Well, that was a fun and busy weekend. I learned how to say "My filling has fallen out, I need to make an appointment", got a new pedicure, saw some fireworks, attended a tap dancing recital* and ate some Middle Eastern food.

* the kids were cute. The beginning adults, not so much. I mean, I respect them for getting up there and doing it, but I don't have to enjoy watching people tap dance to Mamma Mia.

And now for some toe pictures! The copper dragonflies are the current look, the blue sparkly was last time.

Masami has decided we need business cards. I am fine with that and even a little excited, although I suspect they will last me from now until eternity. Perhaps it is a ploy to ensure that I can never quit? "I still have 45 cards left. I cannot quit until I manage to get rid of them all!" and the next thing you know, I'm teaching the grandkids of my current students.

Anyhow, we get to personalize them with our own photos, so I set up a Flickr account. I can only have 50, though, so 5 of these have to go. What ones would you get rid of?

Pictures

The weather appears to be under the impression that is October, not August. Hear that? That's the sound of me not complaining about the weather for a change. I'm fervently praying that it stays this way until actual October, but I suspect that the heat and humidity will come swamping back in a few days. In the meantime I'm enjoying not using the fan and not sweating all the time and cooking actual dinners that don't involve raw veggies.

I sent my passport application off today. I hope it doesn't take too long, I feel sort of nekkid without my passport. On the other hand, I am NOT looking forward to using these photos as my primary form of ID for the next five years, as they represent a whole new low in unflattering official pictures. On the plus side, I probably look about that bad after a nine hour flight, so at least there shouldn't be any identity issues at immigration.

I got some good travel news today. Andrew said he and the wife were at a travel agent trying to find somewhere to go during Silver Week. Sadly, they were unable to find something good, but he did tell me that package tours to Okinawa are really cheap right then. (Package in the sense that you pay one lowish sum for the flight and the hotel, not in the sense that you have to travel in a large group for four days.) I guess it's typhoon season, so it's a bit of a gamble. Yukie is planning to go to the travel agent tomorrow, so hopefully she will have some more good news for me then. A non-typhoony trip to Okinawa sounds pretty good...I have a new non-athletic bathing suit that needs to be broken in, so I'm all for some beach frolicking.

I'm almost ready to send off my passport application. I got the mother of two of my students to act as my guarantor, so I don't have to make the trip into Tokyo. I just need to get exact change and find out the home addresses of Masami and Andrew (who will be acting as references) and I'm good to go. Or at least, I will be, after I figure out how to request that something be sent registered mail.

It costs 8200 yen for a 24 page passport and only 500 yen more for a 48 page one. It's tempting, but I have not yet managed to fill up a passport in the measly five years they are valid (Australians only have to do this every ten years, lucky bastards.), and I think all those empty pages would depress me. As it is, I still have six empty pages left on my current passport.

Let's see, in the five years since getting this one, I've been to Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia (extra stamps from there because I popped back into KL on my stopover on my way home), Laos (stamps AND a giant one page visa), New Zealand, South Korea, Cambodia (another giant one page visa. I love those things, they really make a passport look used.), and of course, Canada many times, but those are only marked by the departure and re-entry stamps in Japan. Hmm. Seven countries in five years. Need to pick up the pace. Or choose to travel to countries that require giant visas.

Not this year, though. I do have tentative plans for my birthday, but they do not involve leaving the country. I mentioned to Yukie that if she wasn't busy that week, heading off to a nice onsen area for a few days would be pretty nice. So we're looking into that, or possibly even going to Okinawa for a few days. I'm just going to have to come to terms with the fact that travel in Japan for less than a week is going to cost me at least as much, if not more, than two weeks in Laos did.

Still no plans for Christmas yet. Canada is always good, of course, but I was there for a whole month this year, and I still haven't been to Bali, which is something that needs to be rectified. I've got a little bit longer to think on that.

Fellow Canadians, I give you our latest contribution to science:


Science ponders 'zombie attack'

By Pallab Ghosh
Science correspondent, BBC News


There has been a revival of the zombie film in recent years
If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.
That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.
They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures.
The scientific paper is published in a book - Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress.
In books, films, video games and folklore, zombies are undead creatures, able to turn the living into other zombies with a bite.
But there is a serious side to the work.
In some respects, a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal rapidly-spreading infection.

My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever
Professor Neil Ferguson
In their study, the researchers from the University of Ottawa and Carleton University (also in Ottawa) posed a question: If there was to be a battle between zombies and the living, who would win?
Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake) and colleagues wrote: "We model a zombie attack using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies.
"We introduce a basic model for zombie infection and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions."
On his university web page, the mathematics professor at Ottawa University says the question mark distinguishes him from Robert Smith, lead singer of rock band The Cure.
To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films.
"While we are trying to be as broad as possible in modelling zombies - especially as there are many variables - we have decided not to consider these individuals," the researchers said.
Back for good?
Even so, their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.
In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".
They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."
According to the researchers, the key difference between the zombies and the spread of real infections is that "zombies can come back to life".
But they say that their work has parallels with, for example, the spread of ideas.
The study has been welcomed by one of the world's leading disease specialists, Professor Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK government's chief advisors on controlling the spread of swine flu.
"The paper considers something that many of us have worried about - particularly in our younger days - of what would be a feasible way of tackling an outbreak of a rapidly spreading zombie infection," said Professor Ferguson, from Imperial College London.
However he thinks that some of the assumptions made in the paper might be unduly alarmist.
"My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it's dead forever. So perhaps they are being a little over-pessimistic when they conclude that zombies might take over a city in three or four days," he said.

