While I was out on the three-mile trail they make us run for our weekly PT, I tried to pass the time by making a mental list of all the good things about running:
First Good Thing: It'll end in about fifteen minutes. You know the saying, "Work is like banging your head against the wall, because it feels so good when you stop?" That's how I feel about PT. People say I'll like running when the "runner's high" kicks in. I've been running since 1979 and this damned "runner's high" thing still hasn't kicked in for me.
Second Good Thing: I have to do it only once a week. I technically have to PT three times a week, but the other two times I can do what I want. Riding my bike counts. Walking a couple miles does, too.
Third Good Thing: It's outdoors. After working inside windowless buildings for twenty years, I've grown to appreciate that.
Fourth Good Thing: It's better than the alternative, such as *shudder* circuit training. Running on a treadmill is only slightly worse. If I've got an interesting television show to watch, the treadmill is almost as good as running outdoors. If I've got to watch somebody else's really awful choice for a television show, it's so much worse that I'd rather bang my head against the wall.
Fifth Good Thing: There is no fifth good thing. Psyche!
No freakin' movie tonight! The Bong Theater — isn't that name great? — shows movies every night, and in a month they show one, maybe two movies I really want to see. Tonight Barb and I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and when we got there, they told us the projector was broken. Swell. Looks like we'll have to wait until that one comes out on DVD, too, coz they're not scheduled to show it again this month.
On the subject of movies, if you've got any interest at all in historical or biographical documentaries, go rent The Fog Of War, an excellent interview of Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Let's see, what else? I also picked up a 3-disk collection of Johnny Carson highlights that made me laugh until I cried. I'd forgotted how much I loved watching Carson, and how much I miss classic stand-up comedy. There was a short clip of Flip Wilson, no more than sixty seconds, that just about made me pee my pants. George Carlin made an appearance from about 1965, wearing a tie and a coat — that alone was worth what I paid for it. And Steve Martin did a bit called "The Great Flydini" that I'd never seen before; I had to use half a box of Kleenex to mop up the tears after that one.
Watching Carson made me wonder if there wasn't any Carol Burnett available. I've searched every way I can think of, but I can't find anything on the web. Battlestar Galactica is available as a boxed set, but you can't get Carol Burnett? What's wrong with our society these days?
Star Wars is another case in point: You can't buy a copy of Star Wars that isn't all tricked out with extra scenes and enhanced special effects. There's nothing wrong with the extras, but I want to watch it the way I saw it in the theater the first time. But no. Can't. Isn't allowed. I guess the terrorists have won.
Okay, I got over the movie rant. I'm okay now. Besides, the good people at The Bong theater were kind enough to show Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind tonight, to make up for last night, and Barb and I could change our plans to go see it. So I'm feeling much better.
I biked to work today. It was the perfect morning for it, clear and cool with a slight breeze off the lake, not too many bugs, and very little traffic when I rode out. Riding back, though, was a sweaty horror, with lots of bugs and traffic. I'll have to take shorts and a t-shirt to change into before I try that again.
Quote of the day: "I'm all over it like ugly on Lou Ferrigno.*" Sorry, Lou, I had to laugh; first time I heard that one.
There was a story in the news today that explained how candidates can lie and get away with it. The argument goes that it's a question of basic first amendment rights: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Okay, I can follow that so far.
The story went on to point out that the media can refuse to run an advertisement, but only if they refuse all advertisements for candidates running for a particular office. Fair's fair; I can follow that, too.
The media can refuse to run a particular advertisement, but only on technical grounds, such as if it's too long, or obscene. I understand technicalities, although I don't always agree with them. Obscenity rulings, for instance.
The news story went on to give several examples of advertisements protected by freedom of speech, one of which was for a self-proclaimed "white racist"** that exclaimed the "main reason why niggers want integration is because niggers want our white women." Funny how that's not considered obscene. I guess if it's obscene, and it's political as well, then it's protected.
*Please tell me you remember Lou Ferrigno, the green alter-ego of Bill Bixby in the 70's television series The Incredible Hulk.
