On the train again

I'm once again sitting on the local train to Iwaki, where I will change to one for Ueno. Going down to Tokyo to see Sayaka again, my last visit was a bit short. Besides, I had two days left on the juuhatchi kippu that I needed to use before April 10th.
Today is warmer than yesterday and with less wind, too bad I'll be on the train most of the day. The train is much more crowded than I'd expect at noon on a Monday. I think every seat in this car is taken... except for the one beside me of course, people prefer standing to sitting there.

The beach! (15:55)

The AirH-card get no coverage out here, not very surprising since there are no buildings for at least half a km. So I'll write this now and post it when I get back.
It's quite cold and windy which makes it a little bit harder to write. Even so there are quite a few people walking on the beach this Sunday afternoon.
The wind was in my face when biking here, so it took me about 75 minutes. That's counting the two times my chain got loose and a quick lunch stop at 7-eleven. The 40 minute stop at Hard Off is not included.
The beach seems dirtier than I remember. Maybe it's just my mind playing tricks, or maybe the winter storms washed up and uncovered alot of this stuff. All of it seems quite old and sad, a memory of summers past. Crumpled and faded cans, bright logos worn by sand and sun to shades that remind me of old cracking house paint. Parts of broken bottles, bricks, concrete, some old and sea worn but most still sharp enough to hurt if stepped on, maybe even enough to break the skin. Short bits of frayed rope, mostly made of green and blue plastic. Half burned pieces of wood from old fires. Unidentifiable bits of ancient plastic. A few driftwood logs, like the one I'm sitting on. Put toghether with the scraggly beach grass and big concrete wave breakers it gives the beach its character.
I long for summer.
The cold is getting to me and I will stop here.
_____

didn' quite get home before posting, I've stopped in a park because I remembered I wanted to look up some reviews of a game I saw at Hard Off.

Whee! TV!

When I got back home yesterday there was a TV standing by the garbage. Dad was with me (he left yesterday evening) and we carried it up to my room on the fifth floor, I didn't really expect it to work but it did! I have no antenna cable for it, but I get two channels anyway :D and I will get a cable next time I go to Yodobashi... or possibly Akihabara since I'm planning to go back down to Tokyo tomorrow or on Tuesday. Not that I like Tokyo itself so much, but... other circumstances... are drawing me back ;)
I'm chewing on a candy snake, this is why I very seldom buy candy for myself, I can't stop eating it once I have it in my room. These snakes I got from dad. The tail is hanging out the corner of my mouth :P
I finally did all my laundry this morning, probably wouldn't have if I wasn't out of underwear again. But it's a perfect day for it, sunny, warm (well, I think it's at least 16 or 17 degrees) and just a little windy. It's the first day this spring that I sit in here with the window open, this is mostly so that all the laundry I couldn't find anywhere to put on the roof (it wasn't just I who noticed the good laundry weather) will dry faster.
I should go out and enjoy the good weather... it's only one o'clock. I think I'll go biking for a bit, maybe down to the beach.

Spent the day wandering around in Yoyogi, Harajuku, Ueno and Akihabara with dad. The sakura are blooming in the Ueno park, much prettyness and quite a contrast to the always bustling chaos of random electronics that is Akihabara. I've finally bought a usb key after planning to for a couple of months.
Yesterday we had a good meeting with Senko (I think that was the name of the company)... well, dad had a good meeting and I had no trouble running the computer presentation. Oh, and I got free lunch. Anyway, the Senko is a big company and they seem very serious about the pulse lavage, so hopefully something good will come of it.
Tomorrow we'll leave Tokyo for Sendai by Shinkansen.

Damn!
I just lost a long post just because the explorer buttons are directly under the keyboard on the pda and I hit reload instead of the space bar.
Well, the most important parts of it were that I've got the pda working properly and that I can't read the comments (except Zoe's that I read on a computer this morning).
Dad just arrived.

