back soon? maybe…

Alright, so 1.25 day weekend and two other days’ stories.

Last week I was beat.  This week I’m sick.  But I’ll be fine in a day or two, just a bit of a nose/throat thing but no sign that I might be losing my voice again or anything like that.  Anyway, I’d been feeling so beat but last Saturday I got off a bit early and after I got home we walked down the hill and checked out the fireworks: We got a bit closer than this but not really any good pictures.  It was nice, we’d planned to go see them real close up but since the boy wasn’t fully recovered we decided we’d try and see them from our balcony.  Problem is, the nice big trees that separate us from the Honda R&D facility totally blocked our view so we headed out to get a little better look.  Anyway, they were nice but I always feel kinda the same about fireworks.  Kinda boring after 10 minutes. After we got home I was messing around with the boy after his shower and I got this cool picture, not exactly what I was going for but you can never be too picky when it comes to kids doing “kid” things:

On Sunday we wanted to head over to the other side of the station to see what we could see in the way of performances or food stalls and whatnot so we headed out in the afternoon after the boy’s nap.  Just as we headed out we noticed a couple of rain drops but nothing serious.  When we got about halfway to the grocery store (which is about halfway to the station) we started getting it a bit more and more.  We thought about heading back to wait it out but in my infinite wisdom I thought we could just hang at the grocery store as we both thought it would probably be over in 20 mins or so.  It wasn’t.  It started dumping! It was raining a lot so we made the best of it, I got a beer and we got some bread and sat in the bakery:

Also, we were joined by a bunch of other people as well:

It started dumping more and more and eventually torrents of water were flooding the streets and eventually into the front entrance of the store even and the staff had to pile up sandbags to try and keep the store dry.  You can see the water flooding up from the sewer in this shot:

So basically that day was bagged and we did our grocery shopping and ran home when the rain had died down a tad but still arrived soaked. It was not a perfect weekend but I felt pretty refreshed.  Monday and Tuesday however were super busy and I was feeling overwhelmed again until I had a sweet late cancel Tuesday evening to set things right.  And then Wednesday I got to start really late and so, while the wife headed to her school to tell them she wouldn’t be coming back to continue her doctoral studies, I headed to Akihabara to get a new home button (actually the connector) for her iPhone so I could try and fix it for her.  After searching around and finding the two locations the wife gave me were closed on Wednesdays I finally found and picked one up and headed home to wait for the wife to come back.  When she got home I grabbed her phone and got to ripping it apart.  Here’s what an iPhone looks like in half:

All-in-all it wasn’t too difficult to do but getting the digitizer separated was the most difficult but it only took me an hour or an hour and a half maybe. Probably much easier with a heat gun instead of a hair dryer but oh well, got ‘er done! And now I just need to order me a new battery and take mine apart, batter replacement will be much easier.  Speaking of the iPhone, been messing around with some new apps lately but might get into that later.  Maybe.

And then yesterday we hung out mostly at home and while the boy was taking a nap we got hit by another crazy storm with torrential rain and crazy thunder.  Love that kind of weather.  And then we went shopping and had dinner, this: Kinda weird coloring. But tasty.

Anyway, that’s about it for now I think, back to work tomorrow and then Sunday off, hope I feel better by then.  Hope I don’t feel like shit tomorrow.  At least I’m off early tomorrow and it’s not too crazy a day either.  Oh yeah, and SEAHAWKS WON!!! FOOTBALL’S BACK BABY!!!

Groundhog days…

Man I need a vacation.  I need one real bad. Going a bit crazy.  Been super busy at work lately and that’s fine but at the same time I can’t seem to get a cancel or no-show to save my life over the past month.  Having two separate days off isn’t too bad in Japan usually.  I get the weekday off to go out about town and not have to face masses of humanity all the time and I get the Sunday off so I can watch college football during the season and at least have one day to see friends and family if needed.  It’s also OK because there are so many national holidays.  Except of course, June and August.  So with the wife being in the hospital last month (tanking our anniversary and covering 海の日 as well) I’ve basically been on single days off since Golden Week with no real prospective for two days off until near the end of September. F. But now I’m thinking about maybe taking the 12th off in addition just to get a little head start on that and so I can watch the Hawks’ first game of the season.  Either way, still a month+ away… I could always get sick though, so here’s hoping for that.