**JB Stoner, who ran for US Senate in 1972 on the National Rights Party ticket, in case you want to look up the particulars.
Computers can be so cool ... WHEN THEY WORK! I just spent the afternoon reloading the operating system on Barb's computer. Holy stinking crap, is that a dirty job! I started at three o'clock in the afternoon, and didn't get all the bells and whistles working until about nine o'clock that evening. And I was whipped!
Tim was coincidentally having a little fight with his computer, too. He spent all afternoon downloading his favorite video game, and when he installed it, it corrupted his disk. I sat on one side of the room, swearing and punching the keyboard, and he sat on the opposite side, swearing and punching the keyboard. And both of us eventually threw up our hands and started all over again.
Quote of the Day came from Tim: "Weren't computers supposed to make life easier?" Yes, Tim, back in the 1960's, Disney imagined a vision of the future in which computers did all the drudgery while we relaxed on the patio with a fruity drink. These days, though, Computer Utopia is more like a scary nuthouse in shades of ice blue and battleship gray where we serve our masters, the computers.
We spent D-Day, appropriately enough, in a boat on Lake Okawara. The local beach rents paddle boats, tiny plastic four-seaters, two facing forward, to to the rear. Tim loves them. We got one for an hour and drifted around near the beach.
The rest of the day was catch-up for me; catch-up writing, catch-up reading, short breaks to eat and float around on a paddle boat. It was a very low-impact day. I'm practicing to become a house cat.
Had a terrible dream last night. Woke myself up blubbering my eyes out. I hardly ever recall any of my dreams any more, and all I could remember of that one was the ending. It didn't many any sense at all, like most dreams: A chicken, who was a girl, was showing me photos of about fifty kids. I was a monk, bald head, robes and all. She said they were all her children. I said they were my students. That's when I burst into tears and woke up.
It seems so colossally unlikely that this dream means anything, but I keep wondering anyway. Why a chicken? She was a geisha chicken, by the way, in a kimono, with the white makeup and shaved eyebrows, the whole nine yards. Sorry I left that out.
Pretty typical day today. Gave out three-day passes to everybody whose last names ended in "Z." Answered my e-mail; had to tell the President "No, thanks." The NCOIC of Supply asked for an extra hour for lunch; I told him to take the rest of the day. Then I chased my secretary around the desk. No, just kidding, I would never do that. His girlfriend is too insanely jealous; I wouldn't survive until morning.
My head was so congested last night that I was having trouble sleeping. No, don't worry, no dreams about chickens. I would drift off to sleep, then wake up some time later gasping for air. So I'd go blow my nose, drift off to sleep, wake up gasping, blow, drift, gasp ...
I'd spent all night going through this wonderfully restful routine when, round about five o'clock in the morning, just as I was beginning to doze off again, Barb reached over and took a poke at my arm. What the hell? I looked around to see if maybe somebody else hadn't jabbed me. Nope, nobody else in the room. I sat up to ask her what the big idea was, but she was already snoozing. I briefly toyed with the thought of giving her a shove, then rolling over and pretending to sleep, when I realized: I must've been snoring. That must be how she stops me.
Well, there was just one way to play this one — I slid way over to her side of the bed, wadded both my pillows under my head so my neck was all choked up, and tried to drift off to sleep, hoping to saw some seriously loud Z's. And the plan might have worked, too, but just then the chicken went off.
Barb bought me a boxed set of the Sean Connery as James Bond movies. I bought her a car. Kinda seems like she got ripped off, doesn't it?
The movies were in the bargain bin at the thrift shop, ten VHS tapes for something like five bucks. Barb knows how much I like the old Bond movies, so she nabbed them almost out of reflex. I watched Dr. No tonight, and I still think it's the best James Bond movie ever. The most high-tech thing about him back then was that he carried a gun.
Barb's car is a mid-sized Toyota sedan, so she'll have a set of wheels to get around, now that she's out of school and I'm at work every day. And I really like the CD player, but Tim thinks the power windows are just the coolest thing he's ever seen. It's pretty easy to dazzle Okonski boys with bells and whistles.
