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Old Tokyo; or, back online in the new Tokyo
Some very interesting historical material up at Old Tokyo - Vintage Tinted Images of the Japanese Capital City. The Department of Foreign Affairs (on the Kasumigaseki page) was a very stately building.
So I haven’t done a thing with this place in months. In recent weeks I’ve had an excuse, which was that my hosting company blew up. Something. They’re back in existence as of today, although I can’t FTP into this server now to update the CRITICAL SECURITY HOLES that WordPress tells me it has. Oops.
My other excuses were a lengthy autumn visit from mom and dad (well, grandma and grandpa; they sure weren’t here to see me), a big freelance project I wrapped up at the end of the year, and sloth in general.
I do have a bunch of stuff lined up in MarsEdit waiting to be edited and posted, so here’s hoping I get around to some of that content before April. Hello Internet!
Getting clean
Our washing machine was getting on in years, and tended to leave bits of black mold stuck to our clothes after a wash. Not good, especially with a baby in the house and load after load of baby-related things going through the cycle each day. So we went to the neighborhood Laox last weekend and dropped ¥150,000 or so on this thing: the National NA-VR1100R. (The “R” signifies that it opens with the door swinging out to the right, rather than the left like most front-loaders in this country.)
It’s got a dryer built in, which will be nice in the winter when we want that hot air blowing out into the apartment. It has a water heater, so we can do warm-water loads of whites (most Japanese homes only have a cold-water tap in the area where you install a washer, so having this onboard is good). It has a child lock function so we can keep inquisitive toddlers from crawling into the machine, like my brother no doubt would have tried as a youngster. It talks to us when we press the buttons, which is nice, because there sure are a lot of them. Good to have a sherpa here.
Ice cream time
For my birthday Megumi got me a BH-941 cordless ice-creamer. The thing runs on batteries that are supposed to be good for about 25 batches of ice cream. You put in the milk and cream and fruit and sugar and whatnot, close it up, press the button, and stick the whole thing in the freezer for three hours or so.
Last night we made our first batch. Since Megumi is still watching what she eats (no eggs, no dairy, not much sugar) we played with a recipe from some health-food cookbook. Soy milk and black sesame paste and a bit of maple syrup for sweetness. It turned out slightly off-balance—too much goma turned the mix a deep shade of gray—but it was still tasty. Very cold and creamy. And dark gray. We’ll be working out the kinks in the recipe as these hot days continue.
The 1,000-yen haircut
It’s way too hot to have shaggy hair in Tokyo. So I went out during the lunch break and got it chopped off at a QB House near the office. My wallet is a thousand yen lighter, and my head is much cooler . . . Much more in danger of getting sunburned, too, I suppose. Doh.
Coke is it
I almost never drink Coca-Cola—about a bottle per year, maybe, unless it’s got rum in it at a bar somewhere—but I grabbed a bottle of “Zero,” the latest no-calorie wonder drug from that company, to see what it tasted like (answer: just like any other diet cola I’ve ever had) and to see if I would win a song on the iTunes Store (answer: nope). You peel a sticker off of the cap and then take the number printed on it to this website, where you enter it and have the Flash animation laugh at you for being a loser.
This is a bit better thought out than the Pepsi iTunes giveaway they did in the States some time ago, since you could peek into the bottle right there in the Kwikee Mart and choose a winner every time. Anyway, no free song for me today, but the translator sitting next to me had another cap (another loser) that has brought my point total to 2. Once I save up 3 I can try for the gift card good for 10 songs; if I save up 12 points I can go for an iPod Nano instead. I’ll probably give the gift card a shot. I can squeeze in one more bottle of Coke before this contest ends, and call it next year’s bottle in advance.
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