Still here

I'm beginning to wonder if we will ever leave for Kyushu. We were supposed to leave Sunday, having an 8 day trip, then it got pushed back to Monday, then tomorrow. Of course it is 1am and no packing has been done. Tomoe took her bike apart to tune it up. This mostly resulted in fighting as once she could not get it back together again, she would not believe a word I said about how to fix it. Granted, I am not an expert, but I have built my fair share of mountain bikes from found junk parts. I also somehow manage to keep my bike running after thinking more than once,twice, ten times, that I would finally have to break down and buy a new one. In the end, I managed to learn some new things about bikes (her's is the most "modern" and high-tech I have ever worked on), and the bike is working again. But, she wont ride it until she has a chance to take it to a bike shop so they can turn a few screws and declare it "safe".

We've also been trying to figure out what to do with the birds. We have no one to come feed them, and the pet-hotels we looked at are either outrageously expensive, or they are certainly not a place for a bird you like. Instead, the engineer caps have been on our heads all night as we use old pet-bottles and plastic bags to devise simple devises that will ration their food and water for the entire week. I have to do the same with the water for my roof-top crops.

I'm quite proud of us actually. For more than whipping up some simply inventions that will allow the birds to be alive. I'm also proud of us for surviving a trip to the outdoor sporting goods store having spent only $5 for a canister of camp-stove gas (which is what we went there for). There were a million things that we saw thinning to ourselves, "Oh. that would be handy!". I'm proud that we have the smarts to ask ourselves why, if it is so handy, we have not needed it yet. In most cases, we realize that, yes, while it may be handy, it's mostly just plastic crap. There were some things that were handy enough that we would want them. I'm proud of us because instead of buying them, we did a little brainstorming and mental inventory and figured out how to make comparable stuff with all the little pieces of junk we have collected at home.

One thing I couldn't make though, and would have bought if I saw it in the shop (but I didn't), is this Swedish Fire Steel I just saw on Meta Efficient.

Well, I should get to bed in the hopes that we somehow make it out of Tokyo tomorrow. Even though it's raining in Kyushu now, it will be a good birthday present for us. Oh yeah, October 1 was our birthday. In the past we have tried to go out but can never get up the nerve to go someplace fancy. (It all seems like such a waste). One year we went out looking for a birthday special. The place we finally went to had a special of cake and a bottle of wine for a semi-low price. We figured what the heck, we'll get one and split it -after all, it's our birthday. When they found out that it was both of our birthdays, even though we only ordered one special, they charged us for two saying that even if we don't eat it (or want it), we still both have to be charged for the birthday special... because it's two of our birthdays.

Needles to say, this year we didn't look for any specials. We did, however, take a walk over to Nakano station which has a lot of really nice-but-not-expensive looking places to eat. Despite that, we wandered around for a long time still not able to find something that fit all our criteria, so we finally settled on a cozy, yet somewhat expensive, little Japanese place with a wall full of strange and exotic sho-chu (potato booze). The bottles had all manner of root, snake, lizard, and even a human finger. At first we were excited to try some, and planned to order it after we finished the first bottle of beer, but soon the excitement wore out we ended up going to the supermarket to get a cheap ice-cream cone instead.

By the way, I'm kidding about the finger thing.