Today's been declared our national day of mourning, so we've got the day off from work. What a nice idea. You die, and all the government workers — your former employees — get a day off to sit in the yard, grill steaks, drink beer, and talk about how much they miss you. I hope I go that way.
Strangely enough, I went to work anyway. When you retire from the military, you customary receive an American flag, and it's usually been flown over the national capitol, or some other place you feel is significant. A friend of mine is retiring in August and, as it happens, he requested that it be flown here at Misawa, among other places. When I found out, I asked if I might be allowed to be a part of the flag detail, and that's why I went to work this morning.
By the time I got back, Barb was making the kitchen all smelly. She's trying a kitchen experiment today, canning basil jelly, which sounds strangely tasty, like something I'd want to have with afternoon tea. Sean was just leaving for work. He got a job as a cashier at the exchange, putting away a little money before he leaves for the States in July. And Tim downloaded yet another video game that lets him program how the robots attack their victims. That's a little scary.
Today was the day I didn't have to set my alarm clock. I usually get at least one of those a week, sometimes two, but I have to be careful or I'll get spoiled.
This weekend, the base hosted American Day, which is a sort of festival just outside the main gate. Various organizations set up tents where they sell American food, sometimes nicknacks and toys, and a big stage is set up to one side where a band can play pop music really, really loud. I got to sell sodas at a booth right next to the stage. Yay.
Barb came out at about two o'clock, when I was supposed to take off, but when you volunteer to work at a booth, you're there for pretty much the rest of the day, aren't you? So she wandered around the booths at American day on her own while I sold about a zillion ice-cold sodas and begged for pocket change. It was a hot, sunny day, so everybody wanted one Coke, and they all wanted to pay with the equivalent of a ten-dollar bill. We could have easily charged the thirsty partygoers two bucks a can, and I betcha we still would've sold out. Instead we were letting them go for seventy cents a can, which is why I kept running out of change. A can of soda in Japan usually sells for a buck ten at vending machines.
Tim just tried to sneak up on me so he could bash me over the head with a pillow. Lucky for me, Tim's never any quieter than a cement mixer, so I can easily spot him and head him off, no matter where he's at. Then I get to disarm him, and use his own weapons against him. Sometimes I think that's what he originally had in mind anyway. It's like he's not even trying. Or maybe he's trying, but I'm confused about what he's trying for.
I'm the vehicle control officer, so you'd naturally think I'm supposed to be in control of the vehicles, right? The way it usually works out, though, taking care of the vehicles is so routine that it seems they take care of themselves, and I pretty much let them.
Which is why, when sergeant Blert (not her real name – D'OH!) ran into me in the hallway this morning and asked to use the van, "because there's nobody else on the schedule today," I said sure, because I assumed she'd actually checked the schedule. When I went back to my office, the first thing that caught my eye was somebody's name marked in on the schedule reserving the van today.
No time for morning munchies then. Had to shift into high-speed crisis management fast.
Grabbed my hat and headed for the parking lot. As I left the building, I could see her getting into the van — everything is timing at this point. I broke into a trot as soon as I passed through the turnstiles, and started running when I saw the backup lights come on. I was shouting and waving as she pulled away — the van was almost close enough to touch — but she never looked back.
Curses! Lots of them!
Tried to call her. Cel phone wasn't turned on. Tried to call the hotel she was going to and talk to the people she was picking up there, but they didn't know who I was talking about. Time was running out fast. Jumped in my car and headed for main base.
First thing in the morning, traffic is very light on base, but when you're trying to get back to main base during mid-morning and you're in a big hurry, every slow-moving dump truck and fuel truck is v e r y s l o w l y weaving, start-and-stop, through a maze of road construction crews that have deployed along all the main roads. It's uncanny.
Somehow, I not only made it to the hotel in time, but I also managed to find her in the crowded parking lot. Even though the Fates like to feed my anxiety attacks, they sometimes cut me a break.
