I tend to write pretty detailed posts about my vacations because even though they're mostly only of interest to me, I like to have a record for when I go back and reread old posts. But this time I was gone for two weeks and, taking into account how verbose my blog posts tend to be, a detailed account of everything I did would run for 10,000 words ( Read more... )

I just finished reading and reviewing Spock's World, which I've wanted to reread for a long while but which got pushed to the front of my queue by Leonard Nimoy's death. It made me remember the influence the book had on my as a child, and I figured I'd write about it. I'd love to make this a nice, pat causal relationship, but while it's that way in ( Read more... )

In what's apparently becoming a yearly tradition for us, softlykarou and I went out to the suburbs to visit my parents and go to the Scarecrow Festival. Much (maybe even most) of our visit was taken up by softlykarou and I looking around St. Charles and Geneva antique shops for either a coatrack or a kitchen sideboard, and we didn't find either of those, but we find a ( Read more... )

I went to visit the doctor today due to my foot injury, and now I have considerably more peace of mind. After the preliminary check-in bits, he felt along the heel and the ball of my foot, poked about the toes, and when none of that drew any pain from me, he took out a tuning fork, asked me to close my eyes, smacked it on the table, and touched it ( Read more... )

I haven't been to that many weddings. I might have had an inflated image of how many other people attended when I was younger, but it seemed like I would always hear people talking about going to this or that relative's wedding, but I was the oldest cousin and no one in my parents' generation that we were close to got divorced, so the very first ( Read more... )

Things I'm thankful for: addition errors.

I went down to the bank today to go deposit the remaining savings bonds that I haven't cashed in yet, because I'll need them to pay off the last of softlykarou's student loans a few days before she graduates in order to laugh in the face of the student loan companies, and it turns out that I was wrong about how much ( Read more... )

I suspect that will cause more psychic damage than any lack of celebrating Easter or Christmas, neither of which I've cared about at all for decades at this point. Is WASJ even a category? If it is, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

I wrote about my meeting with the rabbi a month ago, and how it was a bit confusing, and the beit din I went ( Read more... )

Last weekend was the Scarecrow Festival out in St. Charles, and after not having gone since before we moved to Japan, softlykarou and I decided to trek out to the suburbs and make a visit. I have to admit, it was pretty neat to see the way that our own subcultures have penetrated into the popular consciousness:
( Click for geek )

This is dictated on my iPad so we'll see how well it works.

Last weekend, we had to go help my sister move in Madison. That wasn't so bad - after all my parents helped us move several times - but the problem was that my sister had about twice as much stuff as softlykarou and me combined. We took three car trips with my sister's and my father's cars and ( Read more... )

The first weekend in December was the JLPT/日本語能力試験, which was filled with just as much bullshit as I expected it to be. softlykarou and I took level 4, which we figured that living in Japan for three years would be able to prepare us for. And it...kind of was, in a sense. Our lack of formal schooling (well, mine, softlykarou did take some classes at university) was a ( Read more... )