was rushed out after the 9/11 attack to cash in on the president's approval ratings. Whups! Is that my cynical side coming to the surface again? Sorry. Maybe I'm way off, but to me, it reads like a potboiler. Woodward has the members of Bush's administration striking dramatic poses and bandying about kick-ass phrases like, "we are going to rock their world." Woodward turned the event into a melodrama, which is unfortunate. It was already dramatic. And although he seemed to be trying to portray the administration as stalwart and no-nonsense, as a group, they come off looking like the Keystone Cops, waving their batons in the air and running in different directions.
When I poured the soy milk on my shredded wheat this morning, it came out of the carton in chunks. Man, I hate it when that happens. I didn't even know soy milk did that. The whole carton had congealed into one big, mushy glob that wouldn't even go down the drain until I cranked up the sink disposal. Yuck.
People used to give me crap for drinking soy milk — so I stopped mentioning it. Why's the idea of drinking soy milk so weird to some people? It's delicious stuff. The soy I drink is flavored with vanilla; it's like having soft ice cream and shredded wheat at the same time. And I hate eating cereal dry, so it's a great substitute, since I can't drink real milk any longer — well, I can, but I'd be, ah, uncomfortable and so would everybody else in the room with me.
Barb and I were thinking about going to Shimoda or Hachinohe to see a movie last night, so we checked to see what they were showing. The web page is pretty easy to find, but it's just a blank text page, no movie posters or photos, and nothing's in English. Barb can read a little kanji, and he knows all the symbols in the syllabic alphabets the Japanese use, but when the Japanese render English words using their syllabic language, the words get stretched or smooshed until they're almost unrecognizable. Reading the words is not a problem; trying to decode what they say is.
"Boo Rah Zah . Bay Ah", for instance, had us stopped cold for quite a while. They helpfully put a dot between the English words, so we could see that it was supposed to be "Something Bay," or "Something Bar." Brazza bay. Plaza bar. We said it over and over again, stretching our lips and making comical faces until we gave up and went on to the next one.
"Roe Doe . Oh Boo . Zah . Rin Goo Zah" About the only thing we had to go on was that the title was made up of four words. We trolled through Roger Ebert's recent movie reviews, but couldn't find anything that seemed to be a likely match. We pressed on.
There were several Japanese movies, which we just skipped. If we couldn't get the titles of the American movies, what were we going to do at a Japanese movie?
Barb deciphered the next one pretty quickly: "Mah Soo Tah . An Du . Koe Man Doe Rah" — Master And Commander. With one success helping us along, we went back after the others.
After repeating "boo rah zah bay ah" about forty times, the light came on all at once — Barb got it again: Brother Bear, the cartoon. And she got the other movie, too, after "rin goo zah" gave it away for her: Lord of the Rings.
We weren't interested in the cartoon, Barb isn't at all up for two hours of naval warfare, and we'd both rather suffer eons in purgatory than sit through another Rings movie. But doing the puzzle was fun.
Hit the streets on the bicycle today. The ride was smooth; the tires weren't even flat. Since it was my first time out this season, I didn't try a full lap around the base perimeter road, my usual workout, but instead made a quick loop around the housing area and back home, maybe a mile, just barely breaking a sweat. All the snow was gone and the sun was out, but it was still cool enough that I wore a lined windbreaker.
I'm being scanned. The radar at the airfield sometimes sweeps so low that the speakers on the computer go ZING as the beam cuts through the building. I used to get the same thing at Lackland, when Kelly field's radar swept through the barracks. And someday my eyes will shrivel up and fall out. But I'm sure a thorough medical evaluation will reveal no cause and effect at all.
A couple nights ago, I got Tim to eat some tofu. His mother had fried some up and served it with soy sauce and sesame seeds, and it was so good that we wanted to share it with Tim.
"I'm not eating that," he said, flatly refusing.
"I'll give you five bucks," I dared him. He gave the tofu a good, hard look, then stabbed a slab with his fork and began to slowly nibble it to death. First, he gingerly bit off a corner. Eventually, he tried sticking a whole dime-sized piece in his mouth, and that seemed to work fine. After about ten minutes, he finished off the whole slab. Fifty cents a minute for some of the best entertainment I've ever bought. Capitalism triumphs again.
Tonight, it was strawberries. I don't know where Barb managed to find fresh, red strawberries this time of year, but we had a whole basket of them with dinner, and they were sweet and delicious. "You should have one, Tim," she said.
He flatly refused again, so she tried my tactic and offered him five bucks, but he really didn't want to eat strawberries. "They're all bumpy," he said, shivering.
"How about for five bucks, and I clear the table after dinner?" she tempted him.
He shook his head. She tried to egg him on, but when he finally started to barter, he substituted edemame — soy beans in the pod — for strawberries. He choked down beans from five pods, chasing each mouthful down with hurriedly gulped water and making faces more tortured that any Taliban militia man has ever seen.
Barb made sure to repeat her offer on the strawberries, but Tim never did bite.
We got to talking about all the god-awful vegetables our parents made us eat, not to slam out parents, but because it's seems to be something that everybody who's been a kid can relate to.
I remember lima beans. My Dad loved them, happily scarfed down piles of them. I thought eating lima beans was like having a mouth full of chalk and clay; as far as I was concerned, there wasn't enough milk in Wisconsin to wash down a mouthful of lima beans.
For Barb, it was brussel sprouts. I'll never know what childhood episode involving brussel sprouts scarred her memories, but she still can't say the words without quaking all over.
A close follow-up to lima beans was asparagus sprouts. Again, I think we ate them because Dad thought they were just heavenly. They're notoriously difficult to grow, but Dad tried everything to bring up a small patch of them in the back yard.
And then a wonderful, awful idea occurred to me: If Tim thought tofu, strawberries, and soy beans were truly the most awful thing he'd ever eaten, we'd have a dinner one night to show him just how truly dreadful it could be. Lima beans, brussel sprouts, asparagus, boiled spinach — we'd have all of the nastiest vegetables we could remember, and for the main dish, maybe some liver & onions. It's all in the name of building some lasting family memories. What's he going to talk about with his kids if we don't give him this?
When I started out the door this morning on the way to work, I was faced with a clear blue sky and sunshine. I hesitated on my way to the car. Should I ride the bike?
I wasn't exactly prepared. I was wearing BDUs, and although I had enough time, I'd have to really move, not just loaf along, so I'd be good and sweaty by the time I got to work. Did I want to spend the day in sticky clothing?
No. As much as I like to bicycle, the answer to that was pretty easy.
So I figured I'd come home for lunch, then ride the bike back to work. Sounded great. But — best-laid plans, and all that. I had to sit a review board at noon, which wouldn't give me enough time to take care of the errands I had, eat lunch, and ride back.
Crudski.
