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I finally got around to posting a new blog entry.

I hope all is well with the Squid Crew. We're doing fine here, surviving in spite of being deprived of Chelsea's nutritious and delicious food offerings. We ate at the nearby Hard Rock Cafe this weekend for a dose of good ol' American food. Jon got a burger and fries for $20, and I got a house salad for $15...yikes, I didn't realize it was so expensive.

The big news is that our move to Singapore has been delayed until mid-June at the earliest. Supposedly the final date will be set in early May, but I'm not holding my breath. Still, I'm continuing to work out details as best as I can for our shipment, interim living, etc. Exxon's giving us a hard time about the split shipment (some from U.S., some from Tokyo), but I like to think that common sense will prevail in the end.

Over the next two weeks we have several holidays and Jon's taking some vacation days, so he'll have about 12 days off in a row. We have two sets of visitors during that time, so it works out well. I'd like to get a another journal entry done before then, but don't know if I'll make it.

Take care. I'll be thinking about you all on Friday.

Mary

Good Friday Squid Friday

I have had a really blah two weeks. I have lost all urgency, all excitement, all focus.

So, for anyone who is coming to Squid Friday tomorrow, PLEASE bring news of exciting new projects, personal triumphs, or plain 'feel good' news so I can celebrate something.

If you don't have any of those, bring your biggest tales of woe so I can think how good my life is in comparison.

New Japan Journal Posting on JonAndMaryWorld

Hi Guys. It was good to talk with you today (Thursday your time). Wish I could be there today (Friday your time) for a delicious squid lunch with extra sauce. This "today" business is pretty confusing when you're across the date line!

I just had lunch with some friends at a hotel run by the U.S. military. One of the guys is retired Navy, so could get us in. There was a delicious salad bar and Mongolian Barbeque for $10.50. They even charged in U.S. currency. And there was salt and pepper on the table, a rarity in Tokyo. And they gave each person a menu, instead of only one for the whole table to share, which is how it tends to be done here. It was nice to have these American touches. I ate way too much, in the typical American fashion.

I've posted a couple items on JonAndMaryWorld. Tony, if you tell me how to set up the email notifications on my site, I'm happy to do that for anyone who wants it.

Give my greetings to the gang at NCBRT and at Chelsea's. Have a great weekend! - Mary

http://jonandmaryworld.blogspot.com/

More Photos from the Art Fair on March 7th

Hi Guys. I started a separate blog with all my old journal entries on it. And I've added a bunch of photos from the art fair, if you're interested. Here's the address:

http://jonandmaryworld.blogspot.com/

It's not nearly as polished as Tony's blog. Maybe I should hire him as my web-master...

MAYBE I'll get around to a new journal entry today. Tomorrow morning we're taking off for a long weekend in Kyoto, so getting ready for that is first on my list for today.

The highs are supposed to be around 68 today, so it'll be good to finally see some warm weather.

I have lunch plans today with some of my girl group. Unfortunately most of them are into healthy eating, so we're going once again to a "macro-biotic" restaurant. The food's not bad, but it's not Chelsea's. Sometimes, I just want something that's deep-fried. With extra sauce, of course!

Squid Friday - Be There (Scare Tactic)

Perkins Road Overpass Work in Progress - Blue Moon Distributors Expect Downturn in Demand for Q2.

Dave Remmetter, who owns Chelsea’s Café underneath the overpass, said he plans to maintain normal hours even though the construction will block a doorway to the restaurant and force him to close parking areas under the overpass.

“If people come to the area, I think we’ll be OK,” Remmetter said. “If people avoid the area altogether then all the businesses are going to be in the same boat.”

Remmetter considered opening the popular eatery later in the day but ultimately decided to keep it open for lunch.

“We’re going to let the market dictate,” he said. “If no one comes in for lunch then we’re not going to open.”

Poetry Contest - In honor of Tony's 40th birthday

Mary's Submission:

Let's get together and croon
For Tony a birthday tune
Squid is a winner
For his birthday dinner
As long as it comes with Blue Moon

Happy Birthday Tony!

(Beat that, gang!)

Japan Journal – 11-Mar-2009 - Plum Blossom Festival, Art Fair, Etc.

Two weekends ago we decided to head out of town on Saturday and go to the nearby town of Mito to the Plum Blossom Festival. Mito is about an hour out of Tokyo if you take the express train. A regular train costs less, but takes twice as long. We figured it was worth the money to get there faster. Still, the tickets cost about $100 each, round-trip…far from cheap. Using some very good advice I got early on in Tokyo, I typed up and printed out the necessary information for the train tickets (where we were going, round-trip, non-smoking, etc.) so that we would have that in hand at the ticket office. It turned out that the person who helped us at the ticket office spoke some English, so with the help of my printout we were able to purchase tickets and get on the train without problems.

From what we hear, the really big show in Japan is cherry blossom season, which is in late March or early April. But the plum blossoms bloom earlier, and Mito has a big garden called Kairakuen, with lots of plum trees. The weather was cool and clear, and rain was expected on Sunday, so Saturday was the day to go.

By the time we got to Mito, it was going on lunchtime and we were hungry. There were food stalls lining the paths near the entrance of the park, so we decided to sample some Japanese “festival food”. First we tried a type of stuffed, griddled bread. The guy at the booth spoke enough English to tell us the different fillings. We opted for the sweet potatoes. The bread was interesting, and just enough to whet our appetites. So Jon picked out some fried noodles from one of the vendors, and I picked out some little small cupcake-type things, where octopus and spring onions were put in a batter and baked. We rounded it out with a couple skewers of yakitori. All the food was reasonably good without being anything remarkable.

