A few years ago, when I got my first generation iPod Touch, I also bought a pair of decent earphones. I already had some Shure mics for the band, so I got Shure SE110 in-ear sound isolating earphones. They have some foamy-type tips that conform to the shape of your ear canals, which are pretty good at keeping the outside world from leaking in, and your music from leaking out. Anyway, a few months before the two-year warranty expired, the left side started to drop sound intermittently. It was obvious to me that the wiring had just worn out inside the left side, because I could just press on one spot along the cord to restore the sound.

I had read good things about Shure's warranty repair service online, at least in the US, so I sent the earphones to the Shure Asia warranty center in Hong Kong, confident that they would soon repair and return them to me. However, they sent me an email a few days later, claiming that the problem was due to ear wax, so they wouldn't repair it. They refused to look into the real cause of the problem and instead sent me pictures of the ear wax. They refused to respond to my entreaties that they look at the wire, and instead tried to sell me a replacement set at what amounted to full retail price in Hong Kong dollars. The customer service lady, Elaine Ho, was never rude or even unfriendly; just unresponsive and useless. Despite my pleas, and swearing that I and everyone in my band would never use any Shure products again, they just sent the earphones back to me unrepaired.

So what about the earphones? One of my students replaced the jack where the wire was faulty, in about 10 minutes, and now they work fine again. All for a cost of 100 yen, and Shure's reputation as a reputable company.

One of the few Japanese traditions I actually enjoy is the sending of New Year's cards, or nengajo. You're supposed to send them to pretty much everyone you know, thanking them for whatever they may have done for you in the past year. The standard greeting is 明けましておめでとうございます which kinda means, "Congratulations on surviving the previous year unscathed." so you aren't supposed to send them to anyone who had a family member die in the previous year, and you're not supposed to send any if someone in your family died in the previous year. In fact, you have to send a notification card in advance, letting everyone know not to send you a card because you are "in mourning."

Of course the post office is totally behind this whole thing, because it gets people to mail lots of postcards, at 50yen a pop. The post office holds all nengajo and delivers them on New Year's day, and hires lots of high school and university students just to handle the rush of cards at the end of the year. They run commercials on TV encouraging everyone to send lots of nengajo, and they sell blank, postage-prepaid cards for use in inkjet printers in front of al the train stations. The printer companies are also really behind this because it gets people to buy printers and use a lot of ink. All the marketing in November and December is about how easy this new printer will make it to design and print your nengajo.

As for the design, there are lots of set phrases that you can use on the cards. The most common design element is an animal, corresponding to whatever Chinese Zodiac year we are entering. For example, this year will be the year of the Tiger, so everyone features tigers on their cards. In the past, the cards were all hand drawn and hand written, but with the advent of the above-mentioned printers, people can just take a picture of their kid with a tiger and run off hundreds of copies, using mail merge to print all the addresses and never lifting a pen at all. Almost everybody either does something like that, or downloads a design from the internet. But of course I have to draw mine by hand, because I am like that. A lot of my current and former students send them to me, so I have to send out like 70 or so a year. Of course I print out the same drawing on all the cards, and just write in separate greetings like "Happy New Year" or "Do your homework!" Here is my design for this year:

So, we just had Christmas. What did I do to celebrate Christmas? Of course, I was at work all day. Because so many classes had been cancelled due to the typhoon in the summer, and the 3 weeks of influenza vacation, they added a bunch of extra classes in winter "vacation." Apparently if they didn't add the classes, the kids wouldn't have enough class time to graduate.

But I didn't even have any classes to teach. On the 25th, my guitar club also put on a Christmas concert, together with the brass band and the baton club. So I had to organize all the games and stuff, make the programs, set up the mixing board and all that stuff, as well as practice my parts for the 4 songs I was in this time. So I was completely busy all the time up to the 25th.

As for the concert itself. I'd say it mostly went okay. I actually had to sing a song this time, Evergreen, in Japanese. I forgot some of the words but everyone seemed to think I was good. Nonetheless, I was horribly embarrassed and will probably never sing in front of people again. I mean, what are you supposed to do with your hands? I was just standing there swinging them around. I had to concentrate to remember the lyrics and sing in tune, so I didn't have enough mental power left over to get excited or move around, or even make eye contact with the crowd. Overall, a lot of people came and the room was full, and everyone had a good time apparently. Here's our set list.