Speaking of sick, the boy has 手足口病 (hand, foot and mouth disease) now so, yay!  So since the boy and wife were staying at the in-laws’ place on Monday night because she had to go to the hospital on Tuesday morning so when he spiked a fever on Tuesday we decided they’d stay there again on Tuesday. His fever got pretty bad, 40°+ at times. Unfortunately the wife didn’t have enough of her medicine so I spent my break going home to get it and then bring it back so I ended up not taking any pictures and they didn’t come back to the house until Wednesday.  We finally got to hang out on Thursday and I finally took a few pictures, here’s a little peek at one of the sores the boy has on his tongue (it’s gotten much better since I took this):

Tough to make out but here’s his little プツプツ covered hand as well:

But, luckily he was in a good mood most of the day:

Well, he was in a good mood most of the day, that is until at night when he was all itchy and didn’t want to sleep and was covered all over with a new rash… The wife took him to the doc today and learned that in addition to the HFMD, now he had hives… hives?! For the love of God!!! c’mon, give me a fuckin’ break!!!  I’m so tired of all of this shit.  Well, he got some MORE medicine and seems that the hives have been beaten back at least for now.  Poor kid, I just would really love to have him, and my wife, healthy for a few moments and it would be nice if it was on a day I don’t have to work so I can enjoy that time with them.

Different subject time. For some reason the wife and I were talking about Taco Del Mar and fish tacos the other day so I decided to make some mission-style fish burritos (also because we got a giant Costco tortilla shipment the other day) for dinner last night and they were pretty great:

Ah those were good, I could go for another one right now…

Tomorrow night is supposed to be our big city festival but we won’t be going because I have to work (although I will get off a bit early) and the boy’s still not 100%.  Hopefully we’ll be able to see the fireworks from our place, I think we should be able to but we’ve still been here less than a year so we’ll see and maybe we’ll be able to get out and see some stuff on Sunday.  Maybe.

Gotta sleep, back to fucking work tomorrow again. Again.

N/A

I’m probably gonna take the Kiss with me to work today and see if I can get any interesting pictures. I haven’t really busted out the camera lately, been too busy and nothing much of interest really happening so we’ll see if I can kick-start that.

Also, I recommend checking out the Foo Fighters Rockumentary called “Back and Forth”.

Home is where everything is.

Well, things might just be getting back to normal. I don’t think I’ll go too crazy into details about the last couple of weeks but at least I’ll cover the basics.  It all started really on the Friday evening before the wife and I’s anniversary.

I came home from work per usual and was very happy that I’d have the next two days off for the first time since Golden Week.  And of course, an anniversary to celebrate with the wife along with a date with the wife for the first time in over a year and three months.  The wife however complained about the beginnings of another (in a recent succession of) ear infections. It wasn’t too bad and we started off the next day as planned by headed to Ikebukuro to drop off the boy at the g-parents’ place.  However, it seemed the wife’s ear infection was getting worse and worse.  I’d told her maybe we should go to the 耳鼻科 in the morning but I think she was trying to be a trooper so we didn’t and really when we finally made it to lunch it was pretty much all downhill from there.  She couldn’t eat much, we ended up buying some Tylenol and sitting around before we finally went home and sat around in the dark the rest of the day while she slept on the couch and I slept on the floor.  Wahoo, great anniversary.  So the boy came back via the g-ma in the evening and eventually we all went to bed. I was pretty heart-broken because I’d been waiting for and begging for a day with no baby for so looooong and it was a total shit.  The next day however, was truly a heart-breaker.

Somewhere around 5am or so, the Tylenol that the wife’d been taking apparently wore off and she realized that she had a terrible headache, pretty much debilitating.  She couldn’t move.  Long story short, her mom came over again and we started calling around for a cab to take mornin to the hospital with no luck and finally called for an ambulance and I stayed home with the boy while the wife and her mom headed off. I kept in contact with ママ through the day and we learned that it wasn’t an ear infection but rather Cerebral Meningitis.  Which, is a bitch. If you don’t know, it’s basically an inflammation of the brain and can be fatal. ママ came over and I could finally go to the hospital and see the wife and she was not really looking good. It was a Sunday so the hospital couldn’t do all the tests they really needed so we were going to be doing some waiting but at least we knew that it was going to be at least two weeks before she’d be home.  SOB.  It could be up to a month or more. F. Anyway, the first day I went around and got her some of the stuff she’d be needing and then I headed home to get the boy ready because we’d decided that he’d be spending a fair amount of time at the g-parents’ over the next 2-4 weeks.  The first night he headed over by himself and I stayed home to get some stuff done around here.