Not that I didn't get a workout today. I usually PT with the Group on Tuesdays, and today Curtis put us through an abdominal workout that was sheer terror. I mean it. This guy could have Osama bin Laden begging for mercy in twenty short minutes. We did crunches. We did scissors. We did leg lifts. We did bicycles. And we did three reps of twenty of everything. AND push-ups, just so the pecs weren't neglected, before we ran two miles. I finished two miles in sixteen-thirty.
"Feeling pretty good?" Curtis asked, as I crossed the finish line.
"Oh, a little cross-eyed," I answered, "can't focus, and I'm experiencing some amazingly disorienting vertigo, but yeh, that was a great workout. Thanks."
As I was driving to work the other day, I caught a glimpse, the briefest snapshot, really, of the woman in the car going the opposite direction as we passed. She had her head thrown back and her mouth was as wide open as a bear trap, belting out the chorus of her favorite song with a full-throated extravagance that would have made Ethyl Merman proud.
We're all invisible in our cars, aren't we?
I'm a singer, myself, but only the kind that sounds good with the windows rolled up and the radio cranked to max volume. I have a collection of tapes in the car so that I can launch into "Oklahoma!" whenever I'm faced with a long commute. I'm not somebody you'd want to carpool with.
Probably the clearest, most common example of the invisibility shield built into every car is "The Pick." I sat beside a guy as we waited in two-lane traffic at a red light. He wasn't more than four feet from me as he went on an extended nasal expedition with all four fingers and his thumb just as if I wasn't there, and apparently neither were any of the other half-dozen or so people who watched him in rapt, but disgusted fascination. He took absolutely no note that anybody was watching him.
The morning commute is an especially good time to watch people finish any morning hygiene they could take care of back at their house. Shaving, ear cleaning, nosehair trimming, tooth-picking — it's all on display, and you can get an especially good look at it if you get stuck in traffic.
Most people would probably do anything to avoid seeing something like that, but I have to look around at what other people are doing. Driving is such a boring chore that I'd never do it again if it weren't for the free entertainment. One woman I followed for miles fascinated me as she carried on a very animated and emotionally involving conversation with an apparently vacant passenger seat. I thought she was a barking lunatic until we both pulled up at a red light and I could see that her one-year-old was strapped into a baby seat beside her.
I think that, if we must have reality shows on television, one of the best would be videos taken from those roadside and parking lot safety cameras. I've seen a lot of singing and picking and morning hygiene, but I know there's a lot I haven't seen.
When I log into my computer at work, it asks me, "Should you use your government computer for personal gain?" and two little pop-up buttons appear, labeled "Yes" and "No." I get these random questions every time I log in. They're supposed to remind me not to lie to, cheat or steal from Uncle Sam, and if the government thinks that pop-up messages can substitute for conscience, the republic's already in a lot of trouble.
I think there are supposed to be quite a lot of these questions, but I keep getting the same two or three, so that I can recognize them almost by sight, and I click the correct answer almost by reflex. Whenever I get that one, though, it makes me stop and think to carefully click the "No" button. The whole notion of the question puts me in mind of black-clad SWAT team members descending through the skylight to stuff me in a thick canvas bag if I even mistakenly clicked the "Yes" button. Or am I just being weird?
I can't believe it. Somebody out there in the world thought it would be a good idea to remake Battlestar Galactica. Truth really is stranger than fiction.
There are times when I sit and think about all the hours — no, years of my life I wasted in front of the television watching fluff like Gilligan's Island and Star Trek. And not only are those hours gone forever, there are billions of my brain cells in my head that have soaked up every episode. I'll hear two nerds say, "You remember that episode when Gilligan found the crate of radioactive vegetable seeds and got telescopic eyesight from eating the carrots?" And I'll think: You moron. It was Mary Ann who ate the carrots and could see for miles. Gilligan ate the spinach and got so strong he could bench press more than Charles Atlas.
Some of my brain cells harbor military secrets ... and some of them are entrusted with ... that.
You might think there's a lot of crap on television now, thanks to satellite dishes, cable, and whatever else is out there, but back in the 70's, when we had maybe three channels and we received transmissions on comically skinny, telescoping "bunny ear" antennas — Man! Those were the days when they knew how to pack 100 pounds of crap into a 50-pound bag.
And one of the best televised examples of this must have been Battlestar Galactica — or, as it should have been known, Xanadu in Space! (If you got that joke, I'll just bet you want to hit yourself now.)
I have to admit before I go any further that I was a fanatic watcher of the show. I would rearrange my social agenda, such as it was, pushing great parties with best friends to one side, to ensure I was in the vicinity of a television set the night it was on. That was the atomic-powered lunacy that gripped nerds like me in the years immediately after Star Wars was released.
I felt a faint tingle of the same lunacy when I caught the tail end of a teaser on AFN the othernight. It was just a brief shot of some space ships and the Battlestar Galactica title card, and I thought: No! That would be like bringing back Green Acres! So, naturally, the theme from Green Acres was stuck in my head the rest of the night. (Sing it with me now: Greeeen Acres is the place to be ... )
The next day while I was checking my e-mail at work, I googled "battlestar galactica" and got umptizillion hits from fan sites devoted to the old show. There are lots of sad old nerds out there. And I got a hit from a site called galactica2003.net 2003?
I clicked into the site. Hey, where's Lorne Greene? And what the frak is Mary McDonnell doing there? What is this felgercarb?
Well, it's the old series in a new suit, sort of like when they did Gilligan's Island over and soembody else stood in for Ginger, but now everybody's changed. Edward James Olmos is in this one. If they can pull that kind of star power, maybe it's worth a watch.
Ah, who am I kidding? If they showed the original again, I'd be parked on my couch in front of the TV, drooling into a big bowl of Doritos.
Somehow, I won two post card auctions on e-bay. It's a little unusual because I'm cheap, and post card collectors are serious about their hobby — serious in every way, especially the pricey way.
I'm just a collector. I collect mostly junk. Just ask Barb. My collections are eclectic in the sense of haphazard; my coin collection, for instance, resembles the junk box rather than the slabbed investment coins, and my toy train collection is a catch-all of fixer-uppers and homebuilt first tries.
I collect, or try to collect, post cards of places I've been in Wisconsin. Sometimes these cards go for a buck or two, or, if I'm really lucky, somebody will sell a batch of twenty for five bucks. Those are usually the cards I end up with.
There are a lot of picture post cards that feature scenes of Manawa, Wisconsin, most of the photos taken around the beginning of the twentieth century. These usually command prices that make Barb's eyebrows arch right up over the top of her head and her jaw hang open so that it bangs against her knees.
What's really fun about collecting these photos, though, is that Manawa's landmarks hardly changed at all in a hundred years, so the town in a lot of the photos looks just like it did when I grew up there. The photos I just got show horse-drawn wagons tied up in front of the dimestore I used to buy records from.