Even by my standards, this has been one of my lazier weeks. (Aside from the earthquake, of course, which was a big bolt of adrenaline all Tuesday.) The kids are on summer holidays and it was Obon, so half of my students were absent. Of the ones that did come, another half were doing our quarterly test*, which means I didn't do a whole lot of teaching. Both of the kindergartens were closed, so Friday was very long and lazy, right up until having to go to work at 7:00. And this weekend...well, let's just say that it has not involved the need for putting on makeup or combing my hair. I even turned on the air conditioning for a bit this afternoon, just for maximum lounging pleasure. Reading and tv and smoothies, oh my.

* although bits of this were rather stressful. It's the strangest thing. Every week we practice a series of questions and answers, which always include "what day is it today?", "what's the date?" and "how's the weather?" Every week, and in that order. The younger kids, the five to sevens, don't seem to have much trouble with it, but the older ones, who have been doing it longer, inevitably give answers like "It's sunny!", "It's Tuesday!" and "It's sunn....oops." And it's not like I'm being tricky about it. Before we get to that part, they have to be able to recite the days of the week, which they can do, and then I go "And what DAY is it toDAY?" while eyeballing the calendar in a meaningful way.

Less fun than pictures of chubby laughing babies, I know.

Of all the many ways one can be woken up, a relatively large earthquake has got to be among the worst. There's the initial panic and the "oh crap, I'm gonna die in my jammies", and then once everything settles down there's the whole "well, what do I do now" thing going on. I eventually managed to go back to bed (three hours of sleep was not enough to start my day on) but it wasn't the most relaxed sleep I've ever had.

And, of course, it was really insanely hot, which didn't help. Andy had the right idea, fleeing to Australia for these two weeks, missing all the earthquakes and typhoons and heat indexes of 41 degrees.

Despite the heat, I've already bought a winter shirt. I was browsing the half-priced tank tops at Uniqlo and eyeing the incoming fall/winter wear all askance, when I remembered that last December I was freezing and looking for another warm undershirt and couldn't find any because, of course, they'd all sold out and were bringing in their spring wear by then. So I decided that I should just grab one now, even if it felt horribly wrong. Clearly, I would never make it in retail, since I feel lit is a good idea to carry seasonal clothes during the right season. Sure, a little bit of overlap is ok, but fleece in August when all your shorts are sold out? Hell no.

So, as you can see from the pictures, the fireworks were very nice. I went with Crazy Lady (so called for many, many reasons) and I was a bit apprehensive about how it was going to go, since she has often said that she only likes to watch fireworks for 15-30 minutes. I figured either we were going to leave early and then I would be annoyed and cranky but having to smile and be polite, or we'd stay for the full hour and the situation would be reversed. As it turns out, the reason she never really enjoyed fireworks before was apparently because she wasn't doing it right. We strolled in five minutes before the show started, got an excellent view by the lake, and sat happily for the full hour, oohing and aahing and enjoying the small child sitting nearby who yelled out "ARIGATOU!" every time a particularly spectacular sequence went off. Afterwards she couldn't stop talking about how fantastic it was and how she could have watched for another hour. Location, location, location. Also, not going with family members who drive you crazy is probably also a good way to get more enjoyment out of anything.

Tonight was supposed to be yoga in the park, but it was cancelled due to, wait for it, rain. Granted, this rain is typhoon-induced and so is a different kettle of fish altogether from the usual musty rainy season rain, but still. Timing. Sigh.

I managed to find the entire series of Due South for a mere $20 on the wonderful place known as the internet and popped in the first disc tonight. Oh, nostalgia.

Boomshiny!

So, the first weekend in August. On the one hand, it heralds the beginning of the second most hated month of the year (number one being February, with its unholy combination of hayfever misery and winter freezing). On the other hand, we are now that much closer to October.

Disregarding the whole August thing, though, it was a pretty great weekend. It was rainy and cool again, so that was annoying, but at least it wasn't crazy hot. I got myself a new pedicure and then went off to Shizuoka to hang out with Tomoko. We went out for dinner, where we were privileged to witness some Marlboro Girls in action. These are young women whose job seems to consist of wearing a very short white and gold dress, going around from table to table, hawking Marlboros. Awesomely, they actually carry a tiny lighted display case in their purses. Of course, when I say "table to table", I mean "only those with men at them", because despite Tomoko very ostentatiously puffing away at her own Marlboros, we were thoroughly ignored.

After that we went out to a sports bar. It probably says something weird about my social life that I can walk into a bar in Shizuoka and run into people I know, while I can walk around downtown Hamamatsu all day and night and never see a familiar face. Turns out there was a rugby game between South Africa and New Zealand playing, so we thought we'd check that out. It turned out to be utterly fascinating. I've never watched rugby before, but it appears to consist of all the men in a given team jumping on the guy from the other team who has the ball to form a giant writhing pile of men, then somehow the ball is passed on to another player and everyone jumps on him instead. I am assured that there are rules, but they are not immediately evident.

Unfortunately, during the half-time, a fight broke out between two of the guys there. Fighting about sports? Stupid. Fighting about sports when you are rooting for the same team? Really, really stupid. Randomly throwing homophobic slurs into the fight? Stupid, offensive, and lazy! Congratulations, you have achieved a perfect trifecta of idiocy.

That was the point where we decided to head home, so I don't know what happened with either the stupid, stupid fight or the game. What I do know is that I would like to try watching rugby again, preferably with someone more interested in explaining what is happening than starting stupid, stupid fights.

Today was a lazy day, involving sleeping until noon and having ice cream for lunch (technically more like dinner, since it was about 5 pm by that point). Good times, good times.