I should be posting more often now that I can go online in the lab, but it's not like having a connection at home where I go online any time I'm bored, usually late at night. People I used to send fairly regular e-mails to have probably noticed this as well, I'm not good at writing and doing it in a rush in the middle of the day doesn't make it any better.
I helped make the organic led last week (see picture!) and it worked! It wasn't very bright and we tested it to the breaking point, but still this is hopefully the technology that'll give us affordable flexible screens.
Monday was a holiday, no idea why, and I've used the long weekend to waste some time. I haven't had time for it in awhile. Most of it was spent in my room reading. And I went for a long walk to see what lies north of the kaikan, which was a large residential area.
I miss the Swedish countryside laws, here it seems every little patch of forrest is fenced off. Unless it's a park or botanical garden or something like that.

Monday again, three hours of Japanese and then over to the lab at Katahira. Today I'm watching a guy preparing substrates for making organic LEDs (I think that's what they're for anyway). Weekend was uneventful, I've started painting my other bike but have only gotten to the front fender (if that's what it's called) yet. I'm thinking green with god details in front fading to blue with silver details in back, but there'll be plenty of time to change my mind before I start doing the back part.
Another small earthquake during the night between Friday and Saturday, I only remember waking up and thinking I should shut the cupboard over my bed but I didn't wake up enough to actually do it.
I need to find a japanese cookbook in English so I can start making some real japanese food instead of just trying to make stuff I make at home but with strange ingredients. Even though I never follow a recipe I like to at least get some idea of how to cook some of this stuff. Like what do real japanese people actually do with the tofu? It doesn't really taste anything and frying does nothing to it.

Today's sunny and windy, just perfect for drying laundry. And since I don't have any morning classes on Fridays I spent the morning dealing with the two weeks worth of laundry that had accumulated in my laundry corner, plus my sheets. This had the effect that I had just a little too much to wash in one machine, but of course I tried anyway... with the rather predictable result of it not getting clean, or even getting the detergent washed out. So I had to split it to two machines and do it over again. To keep from spending 150 yen extra on another machine in the first place I had to spend 300 extra. The lesson: remember to do the laundry every week.
Right now my dilemma is if I should leave the laundry up on the roof when I go off to kanji class, there are clouds threatening on the horizon ("We'll attack tomorrow" "Yes, tomorrow" "I mean it this time" "Me too"), but if I take the laundry in and hang it in my room it'll probably be damp and cold (as opposed to just cold) in here for the next couple of days. Not to mention that I'll have laundry hanging everywhere.
There was another little earthquake the day before yesterday, I wonder if they usually have them this frequently or if it's building up to something big. Have I mentioned before that my teacher in Dynamics of the Earth stated that the likelihood of Sendai having a big earthquake this year is about 30 %. They have them with about 30 year intervals and it was 27 years since the last one. I've packed waterbottles, flashlight and batteries into a bag and once I find alcohol for my camping stove I'll get some food in there as well.
Yesterday I finished making an animation of a dna sensor some of the guys at my lab are studying, it's good to get some practise with Blender again, been too long since I played with it.
Oh another mildly interesting thing happened yesterday, I managed to hit the resonance frequency of my sink with the water dripping from the tap. The noise buildup could have been used as a school example on resonance.

... I ended up fetching in about half of the laundry.

Been awhile since I posted anything and I'm not even going to try to go over everything that's happened since then. But there's been a university festival, a couple of tiny earthquakes (big to me since I've never felt one before) and another trip to the beach.
And last weekend I went on a bus trip to Yamagata to do some traditional japanese pottery and look at the temple on the mountain there (that's where the picture's from).
It seems that I will finally get to do something interesting in the lab this week, I'm going to follow a guy making an organic transistor... apparently I didn't have as much to write as I thought.