I don't get them easy, though. If the bidding stays under twenty bucks up to the last day, I'll sign on and snipe at the card in the last five minutes. There's a couple other snipers who want those cards, too, so I don't often win. One card I'd really like, with Dillenger-era cars parked on main street, went for fifty bucks, just a bit too rich for this enlisted guy's paycheck.
As the link above implies, I made a few web pages out of these photos. They're too interesting to hide away in an album.
I dusted off the bike this morning and went riding around the base — or, as I like to call it, catching bugs with my teeth. It's a real challenge, because they're so darned maneuverable, and they would much rather fly up my nose or divebomb into my eyes. Catching bullets would probably be easier.
An 8.5-mile lap around the base takes about forty minutes on a calm day, and it was very clear and almost dead calm this morning, thank goodness, until I came around the north housing area, where a breeze was coming up off the lake. Later in the afternoon, the wind got a little friskier and was probably gusting to thirty knots, which kicks up a lot of grit, not as tasty as bugs.
We watched Love, Actually on the movie channel last night, a shamelessly sentimental medley of about a half-dozen love stories all woven together. I'm a sucker for shamelessly sentimental love stories, so I got all misty and thought it was great. Barb and Tim liked it, too.
Sunday is cleaning day around the O-home. My tiny contribution is that I scrub the upstairs bathroom. After fourteen years of practice, I finally seem to be able to do this task to Barb's satisfaction, or at least to the point where she doesn't roll her eyes, throw her arms up in the air and do it all over again because I obviously don't know what dirt, mold and scum looks like, or how to remove it.
I've also somehow been able to come to terms with the fact that, six days a week, my loved ones are the warmest, most wonderful people on earth and I want to live closeby in their bosom until the ends of my days. However, on the one day a week I clean up after them, it's revealed they are in fact the most disgusting cesspools of filth and sloppiness that they make me shiver wretchedly.
Today is Easter, and if you live in Glassport, Pennsylvania, the Assembly of God will be happy to point this out to you through the medium of drama, in a stage play during which the Easter Bunny is beaten, his eggs are crushed, and drunken men carouse while women mutilate themselves. What, you think I could make that up?
According to a story by the Associated Press, the pagent was billed as fun for the whole family, and in a production by the same folks later this year, they're going to lynch Santa Claus! Bring the kids! Okay, that I made up.
Barb and Tim like to poke fun at me because I ooooh and ahhhh at the golf highlights on television. I don't actually play golf, but I can admire a well-played shot like anybody else, so when I'm channel surfing and I run across the highlights from the Master's on ESPN, I stop and check out the standings. The fact that it annoys everybody else is gravy.
And some instructive conversation can come from even the most derisive criticism of golf. Just last night, Tim sneered that it wasn't even a sport. What do you consider a sport? I asked him, and he got hung up answering that one, so I gave him the rule of thumb: If you can play it and drink beer, it's a sport.
Best example: Bowling. Not only are there ample opportunities between frames to have a bottle of your favorite beer, but your better bowling alleys have a bar conveniently built right into them. If that's not the peak of civilization, I don't know what is.
By definition, Tim's favorite "sport," basketball, isn't much of a sport at all. A basketball player is out there busting his hump running back and forth the whole game. If you've got to wait until the end, that's pretty lame. "Players get swapped out every fifteen minutes," Tim pointed out, but if you've got to wait fifteen minutes for a beer, I still say it's not much of a sport.
Golf is a fine sport. Out in the open air, long walks across a broad greensward, and a tavern at either end of the course. You can wet your whistle waiting for your tee time, stop off for a draught right in the middle of the game, and finish off with a mug of suds after your done. And where I'm from, if you stashed a six-pack in the bottom of your golf bag, I doubt anybody would say anything.
But the finest sport of all has got to be fishing. I know my sons would roll their eyes at the idea, because you don't even break a sweat, for cripes sake — which makes it just about perfect, as far as I'm concerned. I know I'm not alone on this one. Dad kept a church key in his tackle box, and if he couldn't find it and had to ask to borrow somebody else's, they never failed to hand one over. (Don't make me explain what a church key is.)
I got this in my e-mail today:
$32,000 worth of UPS uniforms have been purchased over the last 30 days by person(s) unknown. Law enforcement is working on the case however no suspect(s) have been indentified. Subjects may try to gain access by wearing one of these uniforms. If anyone has suspicions about a UPS delivery (i.e., no truck but driver, no UPS identification, etc., contact UPS to verify employment).
If you see or have seen a UPS delivery from an unknown driver please ask for proper ID and be alert to any suspicious packages or deliveries. Please notify building security or appropriate law enforcement.
And then right after that, I got this:
Hi there, I'm Booboo al-Yubaba, a member of the most widespread, highly-trained terrorist organization on the planet. Let me tell you what we've been up to lately: Osama gave me $32,000 and told me to do something really nefarious with it, so instead of buying up all the TNT in the United States, I won a bidding war for UPS uniforms on e-bay, even though I could just as easily have bought as many knockoffs from a sweatshop for about a hundred-fifty bucks, and had a few bucks left over.
Here's one that never made the news: Over the past twenty years, a couple zillion dollars worth of US military uniforms have been purchased at garage sales and flea markets all over the world. But you can't do anything terrorist-related with those. Nevermind. Don't know why I brought it up.
Zow, am I tired. There's something absolutely draining about working a twelve-hour watch, and I've just finished two twelve-hour day watches. Five nine-hour days with two days off, my office hours, is as easy as standing on my head — okay, I can't stand on my head, you got me there. Nevermind. I had to go back to the watch floor for two days this week, though, and it's got me on the ropes. I'm whipped. Put me back on banker's hours.
I used to like shift work a lot, could do it so easily, or maybe "casually" is the word I'm looking for. It was never exactly easy, but every site I've worked at, with two exceptions, operated on twelve-hour watches, and I never thought twice about it before. While I was standing yet another twelve-hour watch again today, though, I got to thinking about the shift both Barb and I worked in Denver. We'd work four twelve-hour watches in a row — two day watches, then two mid watches — take three days off, work two day watches, get another day's break, then work two day watches and two mid watches again before we got three days off. We worked that schedule for two years, and I went back to work it for another seven years. When I think about it now, I can't imagine how I survived it.
Maybe "casualty" was the word I was trying to think of, instead.
I was drinking my morning cup of java and talking with some of the folks in my office, when one of them laughed and pointed out how quickly I'd taken on the look of a day weenie. "Look at him, he's got a coffee cup in one hand, other hand's in his pocket, leaning on the door jamb — he's got the look down cold and he's been an office weenie for just a week now." When I said I thought I'd earned my weenie badge after nineteen years as a shift worker, he tried to raise the bullshit flag on me. "You've been on shift your whole career? Don't lie to me, now — I'm gonna check." I told him not only could he check, I'd give him names and numbers. He hasn't gotten back to me with the results yet.
