invincidwarf

3 birthdays, a going away party and a day at the beach.
Andrey, Ieva and Riccardo, cheers!. Hitomi, farewell.
Beaches in japan are kinda worthless. Maybe i just hadnt realized how spoiled ive been having grown up in florida. i am not even an especially big fan of the whole beach experience, but i will certainly be taking a trip to the beach when i get home just to show appreciation.
the following day, after perhaps 12 hours of sleep (it was late when i got in, never bothered to check the time) i woke up a little bit groggy but was generally feeling okay. i supposed i didnt realize how dehydrated i was after a long day and playing in the sun. i got some 'breakfast' which included some sushi... some of which must have been off because a bit later it came back. a few hours later i tried a banana and nearly as soon as it hit my stomach, it came back. sushi coming back is a terrible experience. and it came with a vengeance. cthuluhu is not my friend. anyway. i suffered thru the day trying to get a little liquid in me. it was difficult to get the correct flow, but i managed and i even got a little bread in me and tried to pass out. Special thanks to Dylan Moran for keeping me entertained.
any time i closed my eyes, i started seeing things in the empty blackness. people. in varying degrees of clarity. never anyone i recognized.
finally got to sleep. doing much better now.

graphene mobius strips...

i had a goal of posting a pic to fb every day while i was here. that fell by the wayside pretty quick. my scenery just doesnt change very much. rolled my ankle again on friday, so took the rest of the weekend easy. i feel like we have so much to do and there is only a month left. ive applied for a couple of jobs. hoping to hear something next week. made arrangements for living space upon my return. quite excited about being back in riverside. it means ill need to get some real lights for my bike. when it comes down to it i really can live a spartan lifestyle. i think as much will be thrown away as moved with me to the new place. definitely time to clean out.
no, the post has nothing to do with the title, but that's what our current goal is.

once more, in the land of the rising sun

so, its been a few months since i posted last... im great at this.
im back in japan. same research. graduated at the end of april.
a lot more gaikokujin around this year. easier to be social. feels a bit slower on the research end, but we are making progress.
fortunately, part of what i have to get done, and what helps fill the down time is finding a job. lots of options, just not a lot in jacksonville. mildly disappointing doesnt quite cover it.
somehow, i made a pile of new friends while reconnecting with some old ones just before i left. almost seems a tragedy, but... i will return.

mr bucket

i have buckets of dumb. i dont actually know where i keep them, as they tend to pop up from time to time. there is no real consistency in their presence. i just get dumbstruck from time to time.

in other news, i really want to blog more. i have some thoughts i would like to get out. many and varied in topic, so a single blog post seems unreasonable.

ill start with whats recent. the golden dragons are a chinese acrobat performance group. the last time i saw them was just a week after my dad had passed away. got to take my family to see the kinds of shows i work on. they came back last weekend just after i found out that my uncle carlos had passed away. the show has got to be bad for me. i know its hard on my cousins. they lost their mother 7 years ago, and now their father, who was a great man, has found peace. unlike my own father who was gone in an instant, he lingered for a year. it was hard knowing how sick he was. he did well for most of the year after his brain surgery. it was just the last couple of months that he really started waning. gladly, i got to see him on thanksgiving a week before he passed.

anyway, it gave me something else to be thankful for.

Back to school

An unexpectedly nice september morning has rendered me ponderous. Also, its a nice way to procrastinate the home work i ought to be finishing. I promise some day ill get around to posting more pics from japan. But nuclear physics and my data analysis project have kept me busy.

tediously trying to temper techniques to traffic in the transmission of tiny things

made it to kyoto for the Gion festival on tuesday. camera died about halfway thru. only a little frustrating.
crazy floats on wooden wheels with 30ish people on them. apparently these ancient automobiles dont corner well. took 20 minutes and an excessive amount of manual labor for each of these monstrosities to turn the corner. the smaller floats were lifted and pivoted.
it was very crowded. and quite warm.
from there we went to kiyomizu temple. gorgeous view. pics to come. (hopefully, takagi-san said he would send the ones he took)
got a new scanner in the lab yesterday. took some figuring and sorting on the part of kohno-sensei, as the OS is all in japanese... but once we got the software worked out, it went pretty smoothly from there. i might go in some time this weekend and get some more scanning done, so that we can spend more time using the TEM next week.
not much else that's too exciting has been going on. so, thats all for now.

another week down.

kendo hurts. went to practice monday. im sure my technique is terrible and i was hurting myself. it sucked for 2 days. constant pain. so i didnt make it to practice wednesday. friday i was supposed to go with arenas to the english cafe at suita campus, but he had wrecked his thumb trying to so some hiphop dancing so he went to try to get an xray instead.

m13 prerelease event. 2 stops up from ishibashi station. seems i didnt get the directions right, and i walked around for an hour and a half and coudnt find the shop. my guess now is that it was inside one of the buildings near the station and didnt have any relevant markings on the outside of the building. all this after i find translations for several common phrases used while playing and preloaded my laptop with the card image gallery so that i could make notes about my deck so i could know what i was doing.
while i was making all these notes i skipped the first 2 events and was aiming to make it to the 3rd... i left so that i would get to the area an hour early. still wasnt enough... sad.

about the time i figured i had missed the beginning of the event and was heading back to the station, i see a pair of missionaries on bikes. for some reason i had to convince them to accept dinner. they picked an italian restaurant. imagine being given a knife and fork for a meal in japan... food wasnt bad. elder bailey is on his way home in a week. and elder lyman? has plenty of time left. i had met them at stake conference. they are in some other ward. elder bailey told me where to find lightsaber chopsticks... w00t.

on the way back i decided to wander around ishibashi for a bit. there is a lot of stuff around there. it will take more time to explore. the important part here is that i found and arcade... went 5 rounds on street fighter 4 on 1 coin. im a little out of practice... then i tried a space shooter, but i set the movement speed a little high and it didnt work out so well. the place was simple, but awesome.

ran into marco on my way across campus. felt bad because he was just going out and my feet were sore already. he's an italian physicist doing some computational research here.

tomorrow, there is some sort of summer festival here in my building. the sign said that kimonos would be provided. i think ill check it out after church.