Anyway, pretty much the next 12 days or so saw me running around (and sometimes carrying the boy in-tow), between our place, the in-laws’ place, the hospital and of course my schools.  I spent a few nights in Ikebukuro but that place does not agree with my health so… that sucked.  At the same time the wife was spending a lot of time being poked and prodded with CTs, and MRIs and cardiograms and lumbar punctures and all that jazz… poor girl.  After the first few days the doctors got some tests back that told them what bacteria they were dealing with and luckily it is a common one so they knew how to attack it. The basic theory of what happened was that a bacteria from one of the ear infections she’d had over the past few month had escaped from her inner ear through some kind of gap and had migrated to her brain…  There were many worst case scenarios bounding around (surgery on her skull to repair the gaps was one of the more terrible sounding, luckily the Doc said that they would probably heal naturally) but we were fortunate that things went fairly smooth.

She was put on some serious IVs for the first week and then she was mostly clear after that but got an ocassional one for the next week and finally she got the ‘OK’ Thursday night that she could go home Friday morning.  Of course I had to work but I offered to go get her in the morning before work but instead her dad went… one of the slowest humans on Earth… and by the time they got to the house, I got to see her for 5 minutes before I had to leave.  But she got to see MJ for the first time in over a week (because we found out his vaccines were not complete because he was sick around the time of his first birthday and so they got postponed so we decided he couldn’t go back to the hospital) and that was good.  I didn’t go over to the house on Friday after work because I couldn’t risk another sleepless, lung crushing night there before an early (and busy as shit) Saturday.  I was super busy at work for the entire two weeks she was gone which was really exhausting but also work was the easiest part of my week…  When I finished work on Saturday, I found out that MJ had a little fever so she thought it was best to stay at her folks’ place that night… F.  I went home.  So, finally, today I went over and got them and finally, finally, finally we all came home today.

Man, it’s been a super long two weeks.  And I’ve gotta go back to work again tomorrow.  I’m still pretty exhausted but incredibly happy to have a semblance of normalcy back.  It’s not gonna be back to status quo for another few weeks as the wife is still not 100% but at least she doesn’t need to stay in the hospital anymore. I’m so happy they are home and hopefully we’ll all be fairly happy and healthy for a good long while… Welcome back!

halfway home?

It’s been a really long week and I’m not gonna go into it yet but it’s gonna be another really long week coming up here again. Wish me luck and I’ll be back.

burnt

Well, we got a break today.  The forecast was all set for shit but we lucked out and the rain came early letting us get out of the house around 10 or so to head down to the kiddie pool today.  Before I got up, and before I get into that particular topic, here’s a great picture the wife took of the boy this morning: Alright, that’s rad.  So, here we go, the pool.  Well… I can’t say I enjoyed myself too much.  Not really enjoying myself right now either, pretty burnt on the arms, back, shoulders, neck and head.  I didn’t really get any decent pictures and partly that falls on the staff that wouldn’t let me take pictures in the pool.  I could take them from outside of the pool but not while in the water. I understand their reasoning for this rule, I’m sure people drop their cameras in but c’mon, it’s a tiny kiddy pool.  Most of the pools there didn’t come up to anywhere near my waist. Also, of course, I had to cover my tattoo on my leg with tape, which is fine, but the guy put it on so shittily that it pretty much immediately came off when I hit the water. Had to have it redone.  I wish they had just given me the tape and scissors instead of having some skinny dude in a speedo wrapping up my leg… They also wouldn’t let me go on the water slide. I just wanted to check if it would be OK to take the boy on with me or not but they stopped me and I was pretty done.  I don’t really like swimming or especially swimming pools to begin with so I did not have a great time. MJ enjoyed himself and that’s the most important thing.  Just as we were leaving it finally got really sunny and the weather ended up being pretty good for most of the rest of the day.  Did I mention I got a pretty wicked sunburn?

For dinner I made some pasta salad and it turned out pretty good.  In the picture, the front two bowls are the parents’ (way too much though, neither of us finished), in the middle is the boy’s version, pretty much all the same stuff, just bite sized and no seasoning, and deep in the background is some garlic bread: One day back to work tomorrow and then off on Saturday!  It’s anniversary time!  The wife’s and my 2 year wedding anniversary! And no airplay’s 5th anniversary!  Hey hey hey! Happy 七夕 to all today as well!