Off to bed now.
I spent the whole afternoon learning how to spend tons of the government's money responsibly. Who figured they even knew how?
It was four hours of death by PowerPoint. The guy teaching the class had never taught it before. In fact, he hadn't seen the slides before yesterday, so what he ended up doing was reading them to us as he flipped through them as quickly as possible, illustrating occasionally with a story that briefly woke everybody up.
There were 177 slides. Besides the instructor, we had two guest speakers, and they brought PowerPoint slides, too.
I tried every trick I knew to stay awake, and none of them worked well enough to keep my forehead from whacking the edge of the table. As soon as I got out of class, I ran to the legal office and had my living will annotated so that if I ever have to do that again, they'll just put me down instead.
Sam Adams makes a pale ale. Who knew? Well, probably lots of people knew, but it took me until now, because the Class Six store here has about two kinds of beer for sale at any time.
Mmmm. Class Six store. I feel a reminiscence coming on.
Back when it used to be cool to drink & drive, and when it was all right to let 18-year-old kids drink and drink and drink without having to worry much over the social impact of it all, the military had liquor stores on every base (or post, or whatever your branch of the service called it). We're in the military, though, where men wear "blouses" and sailors visit "the head" and soldiers know just one word — "hua." So we call the liquor store a Class Six store. I don't know why. And I've never cared to find out. They had beer, and lots of it, in seemingly infinite variety.
I remember liquor stores as dazzling places, if a little seedy. Budweiser bar signs hung in the windows, hanging lights like giant Stolichnaya bottles swung over the aisles, and the walls were covered with posters of scantily-clad women who promised you would be more sexy if you drank the brand of booze they were holding between their thighs. Talk about glamorizing alcohol.
Military Class Six stores were ten times as dazzling as any liquor store I'd ever seen before. They were packed to the rafters with booze, and not just American booze, but booze from around the world — German schnapps and Philippine beer, Japanese rice wine, lots of stuff you couldn't even read the lables of. It was booze from all the places that the oldest Navy Master Chief or Army Sergeant First Class recalled with a crooked grin how crazy drunk he'd gotten there.
I haven't seen one of those in a few years, possibly because getting even a little drunk in the military is nothing but a legal hassle now. Unit commanders are required to punish all alcohol-related incidents, so if you get drunk and fall down a stairway, you have to weigh the plusses of getting bandaged up by the doc to the minuses of appearing in your commander's office the next morning, as well as sitting through awareness classes for a month. I get the idea that most people just go home and bleed on their sofas.
As a result, Class Six stores are pretty bland places now, so I was a little surprised to see anything other than the usual Sam Adams beer on sale. From time to time we get the Boston Lager, wedged in between the Mickey's Big Mouth and the Miller Genuine Draft, and that's about as exotic as the beer cooler gets. I grabbed a sixer to try out, maybe later while I was opening the mail.
I got a letter from Air Force buddy and Cuber Poobah John Barnes, who was my roomie when I was at my first overseas station. I would sooner have expected a proposal of marriage from Britney Spears. Although, now that I think about it, that's actually not entirely unlikely, given recent events.
After we both left England, John and I saw each other when we were stationed in Berlin, but we were both married by then, so we weren't nearly as drunk and bored as we needed to be to start cubing again, but no huge loss. His wife, Barb, charmed the socks off my Barb, and we had some pretty good times when we got together.
"Cubing" as we knew it was when we sat nearly motionless in a room with lots of beer — sometimes a favorite album was playing on the stereo, but there was never a television — and got perhaps a bit too loud about it, although we never thought we were bothering anybody, because, as I said, we didn't leave our room. We showed a few other people how to cube but, so far as I know, they didn't pass down the knowledge, and cubing has very probably become a lost art.
Here's the latest from Georgetown: Financial Aid is an amazing thing. You send in some papers, you wait a couple months, and when you get back to school in the fall, your tuition is paid for.
Of course, for that to happen, you have to actually send in some papers. Luckily for Sean, his Mom does all his paperwork, just like she does all mine. Unluckily for his Mom, Sean has to actually sign the papers. Why would that be a problem? Oh, I'm so glad you asked.
Barb spent hours on the internet searching for all the correct forms, printed them up, and filled them out. She had to scan our tax returns to make copies of them, which became a major exercise when she had to transfer it to floppy disks, open them up in a couple different software tools to size them, clean out the printer, blah blah blah etc. etc. — it was one of those afternoons in computer hell.
The tax forms were the ones that drove her right up the wall. The college board requires copies of the signed originals, but since we filed our taxes electronically, we don't have originals to make a copy of. Barb had to go to the IRS web site, download the forms, print them, fill them out, scan them (because the library's closed, and that's the only public-use copier on base), and print them out AGAIN.
When she finally pulled everything together, several days later, she neatly folded it up, tucked it into an envelope which she had helpfully addressed and fixed a stamp to, and took it down to the post office, where she jammed the whole thing into an express mail package, which cost just a small fortune to send to the States. Gone. Done. Plenty of time before the May First deadline. The sense of relief was tangible.
Sean called on the phone today, so in the course of the conversation, Barb asked if he'd gotten the financial aid forms. "Oh, sure, thanks," he said, "I popped those in the mail today."
"And did you have any trouble figuring out what to sign, and where?" she asked.
"Sign?" he replied, puzzled.
This time, I scanned, she printed and filled out the forms. Then I showed her my technique for getting people to correctly fill out forms.
First of all, you send all the forms flat, not folded up. If they're folded up, that means you're trusting somebody to unfold them.
You could write up an instruction sheet, but that supposes they will actually set the sheet to one side and continue to read it as they page through the forms. Wrong move. Post-It notes were made for this. Put a seperate Post-It note beside every spot you want somebody to read, initial, or sign. Make sure you write at the bottom of each note, REMOVE THIS NOTE.
If you want it mailed, then by all means include an envelope, but don't put anything in it, and don't stamp it — don't do anything that makes it look like it's ready drop in a mailbox.
Learned a new word today: entomophage. If you're an entomophage, you eat bugs on purpose.
I didn't figure myself for an entomophage, which I learned about in an article in the Washington Post about people who are eagerly awaiting the appearance of the 17-year cicada. The entomophages in the DC area can't wait to stuff their faces with these nasty little bugs. If I were ever to decide to make common bugs a regular part of my diet, I wouldn't start with cicadas. They look way too much like cockroaches to me, and I don't think I could ever be hungry enough to each roaches. Or at least I hope I'll never be that hungry
I also hate cicadas in a very personal way. They remind me of the year I was trapped in Texas, where cicadas buzzed all nhight long outside my window. The heat made it hard enough to get any sleep; the cicadas made it doubly hard. You might think that a supportaing grudge might make it easier for me to bite their heads off out of spite, but I'm a simpler man than that. I just never want to see a cicada ever again, not even mounted on a pin, and certainly not served up in a butter sauce.