Bah!
The pda after all my praise seems to have at least one serious flaw, or rather the version of explorer I run on it; It doesn't handle cookies ver well.
First I got trouble from the Nekomusume log in cookie. The fields for login and password stay on the screen and obscure parts of every site I visit (right now I can't see all I'm writing). I tried fixing this by removing all cookies, but this only removed all other cookies and managed to mess up hotmail in the progress. Argh! frustration. I had to call Sayaka on a payphone to ask for the name of the station we were to meet outside, since I couldn't log in to my hotmail account to check. I tried setting up three other webmail accounts, but mypost.jp didn't work properly on the pda, yahoo wouldn't even register me and fastmail required an existing email address to register (kind of like selling a safe with the key locked in it).
Anyway, after getting lost for about an hour I found the station and Sayaka (who was well chilled by that time).
Today it's been raining all day, so Sayaka and I went to an aquarium. It wasn't as nice as the one in Okinawa (of course), but still a good aquarium. We also went to a bookstore big enough to have a decent selection of English books, eight large floors with books and the foreign language (ie English) were found in the far corner on the eighth floor. I picked up a copy of The Davinci Code, since everybody says it's so awesome, Howl's Moving Castle, because of Deesse's recomendation and to be prepared to see the movie in Japanse, and finally the tenth volume of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. I was holding a couple more, A Terry Brooks and a Douglas Adams, but I'll come back for those sometime when I have my book coupons.

Ok, I'm on the train toTokyo. Weather is bright and sunny, but I just didn't feel like going to the beach. I got on about 45 minutes ago, so I should be about a third of the way to Iwaki.
I've taken a seat in the front of the train, and since there aren't that many passengers they've all taken seats in the other end of the car. Just stopped in Shinchi...not that that gives me much more of an idea where I am.
I'm going to try posting this now, I've had some prolems with posting from the pda before, so I don't want to write too much before I'm sure it'll work. Writing like this is a bit of a pain.

Hrrm... didn't publish when I tried to do it from the pda. And the time changed, but not to the correct one. I'll have to try it again later.

Ok, lets see if this works. I've fixed the time, so now it should hopefully show the time I'actually posting. I'm also trying to do this straight from my pda.
As the day wears on I'm starting to go from tired and confused to plain old bored. So I went downstairs to see if anything was up. But with Norm gone and Joey down in Kansai somewhere I only found Tim being even more bored than me. If the weather is good tomorrow I'll bike down to the beach, otherwise I'll probably go to Tokyo.

Aha! I think the reason two of my posts don't show up in the blog is that I set their time specifically before changing the time zone. Maybe the'll suddenly appear tomorrow afternoon. I've linked to a few more blogs, everybody here seems to be blogging to some extent. Norm's is not just a blog, but I'll leave it in that section anyway.
Evening has been uneventful, went down to Nick's room with Yuta for a bit and Andy and Tim also showed up, for no other reason than that we were all bored. I borrowed Ender's Game from Nick and I'm planning to read it on the train to Tokyo tomorrow. I'm almost certain that I will leave tomorrow.
I'm also fairly certain that I'm getting tired again, only got something like five and a half hours sleep last night. I know people who can live quite happily on no more sleep than that, but if I'm to function for any longer period of time I need my eight hours. And I'll have to tidy up my room a bit tomorrow, don't want it to look this way when I return with dad. Should at least unpack the stuff from Okinawa.

Now! Time should be correct. Bah, blogger kept trying to set me to a different time zone for some obscure reason. But now I'm right where I should be. I hope.
I tried to continue on my entry for the Blender 2004 F1 Competition entry, but grew bored with it very quickly. It's one of those days, even things you which can usually keep my attention for hours seem dull in a matter of minutes.

