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recent
Some cool stuff and some not so cool stuff happened this weekend. I'll start with Sunday. I woke up early to go out to the mountains with Tomoe and our bikes. The final repairs having been made to bike on Friday (or so I thought) it was a perfect day to test it out.
Waking up early should grantee a full day of bike riding in the mountains, but (thanks to my low blood pressure for sure) I didn't actually wake up until 2 hours later. This didn't prove to be a problem since we were only planning to go 1.5 hours away anyway, and actually likes the looks of a small town (Fujino) only an hour away so we hopped off there.
I'm going to make a long story short. My bike was not fully tested and on the first uphill span, I found out the hard way that my back gear shifter was not well. Now my bike is almost officially a scrap heap.
So after ditching the bikes, we decided to hike to the top of the mountain, which probably was better for not breathing in too much car exhaust, since most of the roads around there were pretty busy. On the way back to the station we found a cheap veggie man who sold us a huge bunch of fresh eda-mame and some other goodies for dirt cheap.
Perhaps the best find was that this little town is a magnet for artists from all over the world. Many Japanese artists who lived in Tokyo fled here during the war, and it appears that many people followed. There are some big festivals going on next week so I will probably go back.
Another great find... a beautiful calm lake with beautiful mountains all around and campsites where I can launch my Kayak from. The great thing is that this is even closer than the usual place I Kayak, and the water is usually pretty rough there so I am too chicken to practice anything dangerous.
I have been trying to make little programming improvements to the site every now and then, and even though I learn a lot, I have decided it is plain dumb for me to re-invent the wheel and write my own system that does exactly everything existing systems do. I have finally broken down and begun porting my site into one of those other free blogging software systems. I thought I would be bored using someone else's, but actually I love it! There is still enough freedom for me to play around with the code and do things that aren't really needed, and I don't have to waste time on the basics that are needed.
I am not totally finished setting it up, but as soon as I am I will let you know.
galleries