The article points up a fact that most people don't want to think about: lobsters and crabs are just big bugs, so if you enjoy an occassional trip to Red Lobster, you're a bug-eater.
I have eaten common bugs before — not on a dare, only by accident. Eating bugs that fly is a hazard of cross-country bicycling — it's pretty hard to keep your mouth closed if you're trying to keep any speed on at all, and on a hot, muggy day, you might as well resign yourself to eating quite a few. I've done a lot of camping and hiking in remote, wooded areas, too, where you usually end up eating a few bugs with your dinner. If you're too squeamish for that, you don't get dinner. I made sure they were well-done, then tried not to think about it.
Our weekly trip to the commissary, a normally routine event, was suddenly punctuated by the realization that, in just a few weeks, Sean will be here! Instead of filling a single cart with a fairly typical assortment of groceries, we'll have to readjust ourselves to dragging heaps of canned peaches, bags of apples, bushels of fresh produce and gallons of milk to the check-out at least twice a week. Suffering succotash, how soon we forget.
Looks like we've had our summer. It's pouring down rain this morning, so this could very possibly be the start of the rainy season already. If it's anything like last year's rainy season, I might as well cover everything we own in cling-wrap and get ready to live indoors for the next eight months.
With any luck at all, though, this year's rainy season will be a little easier to live through. Our first year here, about half the days were rainy. You couldn't call the other half dry, because we were always just on the verge of dry when it started to rain again, but at least we could get out of the house to poke around on a walk or a bike ride in the countryside before the rain came again.
The day we arrived in Misawa it was raining, really raining. At Yokota air base, it was hot and muggy, really muggy, and Iwakuni, down south near Hiroshima, was about the same. When the plane landed at Misawa, though, it was cool and muggy and rainy, and it rained all through the night and the next day, although that didn't discourage Barb from popping open an umbrella and taking a walk around to see if anything recognizable was left of the place. When we found her old house the next morning, our shoes were soaked through from tramping in the wet grass, and we had drizzle in our eyes.
Most people who are stationed in Misawa inevitably brag about the terriffically cold winters, when the blizzards come and the snows pile up and swallow cars, buildings, trees and mountains. It's all a load of bunk. One winter weekend in Wisconsin is harder than every winter we've experienced here so far.
Winters here are just very cold, and very, very dry, and summers are precisely the opposite. The only other time I've been this constantly wet was when I lived for a year in San Antonio, Texas. It didn't rain much there, but summers were so freaking hot that I don't remember a time when I stopped sweating.
I was checking e-mail when Barb walked in to kiss me good morning. Before she went downstairs to make a cup of coffee, she sat down to chat for a minute about school work, or travel, something like that, when OH MY GOD WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOUR EYE! burst out of her.
When people stop in the middle of conversation and bleat OH MY GOD first thing in the morning, I sort of freeze in my tracks.
What is this? I didn't have it before I went to bed last night, and I don't think anybody assaulted me as I slept, so it's not any sort of trauma. It doesn't hurt. It's just sort of there. It's so weird. I supposed I'll have to ask the doc about it.
Follow-up: It's a subcutaneous hemmorhage, or something like that. Perfectly normal. Happens all the time. Nothing to worry about.
Nothing highlights the comedy of watching myself age than a trip to the doctor. No matter whether an arm goes numb, my belly ties itself in knots, or other bits of my body go wonky, the doctors keep telling me, "Perfectly normal for a guy your age."
"But every morning I wake up to the sound of Tina Louise singing I Wanna Be Loved By You," I complain. "Sometimes she's standing in the doorway to my room."
"Seen it a million times," he says casually. "Wouldn't worry about it." And then he prescribes Motrin. They used to prescribe Dimetapp, but I guess medical science has advanced somewhat.
We got the newest edition of Trivial Pursuit, partly because Barb and I have memorized all the answers to the old game. Too bad we didn't play this game in high school; we could've gotten A's on everything. But we also got the new game because, although Tim likes to play, he doesn't know what half the questions mean. Like, who's this Henry Kissenger guy? And what's a detante? Plus, none of the sports questions are even about basketball, so he always felt like the odd man out when we played.
With this new game, we can all feel like dunderheads. "What language did Jodie Foster use to deliver her high school valedictory address?" Since none of us was there, about the only way any of us could answer this is with a wild guess. This is truly trivial information.
I have to recommend a book — relax, it's not going to be another long, dry history book about the surgeon who perfected bowel resection. It's Humongous Zits, a collection of the daily newspaper cartoon strip. If you have a teenaged boy, or know any teenaged boys, this comic strip would go a long way to clear up any misunderstandings you might have. It's also hilarious.
I don't have a lot to write about. Today was the most pedestrian of days.
When I glanced out the window this morning as I chewed a mouthful of Life cereal, I noticed that the trees along the road outside had all blossomed bright pink. Our road is flanked by cherry trees. Yesterday, they were all just barely hinting that they were thinking about going into full bloom, and apparently they all got together last night and decided that today was going to be the day. If the sun had been out, it would have been quite an appearance. Even with an overcast sky, it was a sight to warm the cockles of anybody's heart.
By coincidence, I got a photo from Georgetown in my e-mail this morning that showed the trees covered in cherry blossoms there, too.
At work, I did the usual. Had a lot of my busywork cleared up before lunch. Back at the ranch, Barb shared some of her tofu with me. I'd never be able to overstate how much I look forward to meals at home.
I sat in on a meeting in the afternoon. One of the PowerPoint slides read, "Personnel Is Our Business." Oh, is they?
In the evening, I cracked open a new book that arrived in the mail just today, sort of an early birthday present I gave myself. Books always feel like that.
Leftover turkey for dinner, quickly tapped out some drivel, and as soon as I post it, I'm going to tickle Tim 'til he pees. Ta.
I rode the route bus into work this morning so that Barb could have the car to run a few errands. There are just two bus routes on Misawa air base, and they're exactly the same, except that one runs clockwise around the base, and the other runs counter-clockwise, so you've got two chances each hour to catch the bus.
To get to work in the morning, I catch a bus that runs along the road right behind our residence. I had to stand in the rain for about five minutes this morning, and Oh Happy Day! they didn't send the blue goose. They have some brand-new Japanese-built busses with comfortable seats and an air-cushioned ride. The blue goose is your classic school bus with bench seats and a ride like a cow.