Here's an idea: How about any television program that reports a current event — for instance, a massacre, or the destruction of another midwestern town by a tornado — by going to a live feed and asking some poor citizen how they feel — how about we don't call that "news" any more? And any show that features some loudmouth who "reports" current events by referring to people in news reels as pinheads or morons, or by "interviewing" somebody by shouting insults at them — how about we don't call that "news," either? 90% of all the "news" we get over here comes from Fox "News" Network and Cable "News" Network, and, except for The News Hour every morning at eleven, I've never seen such a boorish crowd of childish whiners.
While I'm on a rant about this, news shows with more than one the news reader are okay, so long as they don't emote all over each other to show how happy or sad they feel about the stories, or natter with the weather forecaster about how freakin' hot it is, or introduce the sports by turning to the sportscaster and bleating, "How about those Lakers, huh?" I don't care how the anchorman feels about a story, and I sure don't want him trying to make me feel one way or another by going from jolly, happy anchor to serious, sad anchor with a deeper voice and furrowed brow.
Finally, I wonder if newscasters could possibly revolt against the sloppy, lazy practice of trying to punch up a sentence by starting with "Well,..." or "Now,..." I don't know who dreamed that one up, but he ought to be stabbed through the vocal chords with his own blue pen. Even Dan Rather's been doing it for a while now, and I'm pretty sure he didn't pick it up at journalism school
Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.
I've been taking a lot of crazy photos lately of the junk I see around main base when I go for morning walks — no national secrets here, I'm afraid, just the weirdness that I see around me whereever I go. It's been a while since I uploaded any of these snapshots, so I spent yesterday night organizing photos, writing web pages, and uploading them to the web. You can see the odd snapshots I've added to the morning walks page, and also check out a whole new section of photos of the trees on Misawa air base. Hope you like them.
It's pretty easy to figure out how dumb people can be by reading the warning stickers on appliances. Hair driers have stickers on them that warn you, DO NOT USE IN SHOWER, because some feeb once shocked himself silly by using his hair drier while standing barefoot in a wet shower stall. Take-away coffee cups warn you that the COFFEE IS HOT! (duh!) because another feeb scalded herself after driving through a pothole while she held the coffee between her thighs.
Today, the supply office I work in bought a bunch of fire extinguishers. Each one came in a cardboard box with a bright sticker on the side that said, "Non-Flammable Gas," a really good idea, you know, because it wouldn't make much sense to buy fire extinguishers filled with flammable gas.
But why the stickers, I have to ask? They wouldn't even be called "fire extinguishers" if they were flammable, would they? Sounds more like "flamethrowers" to me. If it said "flamethrower" on the box, I wouldn't need a sticker that told me what it was filled with. I'm pretty sure it would have to be flammable, just as a "fire extinguisher" would pretty much have to be non-flammable.
So do these stickers mean that at one time, or even right now, there are fire extinguishers for sale, maybe even installed in buildings somewhere, that are filled with flammable gas? Those would be pretty cool for burning out anthills in the back yard, but if a life-threatening fire stood between me and the only exit from the building, it would be not so cool anymore. And fire extinguisher fights in dorm hallways would become almost death-defying, especially if a smoker got caught in the crossfire.
Tim and I were channel surfing this morning before I went to work, and came across an advertisement for Nascar racing. A lot of guys (girls too, for all I know) are very serious about Nascar. They watch all the races, they have a favorite team, and they know the competition as well as they know their own families. Tim and I like watching Nascar, but we're not in it for the thrill of competition — like many people who can't be bothered to learn the complicated details, we watch it for the crashes. They're awesome. Dozens of cars run bumper to bumper at two hundred miles an hour down the track — of course there's going to be a wreck, and at that speed, it's going to be a doozy. The cars are built out of something indestructable on the inside, so that the driver almost never gets hurt, but the bodies of the cars are just fiberglass and plastic, so when they hit the wall, or another car, pieces fly everywhere, and cars spin out of control in clouds of burning tire rubber.
Nascar race circuits feature cars and trucks, just for variety, I suppose. But how about this, to make it really interesting: NASCAR TANKS!
