Yes, I’ve been watching too much Band of Brothers again. All I can say is, what a damn fine series. Along with 24 (go Kief!), Freaks and Geeks (/lament), and Firefly (/sob), this series on DVD helped keep me a bit saner this year.

A month or so back, my brother and I found a spot from which to escape from people. Most everybody, that is. It’s a dam up in the mountains just a few miles off a major road, but apparently not very well known. We went there both Saturday and Sunday for a few hours of fishing and just to get away from it all. Saturday I caught a reallyreally small largemouth which attacked a lure not much smaller than itself – and that was it as far as our catch for the weekend – but it was enough. Being out on decently sized lakes with no one else in sight…

This weekend, when asked to describe a burrito to a SE Asian man (probably my future father-in-law, if such things matter), I described it as a “Mexican springroll.” Sometimes I just have my moments. That got me hungry, so I made fajitas for us all. In the age of Teflon-coated, feng shui-infused, drop-forged-in-space cookware, cast iron griddles still kick ass. However, my newly-purchased titanium wok (purchased at Jusco, 2000 yen) positively 0wnzz0rs for black bean sauce stir fry, garlic chicken, and the assorted curry dishes I have tried cooking in it. It heats faster than steel and is light enough to perform street tricks with (I’ve tried the Jive Nelly…

Everything is OK.

It’s very close now. Nothing much to report, except that the neighborhood strays are fighting for porch space.

The earthquakes passed and the gigantic wall of water ala Lucifer’s Hammer never came… But someone’s must be doing an effective rain dance because there’s another goddamn typhoon due to hit tomorrow – the weather this year seems intent on beating the shit out of us here.

There was a magnitude 5 shaker in Wakayama earlier this evening when we were in a liquor store – all the stacks of bottles started moving back and forth, which was not the most reassuring of circumstances. A large aftershock came about five minutes ago… It was also a mag 5 but it felt a lot stronger here and they’re predicting tsunamis this time. There’s an emergency broadcast running in English and Japanese… Our little island should be okay. My place is half a mile from the coast so we should be cool. The shitty thing about living on an island is that it isn’t covered in the news… They…

The ending of this film bothered me so much that I had to go looking on the net, totally convinced that I had missed something vital in the 0.5 seconds it took me to throw a tissue in the garbage there near the end of the film during the parade scene. Verdict: I didn’t miss a goddamn thing.

It occurred to me today that I haven’t been to a public library (not counting my bathroom – don’t laugh, even in an extended disaster situation there will always be enough “paper” in there) for a pretty goddamn long time – ever since moving out to this island, so about five years. After university, there just wasn’t much reason to go, especially since I had my trusty old Powerbook 190 and an Asahi-net dial-up account. Oh, and also because I hate reading books in Japanese since I’m pretty good at it but not good enough to not want a dictionary beside me, and paper dictionaries are heavy. I love public…