It was supposed to rain all day long, and first thing this morning the clouds looked pretty nasty, but they cleared up later on, and it never rained again. But the wind came up. We had another brown-out today. To my mind, these are worse than the earthquakes. When the wind kicks all that dust up, I can hardly stand to keep my eyes open.
Wow, this is so uninteresting. I can't believe I'm writing about the weather again. I had something in mind to write about, but it's completely gone now and I can't think of something else.
I'm reading three books right now. Two of them are pretty good, and one of them is so awful that I can't help but keep reading it, so I'm dividing my time as evenly as I can between them. I just got to a really interesting chapter in Founding Brothers, though, so I've spent most of today reading about how the republic, founded on the principle that all men are created equal, dealt with the paradox of slavery — not just within its borders, but written into its constitution. Not very well, it turns out. But you probably already knew that.
I stood in so many lines today, I felt like I was back in boot camp.
We had wind today that blew so hard anything not tied down started migrating to the Land of Oz. Trash cans, packing boxes, and bags full of refuse were rolling across the landscape and fetching up against buildings. I couldn't get into work while they cleaned up some of that, so I cooled my heels in a line outside the door with a bunch of others. That took about fifteen minutes.
Later in the morning, I had to pay road tax. Today is M through R day, which is my day, because I'm an O. And there must be a lot of O's on base, because the waiting line snaked out of the room and down the hall to the snack bar, where a huge backlog was building up. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to work my way up to the front of the line, and just as I got there, about half of the Japanese road tax guys got up and went to lunch. I waited a long time to get there, but I felt sorriest for the hundred or so folks waiting in line behind me.
When I got back to work, blowing trash had shut up the doors again. Another wait, and an especially long one, made lots of fun out in the open where the wind could blow grit in our eyes. Wheeee!
You know karaoke? One of the guys I work with does "movieoke," but just for one movie, that I know of. We were watching a scene from a Star Trek movie this afternoon, and he did every line, and loved it. Absolutely relished every word. Then the guys in lab coats bundled him up and took him back to his room. It's sad when break time ends.
Tim's nomination to the Edgren chapter of the Junior National Honor Society has been accepted. The induction ceremony is on May tenth; proud parents will post plenty of pictures.
Vacation! Not just Vacation! but Vacation In Tokyo!
Barb was set to received her bachelor's degree at the commencement ceremonies in Tokyo on Saturday, so I took some time off to make sure I could be there to watch her cross the stage and get her sheepskin. And, because she's been working so hard, and we haven't taken any time off together for quite a while, I put leave in for five days, we pulled Tim out of school, and we made a family vacation out of it.
On the agenda: Ride the bullet train down on Thursday morning, spend the afternoon in Ueno Park at the Science Museum; Tokyo Disneyland all day Friday; commencement on Saturday; check out the Edo-Tokyo Museum on Sunday; and ride the bullet train back on Monday.
The Shinkansen (bullet train) station in Hachinohe opened just last December, and I wanted to ride one before we left Japan. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. I don't know which makes me grumpier, commercial airline travel, or driving a car down the freeway for more than ten hours, but I didn't want to do either on this trip, so the bullet seemed like the obvious choice.
We got up at five on Thursday so that we could catch the first train out of Misawa to Hachinohe. My leave started at midnight, and we didn't want to waste any of it. The local train got us into Hachinohe in about fifteen minutes, and the bullet train left shortly after.
These guys don't goof around. When they say the train leaves at six-oh-seven, or whatever, it doesn't leave at six-oh-five, or six-oh-eight, it leaves exactly when the big hand clicks over to seven minutes after the hour. If that's your train, and you're at the gate, or running up the platform, waving your arms, or anywhere but on that train ... oh, well.
I've heard lots of people say that the bullet train doesn't feel like it's going very fast, but I've been on slow trains, and I've been on fast trains. The Japanese Shinkansen is a train that goes VOOM. It's not a choo-choo; there's no quaint clickety-clack as it rolls through the countryside. The bullet hustles along the track to a throbbing beat so strong, you wouldn't be surprised if somebody told you it was driven by nuclear power.
The trip from Hachinohe to Tokyo, 630 kilometers, takes just three hours. That's an average speed of 210 km/h (about 120 mph for those of you stuck in the Stateside time-warp), so the driver must have sprinted to the train's max speed of 275 km/h every so often, to make up for the stops.
Between Hachinohe and Morioka, the train is in tunnels most of the way, so you don't get to see much out the windows until you're past Morioka, and the train makes local stops between Hach and Sendai, to pick up businessmen headed into Tokyo. How'd you like to commute 600 km to work?
From Tokyo station, we took the subway to Hiroo station and hoofed the last few blocks to the New Sanno. Wheels on luggage are a mixed blessing when it comes to this part of the trip. On the one hand, no way could I have schlepped the garment bag four blocks from Hiroo to the New Sanno. On the other hand, the bag kept clipping my heels the whole way. Nothing's ever good enough, is it?
Our room was ready, so we checked in, dumped our bags, freshened up, and headed right back down to Hiroo subway station to zip over to the Science Museum. Today's featured exhibit was props, models, and storyboards from the Star Wars films. I wanted to get my picture taken beside the original Darth Vader.
No pictures allowed. Bummer.
But I got to drool over one of the original six-foot models of an Imperial Star Destroyer. Oooogah!
And we did get pictures of ourselves at the Science Museum's exploratorium, where we could peer into mirrors that made us dizzy, and spin around on a chair until we were ready to hurl. Tim loves the spinning chair. Science inspires another young mind.
The Science Museum was in the middle of Ueno Park, a gorgeous and popular park in ... well, I was going to say in the busy heart of the city, but the busy heart of the city covers just about all the level ground around the bay. It's huge. But you could almost forget that in the park. There were fountains, flowerbeds, shrines and monuments all hidden away so that it would take you days to see everything if you went looking ... but it would really take you weeks, because the park is so quiet that it lulls you into wandering aimlessly. There's no hurrying through Ueno Park.
We met a man at the fountain in the center of the park who chatted us up. He saw me snapping pictures and offered to take a picture of the three of us in front of the fountain. It turned out that what he wanted was for us to take his picture, which we happily did. As he chatted with Barb, they slipped between Japanese and English, until the man decided that it wasn't worth the pain. "You don't speak Japanese very well," he told her, the only Japanese person I've ever heard say such a thing.
"Barb Okonski, you've just won your bachelor's degree, what're you going to do?"
This was Barb's third trip to Tokyo Disneyland. I haven't asked her, but I think she's been here more times than she's been to either one of the Disney parks back in the States.
If you've been to a Disney theme park, then you've had pretty much the same day we had; if you haven't been to a Disney theme park, but you've been to a Six Flags or some other thrill park, just imagine it with Mickey and Goofy and Buzz Lightyear.