Think about how cool that could be. A production-model M1A1 Abrahams main battle tank can wind up to sixty or seventy miles per hour when the driver opens up the turbine engine power plant; give one to a crack mechanical team, and I'll bet they could get it up to at least a hundred. Picture three or four dozen of the world's most advanced tanks, every one of them hopped up on the mechanical equivalent of a cocaine buzz, running shoulder to shoulder, nose to tailpipe as they tear up the asphalt of a Nascar track.
Then it happens: one of these thundering beasts gets a little too close and nudges another, or maybe one just gets unlucky and sheds a track at seventy miles per, and WHAM! the guy behind him drives right up his butt. They spin in two directions, taking out at least two more tanks, maybe sending one into the wall. Chunks of concrete and shattered bits of armor all over the right of way, but that doesn't slow down tanks too much. A crash might even get one to cartwheel! What a sight that would be!
I'd also kind of like to see what a tank would look like in a racy blue and red paint job, with DOMINO'S PIZZA across the front and other sponsor's stickers plastered all over the fenders.
I was at work all day — not that I worked any harder, just that I worked longer. I went to a retirement ceremony in the morning, returned to the office after lunch and stayed until the closing bell because I already did my PT for the week, then had to run straight down to the hangar where the weekend bazaar was setting up. There's one hangar which they apparently don't use to house planes any longer, because there's nearly always a bazaar, or a combat dining-in, or a high school graduation in there. The bazaars are like big flea markets, except with lots of newly-made Chinese trinkets instead of garage sale items. The vendors set up the night before, so somebody's got to stay in the hangar all night long to provide security. This weekend, the Security Hill Senior NCO Council — HUZZAH! say we all! — was there, and I was the guy who put together the schedule. Didn't have to twist a single arm, lucky for me, because I'm not very intimidating. The volunteers were all very helpful, and only one didn't show up, so I pulled the first shift tonight, then turned around and pulled a graveyard shift, which gave me plenty of time to have a good look at all the trinkets. Over and over again. I think I've seen everything at least twice, probably more like three or four times. I discovered the CD player on the graveyard shift, grabbed all the compact disks from the car, and played them all, even the ones I didn't like. I tried to name all the state flags hanging from the ceiling; didn't even come close. I paced off about thirty miles, walking around the perimeter of the hangar. It's not a big hangar, I just had a lot of time. Finally, mercifully, three o'clock rolled around, our replacements showed up shortly after that, and I went home and dove into bed. Come, sweet slumber ...
I mentioned a combat dining-in. The air force has almost no traditions — don't get me started — and the combat dining-in isn't one of them, but it's sort of related to a military tradition of rowdy drunkenness called a dining-in, which is like a frat party, except in uniform, and there's no drinking. Okay, so it's not much like a frat party at all. The combat dining-in is sort of a food fight in battle dress uniform. They've replace drinking with super-soaker squirt guns and platters of soaking wet dinner rolls, which the airmen use to pelt the officers until they're walking disaster areas. Sounds like a fine military tradition, doesn't it?
They not only held last year's high school commencement ceremony in the hangar, they did it beside a fully-armed F-16C.
Today will be Stay Inside All Day Long Day, because it's raining. We had some really beautiful weather all week long, but there's this damned typhoon a couple hundred miles out to sea that's finally got far enough north to dump rain on us, and naturally it waited until Saturday to get here. This is a classic weather pattern, isn't it? The week after next, we'll celebrate Independence Day with a four-day weekend. Care to lay odds how many days it'll rain then?
Speaking of synchronicity, the men's room at work has one of those air fresheners that's loaded with an aerosol can and goes sprits! every couple minutes. It's mounted over the urinals, and it seems to wait until I'm standing under it to go sprits! No matter how often I try to assure myself that it's a machine driven by a timer that's randomly set, I can't help feeling personally offended, as though the thing holds its metaphorical nose every time I come in. Frak! You smell like rotten socks! sprits! I could put a stop to this. I'm head of supply, so I can throw a glitch into the ordering cycle that'll leave us unfortunately without any more air freshener refills, if I were that kind of person. And maybe I am. I don't know yet.