Added George's livejournal to the Sideburn, hilarity doesn't begin to describe it. Now let us hope he'll update it a little more frequently in the future. Let us also hope that I will sometime fix that awful sidebar to something that'll show up on a normal sized screen.
Haven't done anything more today since the last post, except taking a shower before they closed (at noon since it's weekend) and eating lunch (some kind of strange yakisoba). The weather is not bad, I should go for a walk. Or sit down and do something constructive, like study japanese. Or maybe try to draw something, it's been so long that I don't know if I can. No, a short walk will do me good.

Time to write something again I suppose, it's been a while... as always seems to be the case. Except from now on I'll at least have the means closer at hand. You see the texture of my universe was altered yesterday when I got the AirH card working, I can now spend all these bored moments in my room online instead of sitting around thinking up reasons to study. This morning the universe shifted again when Norm left, his room having been a center of activity for most of my friends here. So it's time to get used to somewhat different conditions (at least I hope I won't find myself knocking on the door to an empty room :P). Other things have also happened that have the potential to change my outlook much more drastically, but I won't bring that up here where any and all might read without understanding... not that I understand entirely myself yet, that's part of the fun and the problem.
Did that seem cryptic? no? well, I'm glad I'm being transparent.
For the rest of todays entry, I give you: Random stuff written on my pda on the way back from Tokyo last week.

From Ueno, joban line for Iwaki. 16 past 1, 2, 3.
Today I took the 16.16 one. In Iwaki the first train to Sendai was a limited express. Since I didn't know if I could go on that with the 18 kippu, I asked a conductor walking along the platform. Having his assurance that it was all right I boarded the train and found a free seat, unfortunately it was in the smoking section since everything else was taken. The first conductor to come along took one look at my ticket and in a few words of broken English managed to convey that my ticket was only for the local trains and not the express and that I would have to get off at the next stop, Tomioka. In Tomioka I went and found a convini to get me something more substantial than the dozen or so Ritz crackers that had up until then acted as both lunch and dinner. After an hour and a half at Tomioka station, not a bad place to wait though a bit cold, the local train for Sendai arrived just late enough for me to start wondering if it might be cancelled. So now I'm aboard the train, comfortable though a bit too warm, noting that the batteries for both my mp3-player and my pda are starting to run out. I think I might add this to my blog when I get the chance, but first I must manage to install the software to connect it to my computer and then get the RH-card working so I can upload it.
This is the longest I've written on the pda so far, it's a bit of a pain, but not as bad as on a mobile phone. And it's taken about 8% of the battery. I'm saving the last 30% to have something to amuse me once the mp3 player dies.
Ok, the player is dead, or at least in a state of suspended animation. Got through most of Rush's 2112 before that though. I should be a bit more than halfway between Iwaki and Sendai now, maybe as far as two thirds. Wonder if I'll manage to catch the last bus home to the kaikan or if I'll have to walk. My backpack is quite heavy, since I packed to be away for 20 days and only having to do laundry once. I only ended up being gone for... let's see, 12 days in Okinawa, two days on the boat to Nagoya and then a day with Sayaka in Tokyo adds up to 15 days. Long enough, I hope there hasn't been anything terribly important lying in my mailbox for twe last two weeks. Oh, Okinawa was great by the way. The first four or five days were wonderful and sunny and we ate a lot of icecream and visited a few beaches. After that it turned cloudy and rainy, except for the day we went to the aquarium. We continued to eat lots of ice cream but didn't swim much in the ocean after that. Norm forgot to bring swimsuit when he came down on the fifth, but unfortunately he didn't need one.
The train just left Iwanuma, which means I'm getting fairly close to Sendai... and the battery warning just popped up when I was writing that, how appropriate. I will end this here.
pofo out

I have since learned that there is also a train at 16.16 that should allow me to reach Sendai in time.

I'm afraid I don't make much sense this morning, my mood won't let me. Try mixing melancholy with bubbling happiness and filter through fine grained confusion and see how you take it.
Or you could just ignore me... that's probably the best right now :D *takes own advice*