Month: February 2011

Sure formula

Yesterday I slaved out in the hot sun, carefully detailing our black car.

After that, I watered the garden heavily because it looked dry.

Today I woke to the sound of heavy raindrops hitting banana leaves.

This is only the second time it’s rained in four months.

The first time happened after I washed both cars.

—

I am a level 3 shaman with powerful rain juju.

h4xx0r3d

My admin login for this blog either got corrupted or was intentionally changed by some script kiddie, so I need to purge everything and build it up again. My last backup is recent, from New Years Eve of last year (thank Omniscient Being of Choice that I had nothing else to do that day). I’ll be losing all of my posts from January and February, but I don’t mind so much…

This blog’s feed gets picked up by Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz, so when I import the old posts, it might avalanche.. or not. Apologies in advance.

UPDATE: Maybe I didn’t lose anything except, strangely, the banner – I have backups of it, but it’s time to make a new one.

..random

Mina shook her head in serious disagreement 17 times in a row yesterday – I was asking about people she loves; apparently she just hates everyone, because by the time I got to the end I had run out of people she knows by name and had started naming animals.

—

Max just told his mother to leave him alone and go be with daddy.

—

I got an e-mail from a distant relative in Kyushu who runs a beauty salon that T, Adam, Inaba and I visited 12 (?) years ago when we went to visit my cousins Kana and Aya in Saga Prefecture (Saga was where my grandfather on my dad’s side grew up, and is the Northeast Thailand of Japan – the locals move out to work shitty jobs in the big city, and the only people moving in are either going back to work on their family’s farm, or to get away from people in general.) Anyway, when we visited the salon, they just happened to be shooting a commercial to be aired on a local TV station, so we got to be in it while getting haircuts and shouting the name of the store – “HEADS!” – at the camera.

So the owner of that shop is either a distant cousin or uncle (which makes him close enough to kill for under Sackett law), and he emailed me out of the blue yesterday. He’s recently into sansevieria plants (AKA mother in law’s tongue), which are not so popular in Japan, so he’s coming this June to check out some of the farms and collectors here in Thailand. Maybe we will hook up.

—

Max had to take an entrance exam for a nearby preschool yesterday (his current school, which he loves going to now, is closing at the end of March). They test out the little kids by giving them various little tasks and challenges like drawing, puzzles, logic games, motor skills testing, simple questions, etc. Max would not enter the room without mommy, but aced all of the tests. He apparently did some of them twice, by choice, because they gave him too much time to complete them. Sounds scarily familiar.

—

Nam thought up a brilliant substitute for tenkasu today: Rice Krispies!

This was sufficiently genius for me to acknowledge that I am truly lucky to have married her… For the ten thousandth time or so.

😉

Spicy Maple Links of Destruction 2/11/11

Offered mostly without comment because I’m still chewing on them:

The last Japanese man remaining in Kazakhstan
A Kafkian tale of the plight of a Japanese POW in the Soviet Union

An Evening with J. D. Salinger
Of course he’s crazy, that’s why his best works ring so true.

Educating B Students
My question is: Where have all the A students gone?

The New Atheists’ Narrow Worldview
If it weren’t for the crazy shit based in monkey-ass superstition, religion wouldn’t be half as entertaining… And in that regard, I think of animistic religions as more honest than others.

And finally:

Alternate Universe Movie Posters
So cool.