This week’s weather is awesome! It has been in the mid-eighties since Sunday, with lows in the upper 50’s at night. I have just realized that Autumn is my favorite season here in Texas. In Los Angeles, I like Summer best (Dodger Stadium at dusk are nice), and when I lived in Japan, I liked Autumn.
[graphic via Yahoo! Weather]
Several years ago I used to frequent some chat rooms using IRC (I used the program mIRC) on the Undernet. I would normally just go to the #japan chatroom, which was pretty fun. I met a few good people there, and they gave me some tips to help me when I moved to Japan. After I moved there, I stopped using IRC, mainly because we didn’t have unlimited Internet access. I kind of forgot about IRC.
But recently, I downloaded a demo version for my Pocket PC called Pocket IRC, and I am back into it. It is kind of hard to type on the Pocket PC, but manageable. I joined the #japan group again, and I am surprised to see a few names I recognize. If you are ever on there and see someone named “takoyaki”, that is probably me! I usually am online about 9-10pm while Bay is falling asleep.
Some friends of ours are opening up a new Japanese restaurant soon. Tonight they opened it up for us to celebrate a couple birthdays. The beef was so awesome. They will serve Kobe beef, and import sashimi from Japan. It was amazing! The ventilation system was not installed yet, so the whole restaurant was filled with smoke, but that didn’t matter too much because the food was delicious!!! I hope their restaurant does well. It is very close to our house, in fact we could drive there in about 10 minutes.
After reading about “Lost in Translation” on a lot of the Japan blogs, I decided to go see it. Boy, was I glad I did! It is a fantastic movie. The scenes of Tokyo (and Kyoto) are great. I think the film really captures the feel and energy of the city. I love the scenes at the game center and karaoke box. Totally real. The music is also wonderful, and the acting is superb! For me, the story was actually secondary to the cool scenes of Tokyo. The part when she is staring outside the hotel window down on the city reminded me of when I landed in Tokyo and looked out my hotel window at the Keio Plaza Hotel. I even spied a Postal Cub (Supercub variant) for a couple seconds while Bob was riding in a taxi. And when they went to the shabu-shabu restaurant, it made me want to go to Moomoo Paradise (all you can eat shabu-shabu/sukiyaki) in Shinjuku. Anyways, a great movie, I recommend it to everyone, but especially to those who love Japan.
The parking garage at my work.
[via Sahala]
[via Chris, via FARK]
I have the song Young Turks playing on my Pocket PC. I am not a big Rod Stewart fan, but for some reason really I like this song. The song tells a story about a young couple who leave home to find their lives. Great lyrics:
Billy left his home with a dollar in his pocket and a head full of dreams.
He said somehow, some way, it’s gotta get better than this.
Patti packed her bags, left a note for her momma, she was just seventeen,
there were tears in her eyes when she kissed her little sister goodbye.
There is a dead armadillo on the side of the highway that I take to work. It died a couple weeks ago. I have the priviledge of watching it decompose on a daily basis. Since I usually pass by the carcass at 70mph, I cannot get any pictures of it. As a side note: armadillos are freaky-looking.