3rd of July!

Well today is the 4th but I’ve gotta go to work.  In fact, I’ve got about an hour till I need to start getting ready.  I’ll talk about what we did yesterday but first I realized I forgot to mention my experience at the 耳鼻科 last week.  On Monday I was in class when suddenly my left ear went kinda deaf.  I could hear OK, just some strange metallic humming and is sounded like people were speaking into a tin can or something.  Anyway, didn’t subside all day so went to the doctor Tuesday morning and the doctor pulled out a HUGE chunk of wax.  Literally it looked like an 梅干し.　Gross. I could hear better but still not perfect but gradually it seems like my ear’s all better.  It’s weird, my right ear was all beautiful and I try and keep my shit looking good so I don’t know how this coulda happened.  Doc said there was no infection… Weird.

So yesterday, in honor of today’s holiday it’s been my tradition to go out for Yakiniku (BBQ) and/or have a BBQ.  We’d originally planned on the BBQ but because we ended up getting tickets to the soccer game so we just went for the Yakiniku route.  It was pretty decent:

After lunch we went home, MJ took a nap and then we headed off to Omiya and the game, here’s the view from 北朝霞 station looking out over the town:

We got lucky. I was checking the train times and came upon a lucky find.  There’s a special train occasionally run by JR on holidays and weekends that let us go right from Kita-Asaka to Omiya without transferring or stopping.  Pretty sweet!  We got to Omiya and started walking to the stadium.  It’s about a 20-minute walk and the way leading up to the stadium is pretty cool.  There’s a long path bookended by two 鳥居, here’s the 2nd one just before entering the shrine:

And a couple from inside:

In that last picture the giant stone in the middle reminds me of a hash brown.  We didn’t really take too much time walking through the shrine, I was pretty impatient to get to the stadium itself which was just beyond the giant hash brown. This picture doesn’t do it justice, click on the link and check out the biggest version (which is still only 20% of the original). Great stadium.  As you can see, there’s also a baseball stadium just beyond the north stands.  The Lions play there sometimes, I’d love to see a game there some time.

The stadium was pretty awesome, so much better than Kawasaki’s stadium because there’s no track around the field, it was pretty sweet. Also the shrine/park next door is pretty good too.  The one problem was the cheers frightened the boy a bit so his mom had to cover his ears a couple of times

So that was it, we lost 0-1 (and more importantly, Kawasaki lost 1-2) and we headed home… Happy 4th everyone!

A beautiful day in the hood

The weather lately has been fantastic! Hot, but fantastic! Sunny blue skies most of this week with a couple showers here and there. Not bad though. Of course, I think I might be one of the only people in this whole country that sees it that way, strange considering I’m usually a huge pessimist. Oh well. So Thursday we headed out kinda early just for a walk along the river to scope out the kiddy pool we found on the internet where we want to take MJ next week probably because, of course, it didn’t open until today. We found it and it’s pretty close, be back next week! Also I got a pretty decent sunburn on the walk.

After we got home we had lunch and I filled up the balcony pool again but it got cloudy and actually got a little chilly as soon as we got in… well, after MJ’s nap it cleared up and we got back in, much warmer the second time around!

In other news:
On our walk to the kiddy pool yesterday morning, somewhere along the way a bird pooped on my camera! No idea how/when it happened but that’s some awesome aim! I wasn’t hit though. I used a baby wipe to clean it off.
On Wednesday morning I got a delivery from Omiya Ardija and inside were two tickets to this Sunday’s game! Sweet! It’s a make-up game for the March 13th game that was canceled after the earthquake so seems I might be headed to the stadium on Sunday for some soccer for the first time in a long while. Weather permitting…

Pool party!

We had some amazing weather finally on Thursday and we headed over to 和光市 and get a few things at the kids store.  We got MJ some swimming diapers and some shorts and some swim trunks.  We also got me some swim trunks and picked up a swimsuit for the wife as well.  Probably make a trip to 豊島園 or the beach or to a pool some time this summer but for now we busted out the tiny little inflatable pool and filled it up.  MJ and I hopped in and tried to beat the heat a little bit, it was pretty nice. Here’s some of the action: 

The wife made some pretty good dry curry for dinner as well:Think it’s gonna be raining tomorrow so not sure if we’ll fill up the pool again or not… Probably won’t be doing too much, maybe make a trip to the home center to try and get a doorknob or some stuff. We’ll see.