A quick, content-free post to stick this photo up on the site. I have a batch to go up on Flickr soon from our trip to Yuzawa a few weekends ago. Sakura’s first time in the real snow! She didn’t mind the chair-lift ride on my lap at all, but was scared when I snowplowed down the green slope with her in my arms. Maybe next season. (The sleds and inner tubes were much more her speed.)

• Kana order (lists of terms for each character in the Japanese syllabary, either by baby sound or adult word represented)
• By genre (including such toddler favorites as “animals,” “foods and drinks,” and “song lyrics”)
• By sex of babies that tend to learn the term first (including months of vocabulary usage; boys lag by a half-month or so, with the exception of important words like “ramen”)
• By month of vocab usage

My favorite category is probably マニアックワード, “maniac words.” The imported term in Japanese refers not to the axe-wielding variety but to a hobby or other interest taken to extremes, often in a “really out there” area that not many people pay attention to. Some of the examples in the Goo Labs glossary are 殺虫剤 (insecticide), アフラック (Aflac, the insurance firm with the popular duck), and シュワッチ (Ultraman’s phrase “shuwatch,” to borrow the Wikipedia entry’s spelling). Crazy kids.

(Via ことば・言葉・コトバ.)

Seems like a quarterly thing, to post here. I’ve been busy. Translating and editing and enjoying visits from family (sister pictured) and watching the little girl grow larger and larger.

Jessica has been in town for 10 days or so. She came to Tokyo to watch her Oakland As play Yomiuri, Hanshin, and the Red Sox twice. They won three of four, so that wasn’t a bad start. The best seats we had were the “Excite Seats” for the season opener against Boston. Matsuzaka started, and Okajima got his pitches in, so there was no way the As would be treated like the home team even if that’s what they were on the card. We were in the second row, down the third-base line, in seats actually on the field. They came with helmets and gloves to protect us from fouls, of which there of course were none this game. And then the As lost! Walking Ortiz to pitch to Ramirez in the tenth. Bah. They won the second game the next night, at least.

Sakura was happy to meet her aunt. They played a lot and enjoyed some books together. (Sakura’s favorites these days all have buttons and little electronic songs, and Jes usually goes to bed with an iPod on to try to drive the ditties from her skull. Not that this works.) We fed Jes big piles of food and gave her no chance to exercise, beyond walking around Kichijoji looking for trinkets to purchase, so she’ll have to hit the gym hard when she gets back to California and her own waiting baby.

Bed time now. See you again in the summer! Well, sooner than that if I go ahead and get my posting act together. I owe a lot of people email as well. Sorry about that. Plugging back in . . .

Sakura is sick now. She has something called herpangina, which means blistering inside her mouth and throat. Makes it painful to swallow, so she’s been very fussy during feedings. Megu took her to the hospital and get everything checked up, and we now have some medicine to give her. Should be all better within a week or so. Poor baby.

Speaking of baby (-ies), Adam has posted more photos of his. See them on his Flickr site. Unless he has them protected and visible only to family and registered friends or something, in which case enjoy the Flickr warning page.

I bought a black MacBook. Stuck 2GB of RAM in it and it works just fine. I got to do the Microsoft Office dance again, the one where I try to install Office 2004, which I bought as an upgrade, and it tells me I have to have an older version on the drive, so I have to track down the disk for Office 2001 or Office X or whatever, copy the Office folder from it to the drive, point 2004 to that copy, and then erase said copy. It’s all so inefficient. This machine has a camera on it; I should be able to show 2004 that yes, here’s my CD copy of your ancestor, now please allow me to view this .doc filled with client comments I will ignore! Seems like it should work.

I’m now translating an article on the scandal rocking Japan’s pension system, in which the Social Insurance Agency accidentally misplaced records for some obscenely high percentage of the population, rendering them incapable of receiving payments. I can’t say I’m too confident in my own chances at getting a piece of this pie, since by the time I’m old enough to claim some of the yen I’m paying into the system there will be 100 million people my age and several dozen workers trying frantically to prop the whole thing up. I don’t think Social Security will do me much good either—hey, the money to pay for Dubya’s Wild Middle Eastern Ride doesn’t grow on trees, you know—but I am doing an end run around that whole mess by not living or working in America and paying into that system. I’m way ahead of the game here.

All right, I lied. Actually I’m now editing the new issue of Japanese Book News for a very finicky client. “Please translate these reviews in a more formal register. This is too casual.” “But the new critic you people have writing them in Japanese is much more casual than the last guy; we’re being faithful to the source here.” “Well, we know that, but ignore his style and do that stiff, formal thing.” Thanks for sharing this fundamental bit of editorial direction at the end of the process, rather than before translation began.

More random things to type: I’m playing with WordPress and considering making it the default thingy for the whole bloggish shebang. It’s doing stupid things with dead links that I can’t seem to make go away, though; probably some permissions deal that the WP folks expect everyone just to know offhand. “Oh, when you install that plug-in of course you’re supposed to chmod everything to 666, except for file B, which is 755.” Pure gibberish! It’s arcane wizardry like this that drives people to use MySpace.

Last but not least, I added more shots to the set of photos from our honeymoon trip to Scandinavia, lo those many years ago. Nice place in October. Much cooler than Tokyo in July. Would my company let me telecommute from three months in the future and seven time zones away? I’ll ask the boss.

This was a vacation in 2002, actually. I had a few photos from it posted on a previous incarnation of this website, but I never got around to uploading any of them to Flickr after getting the account there. Now that’s changing.

There’s a set of photos that will grow as I post more. Today there are 20 shots from Stockholm, our first stop on our honeymoon lo those many years ago.

Sakura’s cousins have left the hospital and are at home now. Their stay (with C-section and all) was shorter than Megumi’s straightforward birth here in Japan, which is a shocking bit of news to everyone over here who hears it.

Congrats to the twins, and their parents, and all the grandparents on their way to Mountain View to visit!

Welcome to Luke and Anna Durfee. Sue is doing well and the babies are healthy (around 2,150–2,200 grams each) and ready to take on the world. Photos will go here (and elsewhere) when they become available, I suppose.

(This is sort of a duplicate post to one I made at Sakura’s blog, which is where I mean to put all the baby pics and videos and my interminable yammerings about how cute she is and stuff.)

Photo by Jes! (Click to see the bigger one.) Apparently San Rafael High School is a bit confused when it comes to the messages sent by signs around the sports field.

Weblog writing has been sparse lately due to a visit from Grandma and Grandpa Durfee (they came to see Sakura, and oh, I guess the rest of us as well) but now that they are gone I will try to post more frequently. I signed up for a Twitter account yesterday so now I am way more hip and connected and Web 2.0 than ever before. If you’re into that then add me as a friend. I’m so ronery.

That last thing reminds me of how sad I am that this East Asian dictator’s blog isn’t getting updated any more these days.