I burnt my tongue on a slice of pizza last night. A lava-like layer of tomato sauce had hidden itself under a deceptively cool cheese topping. Man, that smarts. I had four slices anyway. After the cheese got to my gut, it started a chemical reaction that generated enough natural gas to light up the forced-air furnaces in every house in Gary, Indiana, from the beginning to the end of a very cold Midwestern winter, because I'm really, really lactose intolerant. I took a little pill to keep the effects from being especially embarrassing, but the condition never completely goes away. It's a curse, but it's also a blessing. When we have a pizza weekend, Tim can make all the fart jokes he wants, and that's important to a growing teenaged boy, so why would I want to deprive him? Besides, I love pizza.
Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono. Is that the coolest name ever, or what? He's a politician running for some government office in Indonesia, but when I read that name, the first thing I thought was that I should have named my son Susilo Bambang. I told Barb we should rename Tim right away. She said we should probably ask him first. Okay, why not? "What do you think of the name Susilo Bambang?" I asked him. His eyes lit up. "Cool!" That's my boy.
Indonesians have the best names, like Megawati Sukharnoputri. Philippino names are just as cool. Tim goes to school with a girl named Christina Macadangdang, and I worked with a guy named Tabayoyong. Everybody called him just "T" or "Tab," which is too bad, because his name is a lot of fun to say out loud.
We went out to the all-you-can-eat place for dinner tonight, and it was like a return to the good old days — Sean ate himself sick. Not, like, bazooka-barfing sick, but he was so full that he was making croaking noises every time he moved around just a little bit. We always get our money's worth when we take him to one of those places. By the time we're done, the plates are piled high on the end of the table, and the guy at the cashier's desk posts Sean's picture with the other world-champion ingesters next to the register and stares goggle-eyed as he waddles out the door.
The weather has been hot and sticky all week, hot enough and sticky enough that I can hardly stand to wear my uniform with my sleeves down. The only reason that this is worth mentioning is because the military has made rolling the sleeves up on a BDU blouse into a major project. They must be turned inside-out, rolled up, and then the cuff is flipped over to hide the uncamoflaged inside of the sleeve that's become exposed. If you've had a lot of practice doing this, you can knock the job out in about five minutes. One of the guys at work confessed to me that he'd never rolled up his sleeves the whole time he'd been in the air force, and he was a staff sergeant, so he must've been in at least four or five years. "You mean they never showed you that in basic training?" I asked him. "Well, they might have, but I probably slept through it."
I drove home from work thinking that I'd like nothing more than to peel off my uniform and slouch on the sofa in my skivvies with a cold beer in my hand, watching a couple episodes of Dead Like Me, a goofy television show I found on the New Releases rack at the video store.
Only trouble with my plan was that we had no beer at home. I could stop at the shopette and get some, but that would require going further along the perimeter road, then turning onto the main gate road, and both roads were bumper-to-bumper traffic, because everybody on base is released from work between four and five o'clock. The only way to get to the housing areas from any work place is along the perimeter road, and the only way out the main gate is right past the shopette. On my way home, I normally hit a tailback out near the flight line, and from there it takes me about five minutes to crawl the quarter-mile or so in first gear to the turnoff into the housing area. The shopette is a lot farther along.
The perfect picture I was looking for included beer, no question, but I've never been about perfection. I'm not saying I'll settle for less when better's available, but in this case what I wanted was to relax, and soon. Bumper-to-bumper traffic is not relaxing for me. On the other hand, home was just minutes away, and I remembered a bottle of sake I'd picked up earlier this week. It wasn't a soothing cold beer, but sake has its own charms. It would have to do.
I stayed up late last night, reading. Of course, "late" is a very relative term. I'm such a lightweight that "late" for me is eleven-thirty, but then I'm usually up at five or six, when the sunlight comes through the window and kicks my circadian rhythm into high gear. And "high gear" is pretty relative, too. I'm more of a Volkswagen Beetle than a Porsche roadster — even in high gear, I build up to top speed in a carefully measured way, downhill if possible, and not in an explosion of noise and fumes.