Food vendor at the Plum Blossom Festival

We then wandered around the park, looking at the sights and people-watching. We were the only westerners I saw there the entire day. Unfortunately, the plum blossoms were not quite at their peak yet; the trees were in bloom, but many of the buds hadn’t yet opened.

Family photo time under the plum blossoms

One interesting sight at the park was a temple that had a display of dolls. March 3rd is “Girl’s Day” in Japan, and the Doll Festival (Hina Matsuri) is the main way it’s celebrated. Apparently people with young daughters display these dolls in their houses, but there are also big public displays like at the temple. The dolls on the top tier represent the emperor and empress, and the lower dolls represent their court attendants. The display was beautiful, and I was glad we got to see it.

Dolls on display for Girl’s Day

During the week, our one night out was to a nearby yakitori restaurant. This is where the various types of food are all skewered and grilled, though the grilling isn’t done at your table like in a robatayaki restaurant. We both ordered one of the set menus. The waiter then gradually brought us grilled skewers of chicken, beef, pork, scallops, shrimp, squid, eggplant, and quail eggs, along with a salad. It was all good, but the beef was fantastic, while the eggs were okay without impressing me much.

This past weekend we had a full schedule planned for Sunday, so decided to take it easy on Saturday. We did go on a small outing to a used foreign book store, and surprisingly ran into Joanna, one of the American women from my little lunch group. This was quite a coincidence, since I know about ten people in this city of 12 million. After the bookstore we went to an Indian foreign food supermarket near Roppongi Hills in search of basmatic rice (they were out). As we walked past Roppongi Hills on the way home, we passed a “Free Tibet”demonstration. It was all very colorful and enthusiastic, but peaceful and well-organized, with several policemen handling traffic. For lunch we found a small Thai restaurant, Bangkok, just a couple blocks away from our house, buried on a side-street. The food was good, and I’m certain we’ll visit there again.

On Sunday morning we went to an art fair at a convention center called Tokyo Big Sight on a man-made island in Tokyo Bay called Odaiba. To get there, we had our first experience on one of the Tokyo monorail lines. It felt weird being on one of these trains with no driver. The art fair was called Geisai #12. Apparently for a small fee up-and-coming artists can display their wares in this fair at the convention center once a year. The vast majority of artists seemed to be college-age. There was a wide variety of art, including some people doing performance art. For example, two young guys were sitting on the floor of their “booth”, eating a pile of bananas (“yes, but is it art???”). We spent a couple hours looking at the different works and found it all pretty interesting. We grabbed a bite at one of the cafeterias at the convention center, then headed home.

Art fair sample

We didn’t have much time at home before we headed out again. We had tickets to see Zingaro, a French equestrian performing group. It was a visually interesting show, and they performed some pretty amazing moves, like riders standing on horses that were going at full gallop. But we were a bit disappointed in the whole thing. It was very highly hyped and quite expensive, and we didn’t feel like we got enough bang for our buck. Oh well, live and learn.

We try to have fun when we can, but unfortunately spend quite a bit of time on the daily business of living. Jon continues to work a lot of hours, and comes home tired each night. Last night he had a teleconference that started late in order to include participants from various places around the globe, so he didn’t make it home until almost 9:00. And he’s been spending quite a bit of time on weekends too trying to catch up with reading and email.

I finally got our Japanese banking situation squared away, and felt really proud the first time I concluded the final step in our current work process for getting money:

1. Jon’s paycheck gets automatically deposited into our U.S. bank account.
2. I contact the bank in the U.S. to do a wire transfer of U.S. dollars into our Japanese “multi-money account”.
3. I go on-line and change dollars into yen, moving them from the multi-money account into our “yen savings account”.
4. I go to the ATM and withdraw yen so from the savings account.

We aren’t used to handling as much cash in the States as we do here. In the U.S. we charged almost everything. But here, many smaller shops and restaurants don’t take credit cards. And I guess checks just aren’t done here in Japan. We’ve used our U.S. credit card successfully at a lot of places here, but yesterday they said my card was “rejected” when I tried to buy some train tickets for our upcoming visit to Kyoto. When I got home and called the credit card company, they said everything was fine with the card, and that a $1 charge came through from the train station. So now I need to go back to the train station and try again, though this time I’ll take the cash with me, just in case I have problems with the credit card again.

Other painful chores I’ve been working on this week include doing the U.S. taxes, and continuing with the address changes. My mom forwarded a bunch of mail to me, and I was a bit dismayed to see how many businesses we still needed to change our address with. I’ve been establishing on-line accounts wherever I can, so that I could change addresses there, and hopefully make it easier in the future. But it all is incredibly time-consuming, and really no fun whatsoever.

I’m currently working on a load of laundry. With the washer/dryer we have in the apartment, it takes at least 4 hours to do one small load of clothes. So far, I haven’t had the heart to try to do two loads on the same day. It’s a cool-looking machine, a single machine that does both washing and drying, something I’ve never heard of before. You can even set it up to do the whole thing in one big cycle. When it’s all done, the machine plays a little melody…much more fancy than the loud buzz that my washer and dryer in the States used to indicate that they were done.

The new Vonage phone system seems to be working well with one exception: the telephone solicitors know where to find us, and we get calls from them in the middle of the night. We’re on the “Do Not Call” list, but apparently there are lots of loopholes, so we still get plenty of calls. We’ve taken to closing the office door before we go to bed at night, so that we aren’t wakened up for campaign phone calls.

Speaking of which, the time difference between us and Baton Rouge is now 14 hours instead of 15, since daylight savings time began last Sunday. They don’t shift the time here like they do in the U.S. So keep that in mind if you’d like to call us.