One nice thing about living in the DC area, you have a chance to go downtown and see some of the beautiful monuments and other scenery on nice early spring days. Continue reading “Some DC springtime pictures”
Don’t know who, or how, but congratulations, you got in. Thank you for not defacing my page, I guess you did it for the lulz, not because you have anything personal against me (how could you, I don’t even know you!). I presume you left some backdoor in somewhere, since WordPress isn’t the most perfectly secure site, so you’ll probably get back in, but I’m not going to make it easy for you.
If anything does happen to this site, or anyone reading sees something they didn’t expect (or seems out of character for those who DO know me), understand that someone probably got in, in order to mess with me. I’ll be watching for the next go-around.
I’m a big fan of web comics, and one of the best I’ve read is “Errant Story” by Michael Poe. He and his wife have been doing this for ten years, he does the art and she handles the business, but they’ve been having a pretty terrible time this past 3 years. Medical emergencies, surgeries, deaths in the family, all piling on each other sometimes simultaneously. Poe’s wife (her nickname is “Impy”) posted a timeline of what they’ve been dealing with.
Amazingly, they’ve been able to keep a sense of humor in the face of their troubles, but they could use some financial help with Poe’s latest hospitalization (acute renal failure from an infection). Instead of asking for donations, which would hurt his chances of getting insurance, his wife asks that people buy things from their online store. A lot of what he created goes beyond “risque” and heads into the “scatalogical” area, but if you don’t mind that, they’re selling his comics in book form, as well as t-shirts and other goods.
I bought a copy of this print, which is a character from “Errant Story.” He’s also selling the original artwork pages (on paper with ink! of all things!) from his comic, but I can’t afford to go $80+ per page, much as I’d like to. If anyone reading this (all two of you!) can help, they could sure use it, and buying their stuff is the best way to help.
I had heard about this documentary, “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom”, filmed about 1 month after the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. I finally got a chance to see it, and it’s both heartbreaking and hopeful, beautifully filmed scenes of people coping with the chaos, death and destruction, with the wistful contrast of the iconic Japanese cherry trees blooming amid the debris. The maker of the film, Lucy Walker, captures the sadness, the hope, and some of the spirit of the Japanese people, in their own words, and in the images of their land.
If you get a chance, the documentary is on HBO now, and may be available other places. The trailer is on YouTube, below.
Another in my comparison between what Matsushima was like when I went there in 2010, before the tsunami, and 2012, when I returned to see how the town was affected. Continue reading “Matsushima, two years later (pt. 2)”
Urgh, I’m now on day 2 of a crappy head cold. It’s a little disheartening to learn the hard way that not all Japanese care enough about the people around them to cover their faces when they have a cold. In walking through crowds to and from stations, or standing on tracks in a crowd waiting for a train, I’ve seen a lot of people wearing the “surgical masks”, to keep from spreading their colds via coughing or sneezing. Unfortunately, some people in the crowds have not been so considerate, and I’ve been standing near people who let loose with a cough or sneeze, leaving their clouds of mucus and viruses for others to walk through. It’s hard to avoid them, too, when you basically have to keep moving behind them, or have to grab the hanging straps that have been grabbed by untold others.
At any rate, it hit me Monday evening, the sneezing, the runny nose, the crappy feeling. Tuesday I stayed in the apartment until the evening, when I decided I needed to get some kind of cold medicine, and some food and something to drink. A quick Google search of the expat sites for advice, a little research with my iPhone dictionary app, and I was ready to head to one of the local drugstores ( 薬屋, kusuri ya, literally “medicine shop” ) for some head cold medicine ( 風邪薬, kazegusuri, cold medicine ). I wanted something specifically for the symptoms I had, sneezing ( ãã—ゃã¿, kushyami ) and runny nose ( 鼻水, hanamizu, literally “nose water” ^_^ ). Fortunately I was able to convey this to the pharmacist, who pointed me to a box of something that had most of the words, and double-checked with him to make sure.
So, fortified with hope, I stopped at a combini to pick up dinner and some juice and soda. Different convenience stores stock different things, but they all have a hot food, cold food, and drinks section, so I picked up a tonkatsu meal, which is a fried pork cutlet, on scrambled egg and rice, and a bottle of Kagome vegetable juice. On the way back I passed a vending machine that carried hot and cold drinks, and so I decided to try a “hot lemonade”. Sure enough, a bottle of lemonade came out of the machine, very warm. I bought two, and they were still warm when I got back to the apartment. I drank the bottles of hot lemonade with the cold pills, and as I was eating the tonkatsu, the medicine started working on my cold. I called it an early night a few hours after that, but had to wake up a few times during the night with more sneezing.
Today, Wednesday, I’m feeling a bit better, the cold is still with me but not as bad, and the cold pills are doing their job. I figure I should be back up and about by tomorrow. Hopefully I just caught the same cold everyone in Tokyo seems to have, so that I have immunity and don’t have to worry about it anymore. We’ll see.
Here’s my magic combination that seems to be working on my cold!