This morning I had the luxury of sleeping in until eight, because I'm on leave. We had planned to go to Tokyo, but never got to the top of the waiting list for a room at the New Sanno hotel, so we had to scotch that idea. Our emergency back-up travel plan was an overnight camping trip, but the weekend forecast called for rain, so our decision came down to staying home, or picking a place where we'd like to stay in the shelter of our tent all weekend. Gee, that's a hard one.
We planned to spend the last week in June in Tokyo, where we'd goof around a couple days before putting Sean on a plane for his return to the States. Unfortunately for us, the room reservations at the New Sanno didn't come through, so we had to fall back on Plan B: a weekend camping on the Tsugaru peninsula. Not that going to Tsugaru was an unappealing choice, just that we were hoping for Tokyo, and the weather up north ended up looking to be pretty bad. As a hedge against the weather, we called ahead to make sure we could rent a cabin; it turned out that we didn't have the least little thing to worry about as far as availability was concerned — we were the only people at the campground, except for a lone tenter who showed up the second night.
We didn't leave for Tusgaru until about ten o'clock, but that didn't put us behind schedule. The trip turned out to be quick and easy, made even more straightforward by Miss Barbara's able navigation. This important ability will become especially noteworthy later.
We didn't know what there was to see on Tsugaru. It was as far north as you can get on the Sea of Japan side of the island, but we've been further north on the island when we went to Shimokita, so that wasn't all that special. The area was known for its spectacular sunsets, but the forecast called for heavy overcast and rain the whole weekend, so the probability of a spectacular sunset was just about nil. There was a lighthouse, and hey! On the way to the lighthouse, we noticed there was a "Memorial to a Accidental Death." And just down the road from the lighthouse, there was a singing memorial, which was not the Memorial to a Accidental Death, but we never found out what it was a memorial for. The spit of rock that the lighthouse was perched on was close enough to Hokkaido that we could see the mountains over the water, even through the haze. So there was something to look at in Tsugaru, see?
The campground we stayed at was just down the road from the Tunnel Museum. What luck! We piled into the car to ride up there in the morning to see what it was all about, and not incidentally to get some coffee.
There are coin-operated machines all over Tsugaru, just as there are all over Japan, that dispense a wide variety of soda and java in cans. They're incredibly overpriced, but when you want to grab a hot can of java for a quick pick-me-up, they're like little gifts from heaven. So early in the morning, Barb went to the machine by the campground office for her morning jolt, only to find that the machine dispensed only cold cans. Not a problem; there were lots of other dispensers at the parking lot by the talking monument, or out in front of the hotel, so we swung by there on the way to the tunnel museum ... nothing hot. Okay, not nothing — there was a European blend that Barb tried out of desparation, but to judge by the look on her face, it left a lot to be desired. So we made a little game out of it; was there any machine on the Tsugaru peninsula that dispensed hot java? I won't keep you in suspense: There wasn't. Everywhere we stopped today, and everywhere we stopped the next, we never found a machine where Barb could get a hot Georgia coffee until we got on the Michinoku toll road, out of Aomori.
So we stopped in for a coffee at the cafe in the tunnel museum, instead. It was getting pretty late in the morning by that time, so we should've just had lunch, but Sean opted out of the tunnel museum visit, so we just wanted a quick coffee break before we swung by to get him for the rest of the day. I don't usually drink coffee, but I had a cup this morning, just to be sociable, and ZOW! I can't remember drinking anything that lit me up like that before. It was crack coffee. I didn't come down from the buzz until mid-afternoon.
The tunnel museum was pretty much what you would expect, if your parents ever dragged to a museum devoted to an engineering marvel such as the longest tunnel in the world, or the biggest dam, or the tallest building. I'm one of the parents that loves to go hang out for hours in museums like that; Tim's one of the kids who gets dragged. Anyway, there was a scale model of the tunnel, complete with pushbuttons and flashing lights; photos of the tunnel being dug by grime-covered miners; a cartoon mole that narrated the documentary story of the tunnel; and, of course, this was all in Japanese, so we had to sort of make up the story by looking at the pictures, a story that was pretty far out there, especially when the mole started digging.
