Earthquake! A story I rarely tell…

Yesterday, the LA area was hit by an earthquake. I haven’t experienced one in a long time, and the 5.4 magnitude would seem to be strong enough to scare many, but it wouldn’t cause much damage except to old structures and outdated infrastructure. Indeed, except for the items falling off store shelves, the damage I [...]

Earthquake! A story I rarely tell…

Yesterday, the LA area was hit by an earthquake. I haven’t experienced one in a long time, and the 5.4 magnitude would seem to be strong enough to scare many, but it wouldn’t cause much damage except to old structures and outdated infrastructure. Indeed, except for the items falling off store shelves, the damage I [...]

Woo hoo!! Sales Tax Holiday

Just a reminder to those who live near me: This weekend is Virginia’s Back to School Sales Tax Holiday. It is three days designated for residences–and visitors, I would presume–to purchase Back to School necessities tax free.
The Commonwealth of Virginia enacted in 2007 a Sales Tax Holiday to help residents–like me–who need certain items for [...]

Unexpected encounters II

Back in 1972, my grandparents informed my mother that they were willing to have me come to Japan for the first time in an attempt to nurture a relationship that was on again, off again, due to the physical distance between us. Back in the 1970s, going to and from Japan was not an inexpensive [...]

Unexpected encounters

Have you ever encountered someone you haven’t seen in a while at the most unexpected place? When M came home from Japan last month, she ran into the grandmother of one of students/clients at Narita airport. Actually, she didn’t really run into her. M had forgotten to fill out some kind of form for the [...]

Ratatouille

Given the content of the previous post, I can’t figure out why I rented the DVD, Ratatouille. It’s a Pixar animation about a rat that finds his way from the countryside to the City of Lights and becomes–get this–a chef at a famous restaurant. Ugh. Rats shit where they eat, and this one is cooking [...]

Wildlife: Not for animal lovers

Living in Northern Virginia, in a suburb of Washington DC, has it good side and it’s bad. It is, to be a sure, beautiful country. When I first visited DC, I came on a business trip from Japan. I had imagined Virginia as a rural land of tobacco, plantations and a bunch of hayseeds. Boy, [...]

Summer rerun: Escalator etiquette

I went to campus recently and experienced again something I wrote about previously. I was going to provide a link but couldn’t find the original post on Xanga. Then I remembered that I posted it elsewhere when I had gone on hiatus due to some issues that arose about my online identity. Technically, it [...]

Dude! Are you serious?!?

There’s a summer reality show on ABC on Tuesday evenings called, I Survived a Japanese Game Show. I was looking forward to watching this, but as usual I forgot about it. Fortunately I was able to watch the full episodes online. It’s a show where contestants go to Japan and participate in a Japanese-like game [...]

When learning Japanese

The other day, I wrote about my my eye surgery when I was in Japan. The Greatest_Pip left a comment that suggested that he thought my English was pretty good for a guy who had been in the US for 12 years–since 1996. Haha, I’d like to take a bow, but I had to tell [...]