I practiced riding my bike to work today.  It's about 10-11 km from my house to work.  Usually I take the train which mostly runs underground so I didn't want my first attempt to ride my bike there to be on a work day. And that turned out to be a good thing. One of the things about streets in Japan is that they seldom run on a grid system.  It's not uncommon to have an intersection with five streets or intersections at strange angles that make it just a little tough to fig...

Why do people feel they need to add a banana to things with caramel?  Things taste lovely without banana. A new bakery opened up near my house.  Last time I sent I got a caramel flavored chou-cream.  I think it's what we call a cream puff back home. Lovely!  Amazing!  And without caramel. I bought one today and it was pretty nice except for the banana slices inside it.  Ick.  I'm kinda bummed.

I was listening to a recorded lecture today.  The speaker, Carla Neggers, quoted from Elizabeth George's book on writing, "discipline, you're born with it or you aren't."  I may need to go back and have another listen to double check my accuracy with the wording. The topic of the lecture was about understanding your creative process and the discussion turned to discipline. I suppose I could go into more context, but the phrase exactly is what I'm hoping people will comment on. Ar...

I got two books from Amazon that just came in the mail. One is a book about CSS and the other one is about Illustrator CS3.  I'm pretty excited about them.  I have been doing online tutorials with Lynda.com and Adobe, but I'm not as good with video as I am with a book.  It's my earning type I guess.  I even took lots of notes when watching the videos but I tend to daydream a lot during lectures.  When I was in uni, most of my notes had cartoons all over the pages. &nb...

Pastry Units Eaten: 2 (ok... well improving anyway) vegetable units: 2 (um... ok?) meat/fish/tofu units: 3 caffiene units: 2 (or do I add 1 unit for each espresso shot added...) Actual caffeine units:4 (grande has two shots, plus extra shot.... 3x2... but divided with husband... so three... but he didn't really get to drink much because he was driving....  yeah... 4 should be right) good television units: 1 (just during dinner and this is the 50th time to watch "Ocean's...

My birthday is in two minutes. I kind of wanted to have a large party, but then when I started to organize it, I realized that doing so was going to be full of disappointments and irritations so I wisely opted to have dinner with my husband only. That will be 98% guaranteed to be a really nice evening. The 2% is just in case of things like stepping on dog poo or twisting my ankle or getting salmonella.  Remote possibilities as I only give it a 2%.  Since it is 1 a.m. in the morning,...

Between my house and the neighbor's house there is a huge weed.  It's almost next to our front door.  It's about a meter tall with huge leaves about the size of dinner plates.  We haven't pulled it because it's on the neighbor's side (although the space between our houses is only about 50 centimeters) but we don't know our neighbors that well.  I'd like to pull it, but my husband says he wouldn't like people messing on his property, so we shouldn't either.  Fair enough. ...

I went to Hakeijima/ Sea Paradise Aquarium last week.  I really enjoyed it.  I shut off the flash and took lot of photos.   I was looking closely at the photos  and thought something looked weird about one.  When I took a closer look, I noticed lines like one would get from a plastic cast.  The lines can be seen on the back leg and around the toes.    Did the aquarium put up a fake frog?  Am I wrong? Maybe they had a sign up admitting to the ...

I was really excited!  The new chair I bought online just arrived.  I was a little annoyed to see that the box was small enough that some assembly was going to be required for this chair.  Not a big fan of assembling my own furniture, but since I am only slightly useless in this department I decided to grit my teeth and get through it.  After all, I just need to follow the instructions.   Except there are no instructions.  Now I have several pieces of an offic...

It's a revelation!  I never knew until three days ago that tonic water is sweet!  This explains the extra tasty vodka tonic I had when I was at an extremely interesting photography exhibition in a tiny, tiny izakaya in the Golden Gai area of Shinjuku.  At first, I thought it was the ambience adding to the flavor.   Golden Gai is a small maze of tiny izakayas (Japanese drinking bars) that are about as large as the average second bedroom of a typical apartment rented in Manh...

I just got back from a week-long trip to Prague with my husband.  We took the trip to celebrate our tenth anniversary.  I'm pretty happy that we've made it to ten, and we spent a long time debating about wether we should go or not. We booked our tickets and thought we were safely ready.  No such luck.  One day during house cleaning, I decide to check our passports to double check that our passport expiry dates are no problem.  Lucky I did.  My husband's passport ...

I'm a night owl. I just noticed that it is 3:30 in the morning and I had intended to get to sleep before midnight since I have a lot to do tomorrow. Part of the night owl situation is due to holiday time-warp. Things just don't seem to keep on track during the holidays. Another part is that I just got a new Mac and I'm trying to figure things out, try some new software and figure out how to get that disk out that got stuck. I figured it out and it was common sense (reboot) but I'm not ...

Today was a bit of a slow start, but it is finishing up okay. I went out to Jogashima and did some more work on my photography project. Waves were supposed to be higher today, but weren't. Light was completely different... dark and cloudy rather than brilliantly sunny. I got there about 3:30 which would have been perfect for the kind of shadows I was hoping for if it had been sunny. I will have to develop the film. Maybe there will still be some good stuff. Some of the cloud shots...

Not in order..... Still on my list are... *dacshunds running (have you ever seen the wiener dog races???? tooo hilarious. Popular breed here now. So jealous) *my chair in my study (I have a great little posture chair but I'm always in the slouchy comfy chair with laptop on lap) *view outside my study (recently there are butterflies living a life and death saga with all the birds) *hubby (he's just so cute when he's not pissing me off! ) new to list... *my photo *this cho...

In Tokyo, It feels like we get a noticeable earthquake here about once a month. I'm sure there are tremors going on all the time that I don't notice. Since July, there have been three earthquakes that shook enough to make me start to wonder if I had to think about taking cover. Luckily, they just shake stuff and no damage done. Enough shaking happened today that the trains probably stopped though. An interesting side effect of the earthquakes is the physiological effect it has one me....