One of the exhibits at the museum was a tiny model of the city in the middle of the peninsula where the small army of personnel lived who maintained the tunnel. The city was apparently just south of the electric windmills that we could see from just about everywhere, but couldn't get to until we did a little motoring around and found a small service road that took us straight through the middle of them. None of them were going, so it wasn't as spooky as it might have been; for some reason, windmills scare the hell out of me when those big rotors are sweeping right over my head. But the road through the windmills didn't take us to the city, or to anything that looked like a city. There were fishing villages all along the coast, but we'd seen them already. There were no signs at all of the city of hundreds of people that was supposed to be almost within arm's reach. We began to refer to it as Obscurity City, and eventually gave up looking for it.
Our search for Obscurity City left us on the Mutusu Bay side of the peninsula again, where we got on the coast road and began to drive north. We stopped at a roadside park in Minimaya, where a strikingly picturesque rock formation, the subject of song and fable, rose up over the shore. Naturally, somebody thought it would be a good idea to cover it with neon signs. Just behind the rock formation was a gateway over a long stair that led up a steep hill to a Buddhist temple, where we got an awesome view of the town and the coastline.
You know how sometimes it takes a few nights to get used to sleeping in a different place, or on a different kind of bed? We had to get used to both. The cabin was very nice, much nicer than we'd even hoped it would be, but the way to sleep in Japan is to throw a sort of thick quilt on the floor — it's not a futon, or, if it is, it's not the futon you're thinking of when I say 'futon.' It's about as thick as a thick rug, just enough to insulate you from the ground, and sleeping on it is only a little better than sleeping on bare wood. We had the same sleeping arrangements when we stayed at a cabin in Shimokita, but Barb and I piled a couple of the thin futons on top of each other to make a comfortable bed; the cabin in Tsugaru had just one thin futon for each of us. I could maybe get used to this after a while, but I'll probably never know — two nights certainly isn't enough time. After I woke up from a second fitful night's sleep Monday morning, my poor, sore body was ready for my nice, cushy bed back home.
The drive back was nearly as uneventful as the drive up, if you don't count twice we got lost. Significantly, Barb was driving, which meant that I was giving directions. I drove until we were out of the mountains, when I thought there couldn't possibly be any objection to me sitting in the passenger seat for a while. Turns out there is: I suck at navigation. After several years of hitting the road for our vacations, Barb's become pretty good at telling me where to go, but of course that implies that I've been doing the bulk of the driving, and not the navigation. I've got a defense this time: To get to Tsugaru, we used the handy directions provided by Outdoor Rec, which are very good, but only go one way. To get back, I had to read the directions backwards, and try to infer certain things, like where the Michinoku toll road started. It doesn't start, it turns out, on the Aomori expressway, a lesson which cost us about eight dollars. I forget how I got us on the other wrong turn, but nevermind. Those two glitches cost us an hour at the most, and happened one right after the other. After we sorted out which way we were supposed to go, it was a straight shot back to Misawa, with no more wrong turns.
We all drove down to Hachinohe this afternoon to tape the planetarium show, probably the most fun we've had doing that since we first started more than a year ago. They had a special show this time around. The creators of Astro Boy wrote an adventure for them and sent them an animated short, and they wanted us to read for the whole thing. This was quite a bit different from the shows we normally read for. One of the guys at the planetarium usually writes a little narrative about the constellations, throws in a couple of characters and builds a small story around them, and then we get all kinds of theatrical. They tell us we're really good at it, but really we're just a bunch of hicks from the midwest having a good time in Japan. This time, though, we were reading for a professionally-made cartoon, and we had to dub over the professional actors' voices. The director of the museum kluged together a video player and strung headphones across the recording studio so Tim, playing Astro Boy, and Sean, playing Dr. Mikazuki, could hear their characters and read their parts at the right times. It was almost as much fun as running the projector in science class.
On the way home, we stopped at our favorite noodle shop for a big bowl of noodles and some cheese rolls, Sean's last dinner in Japan before he jets out tomorrow morning.