This was my first trip to Tokyo Disneyland, and it was a little surreal. I've been to Disney World in Orlando, back when I was a teenager, and this Disneyland looked pretty much like that. Actually, it looked almost exactly like that, which is what made it surreal. It was almost like being back in the States for a day, except that all the visitors and all the service personnel were Japanese.
It would be pretty hard to make anybody understand what made this so disorienting, unless I was describing the feeling to somebody who'd been to Japan. One of the most confounding experiences you can have in Japan is trying to read anything at all. There are often signs in English and Japanese, but it seems that, whenever I need that one crucial sign to help me out, I'm drowning in a sea of kanji.
At Disneyland, everything's in English. The street signs, the store signs, the signs on the bathrooms and waste paper bins. I read each and every dumb cartoon sign, just for the joy of it.
The service personnel were wonderful. Most of them spoke some English, and, like the Japanese people almost everywhere, they were helpful to a fault. But it's still kind of weird to pass by the Enchanted Castle and watch Japanese dressed in medieval page boy's outfits pop into the street to announce, "Irrashai! Irrashai!" (Come on in!)
We took a tour of the Enchanted Castle, by the way. It was a guided spook house show, entirely in Japanese. That was different.
When we got back to the hotel, we went to the pool. Of course.
Saturday was Commencement day! (And not yesterday. Sorry if there was any confusion.)
Here's what we did before anything else: We slept in. We're on vacation, you know? It's been so long since we've taken some time off together, and Barb's been working so hard and so single-mindedly on finishing her school work, that we were in super relaxation mode, so just cut us a break. It was time for some R&R.
We slept in to nine o'clock. Maybe that doesn't sound like "slept in" to you, but we usually wake up at six, because of work or cats running across the bed or kids getting up for school. Nine is a special treat for Barb and me. We get them any way we can.
Barb had an appointment to get her hair done after breakfast, and after that, she had to spend the afternoon rehearsing for commencement. She was stuck in rehearsal until the actual ceremony, which started at four, so what it came down to was that she was busy all day, which left Tim and I free to do whatever we wanted.
Tim wanted to crash out in his room and watch television. That's his idea of a vacation. No amount of wheedling would change his mind, so I dumped his flabby butt and took off on my own.
Whenever we go anywhere in Tokyo, we take the subway from Hiroo station, just a few blocks from the hotel. I knew there was a park just around the corner, barely out of sight, but I'd never been within spitting distance. This was the perfect opportunity to check it out. If it was no fun, I could just jump on the subway and go somewhere else.
It turned out to be a great way to spend the morning.
It was some kind of botanical garden. Every plant in the lush undergrowth and every tree had a plaque, and paths crisscrossed every way through them. A river that you ordinarily never would have seen in the middle of the city ran through one side of the park and ended at a pool where old men gathered to drop in their fishing lines and sit in the sun for a couple hours. At the other end of the park, the Tokyo Metropolitan Library sat beside one of the largest gingko trees I've ever seen.
Hundreds of people came and went strolling through the park, kids ran yelling and laughing through the undergrowth, and beside the pool, the fishermen tossed minnows to the egret stalking the shallow water along the bank.
I spent about an hour and a half there, then went strolling up a market street on the other side of Hiroo station. I headed back to the room about one o'clock to answer some e-mail and post a couple picture pages on the web for the folks back home.
Barb warned me to be at the ballroom at three-thirty to be seated, and we were, but commencement didn't start until slightly after four, and a whole bevy of Very Important People, including the Japanese Minster of Defense, got up to tell us all sorts of wise things, so Barb didn't get to make her walk across the stage until almost five-thirty. She was beautiful. We were supposed to hold our applause, but I couldn't help calling out, "You go, Barb!" when they announced she was graduating magna cum laude. That's my girl.
There was a buffet dinner at six, and we stayed long enough to fill our bellies before rushing back to our rooms to change into our swimming suits. The pool closes at nine, don'tcha know. We weren't going to miss out.
By Sunday, we had a routine down: Wake at about eight o'clock, scarf down a big buffet breakfast to hold us through the day, gather our packs and head out into the city. Our destination today: the Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architectural Museum, a collection of houses and buildings from the 200-year long Edo period.
You might have the sneaky feeling that I'm the one who planned the trip to this museum. Well, I wasn't at all sneaky about it. When we were brainstorming to come up with places to visit, I threw this one out there on our last trip to Tokyo, and I threw it out there again this time. Nobody came up with anything else. We sort of went there by default.
Like the National Science Museum, this museum was in a park, Kanagei park, which, it turns out, is a freaking long train ride from downtown Tokyo. There was just one glitch when our train shot past the stop we wanted, but we got off a little further along and just got on the next train going back, which did stop where we wanted it to, for no reason that we could see.
We had to either walk, or take a bus. I had rather vague directions on how to use the bus, so we hoofed it up the main street for about twenty minutes before we came to a street corner opposite a great big park. To make sure it was the right park, Barb asked a passing mom pushing a stroller if that was in fact Kanagei park.
Big mistake. Most Japanese we've run into will actually take us to the place we want to go if we stop them and ask for directions. It happend to us before. When we were looking for the Tokogawa museum, we knew we were in the right neighborhood, but weren't sure where to turn, so we stopped an older couple and asked, pointing at our map. They took the map, talked it over for a bit, then motioned for us to follow them, and led us a couple blocks down the street and around a corner to the museum. There must be a way to ask for just directions without obligating a person to take you personally to the spot, but we haven't figured it out yet.
Mom turned around and started to lead us to the park, but Barb interrupted her and asked, "Is it that one right there?" and pointed at the park across the street. Mom said yes, just go straight down the street and turn right. We thanked her, and easily found the entrance ourselves.
Kanagei park was the kind of place you go to play softball or throw a frisbee to your spaniel, with broad, open lawns under tall blade trees and spreading gingkos. The museum is about in the middle on the north side of the park, and the entrance is easy to find. I could have happily spent a couple days wandering in and out of the traditional Japanese manors and avant garde bungalows, but the few hours we took there were just fine.
They have a set of commercial buildings set up along a street to represent a business district. The first one was a candy store, where volunteers called us inside, "Irrashai! Irrashai!" The older man, playing the part of a merchant, peppered us with English. "Pick any candy," he said, pointing at the boxes of twenty-yen candy. "Twenty dollars."
He had quite a bit of fun with Tim. "Kawai," the old man called him, "handsome boy. Like the catcher for the New York Mets. Mike Piazza. Very handsome. Your son?" I assured him that Tim was my son. "I don't believe it!" he said theatrically. I'm not sure he meant it quite the way he said it. Then again, maybe he did.
The volunteer at the gate asked us which building we liked best. I told him I thought the bath house was about the most interesting building along the street, and the old Japanese mansions were gorgeous, but the place I liked most of all was a small, relatively modern bungalow built in 1925. That's it in the photo above. He asked me if I wanted to take it with me. If he'd been serious, I would've strapped it to my back and carried it all the way back to the States. Barb told me later that she thought the guy was disappointed that I liked a Western house best, but even though its outward appearance was obviously influenced by Western design, I felt the way the rooms inside were arranged around the entrance and living room was distinctly Japanese.
I found a pamphlet in the museum book shop with photos of each building and a short explanation, all in Japanese. I made the mistake of asking the cashier if they sold the same book in English, and she was almost immediately overcome by grief when she had to tell me that no, they didn't have an English translation. For a moment, I thought she might offer to personally translater it for me right then, but I thanked her profusely for the Japanese booklet, quickly paid, and took it away before I asked any more questions.
That night, we had dinner at Kikuyen, the Japanese restaurant in the New Sanno. Stuffed ourselves silly on seafood. And then, of course, we went to soak in the pool.
We planned our trip home with great care: get up at eight, breakfast buffet, then get in as much pool time as possible before we checked out at ten o'clock.
Turns out you can never get enough pool time on the last day of your vacation. But everything else worked out smoothly. We got on the noon bullet train out of Tokyo station and were back home on Misawa air base by four-thirty. My, but the cats were so glad to see us.
I have a little confession to make: I drove to PT today. In fact, I usually drive to PT. I used to sneer at guys who drove to PT, especially the guy who lived less than a block away from the gym. I live about three blocks from the gym, but I'd still sneer at me, if I was like me when I was a few years younger. Now, I don't pause for a moment. I get into my workout clothes, sprint up the stairs to the parking spot, jump into the car, and vrooooom off to the gym. Not a smidge of guilt. People change in big ways, a little at a time.
Sorry it's such a short drivel today, but I've been writing up the family trip to Tokyo, five days worth of drivel, a daunting project, but fun. You can read it by jumping to the index and looking up April 22nd through April 26th.
Well, they've gone and done it — they've turned the heat off. The housing office uses a foolproof formula to determine when in the spring they will turn the heat off in the residences. When we have three consecutive days of sixty-degree temps, followed immediately by three full weeks of forty-degree weather and miserably drenching rain, they'll turn the heat off right at the start of the rainy days. Then we have to dress up in layers under our rain gear.
It's nearly May, and I could see my breath as I walked from the bus stop to work this morning. Lucky for me, I have lots of flannel pajamas, and I haven't put them away for the summer yet.
After a sudden, almost ravishing bloom, the blossoms are falling off the cherry trees this week. Everthing in the neighborhood is becoming a sort of pastel pink, and it's been raining for the past three days, so the petals are stuck to everything. I've got them all over my combat boots, and they've given just about every car on base a pink polka-dot finish. It's like living in Toon Town.
Quote Of The Day: "Have you ever been so congested that you could feel it in your teeth?" One of my coworkers has had a pretty bad spring head cold for the last week or so, and he's getting pretty tired of blowing the contents of his head into a roll of toilet paper every day. I've been there, so I feel pretty sorry for him.
I have a public apology to make: In my descriptions of our trip to Tokyo last weekend, I made the mistake of referring to our vacation in Tokyo as a "family trip," when in fact one member of our family is thousands of miles away in Georgetown. My apologies, Sean. I didn't mean for a moment to say that we're a family even without you, just that more than two of us went on a trip together. Paybacks are a pain, you know. I'm eager to hear what you call it when your wife and kids go on vacation without your mom & me.
Our cats are so spoiled. Barb gushes over the kitten, and Tim carries the big, old guy around like it's his favorite dolly, petting and cooing over him. His name is Bonkers, so Tim sounds sort of deranged some times. "Oooooo, Bonkers Bonkers Bonkers," he'll purr as he cradles the old boy in his arms and scratches his chin, and Bonkers will just eat it up. It must be great to be a house cat.
It's the end of a long day at work, the kind of day when I just want to curl up with a 128-ounce bottle of beer and gradually slide off the edge of my chair into a puddle of my own drool. I don't have that much beer, though, so I'll just sit here and drivel instead.
Barb & I went to our favorite noodle shop for a big bowl of ramen and the usual plate of gyoza. She likes the cheese gyoza; I favor the cabbage & garlic. And let me tell you, when you eat ten gyoza stuffed with cabbage and garlic for dinner, the whole world knows where you are for the next twenty-four hours. If the smell doesn't give you away, the noise always does. Cabbage and garlic. What kind of sociopathic gastronome thought that one up?
I saved a few for lunch. I think I'll share them with my coworkers. I've waited long enough to be polite.
There's got to be a theoretical limit to how much toothpaste is in the tube. The one we've got in the bathroom right now is flat as a Christmas ribbon, and has been for at least three days now, but I can still magically get toothpaste out of it. It's starting to scare me a little. Every time I flip the cap open, I think, This is stupid, there can't possibly be any more toothpaste in here, because I had to squeeze pretty hard last time, and I know Barb's been brushing her teeth, too, or at least I hope she has. And I get more out. I have to. We don't have another tube in the house, except for that bubblegum-flavored gel crap that Tim uses, and I'd rather scrub my teeth with Bon-Ami and a wad of tinfoil than have that taste in my mouth all day long.
I was "strongly encouraged" to show up for the base readiness run this morning. That means I had to go, but for some reason, today's military officers don't want to tell us we have to go, they "strongly encourage" us.
If I've run in a military formation in the last ten years, I can't remember it. In fact, I think the last time I ran in formation was during basic training. That was twenty years, two months ago. Before that, the only formation I was in was a marching band. For whatever reason, during the readiness run this morning I kept thinking of my marching band days instead of my basic training bad dreams.
I was always in the front row in marching band, because I played the trombone. I felt pretty scared about that at first, but when the guy next to me pointed out that we followed the baton-twirling drum majorettes, I realized that nobody would be paying any attention at all to little old me.
Our band director believed in leading the parade with trombones. They look cool, they sound cool, and we played them really loud. That was my musical forte, playing really loud. I was never anything better than an average trombone player. Sitting still, I could almost sound pretty good, but marching down a street on a hot day wearing a black, all-wool band uniform and a big, black, fake bearskin helmet, about the best I could do was make my bone go BLATTT! really loud. That seemed to satisfy our director. And I could march in a straight line.
Marching in a straight line in a formation is actually a lot harder than it sounds. Most people can't do it. Most people can't even march in step with the music and each other, but it's one of those mindless, automatic things I picked up and could do pretty well. And I liked it. I marched for miles at a time, blatting away on my horn and dripping sweat, and I couldn't wait to do it again.
I still like it. I even miss it, but I could tell that most other people in the formation this morning didn't have the fond memories of marching that I had. Maybe baton-twirling drum majorettes would help.