Butterfly - Ellegarden
Evergreen - Straightener
After Dark - Asian Kung-Fu Generation
Love Addict - Vamps
Rolling Star - YUI
本日ハ晴天ナリ - Do As Infinity
有心論 - radwimps
Love Addict - Vamps
赤橙 - Acidman
君の知らない物語 - supercell
Don't say "lazy" - Cagayake! girls
少女S - Scandal

Those nerds or otaku among you will notice that most of these songs are from various recent anime. This is due to the fact that the members are mostly girls, and not even the cool punk kind so much. Some of them are like 17 years old and still listening to boy bands, Johnnies Entertainment and the like. I've tried my best but it seems that there's nothing I can do to cure them of it. But there's a few good songs in there anyway.

So there's been a massive outbreak of influenza at my school. At least 35 first graders and 15 second graders have been infected: some with the regular influenza, and some with the type-A Russian influenza that I had in January, and some with the swine flu. Of course this means that the entire two grades are shut down for a week, and everyone is confined to their houses. Of course, I still have to go to school anyway, even though I have no classes. Actually, this week is the sports festival, so the first and second graders get to miss that. I don't know whether they are lucky or not, but they were mostly all looking forward to it so I guess not. On top of all that, the Emperor's flock of birds, which are raised right here in Koshigaya, have also come down with bird flu. Good thing that there's no such thing as rice paddy flu; I'd never be able to leave my house again.

So I've been really busy up until recently. Since I got back from Texas, all of my time was spent preparing for the school festival. If you're really interested in reading about that, you can read the entries from previous years, because it's the same story every year. All the classes put on boring educational displays, recycled from previous years, and my band does a concert. Since we have like 30 or 40 members (I don't have enough fingers to count past 21 so I don't really know how many there are.) we played 10 songs, and we would have played more but that was all that would fit in the one hour we were allotted. And because the kids pick the songs themselves, they ranged from the really cool to the really crappy. I performed in two songs as well, which was fun. New this year was that Hana-chan came to watch the concert. She really seemed to like it! Of course the house was packed to fire hazard levels, so badly that even the principal couldn't get in, but I saved a seat for Hana in the front row. Anyway, for those of you interested in a brief primer on J-rock popular with 13-year-old girls, here is the program, brought to you by the magic of YouTube(Band names are first):

Well, I'm back in Japan now. But I had a fun three weeks in Texas. I stayed at my parents' new house, since they moved to Texas and sold my childhood home, to some weirdos as I hear it. Of course, it was really hot over there, but honestly it feels hotter in Japan because of the humidity. Austin seems like a pretty nice city. I don't think that I could ever live there, for three reasons. One, it's too hot. And sunny. And hot. Two, everything is too far apart. It was at least a 10 minute drive to get to anywhere, including the supermarket, the beer store, or anything. There was no way to walk to anywhere from my parents' house. Maybe if I chose a less-remote location. Three, the state of education in Texas makes it unsuitable for raising a child.

I got to see my 90-year-old grandma while I was there, and Hana got to meet her great-grandma. She's got Alzheimer's Disease, so she's kindof in-and-out in terms of remembering who people are and stuff like that. She's really attached to and dependent on my dad (her son) but she doesn't really seem to get who most other people are. She had some idea of who I was, sometimes. She mostly just goes about her daily routine, sometimes doing the same thing multiple times. Conversations with her can also get really circular. She could never remember how old Hana was, and asked us about 30 times a day. Every time, it was the same conversation. "Really? Almost two? She's so big!" I found her mostly harmless, although not being able to leave her by herself made it difficult to plan outings and stuff like that. But she really seemed to get on my mom's nerves a lot.

The best thing about Texas was (and is) the food. I gained so much weight while I was there. In addition to my mom's home cooking, which has improved tremendously since she got a job at a cooking store and started using bacon in everything, we also had lots of steak and ribs and barbeque and all sorts of other assorted meat products and byproducts, as well as pizza and stuff like that. The next time I go to Texas, I think that I am going to just skip my parents' house completely and just camp out at Rudy's.

The trip was also a really good experience for Hana I think. She got to go swimming for the first time in the backyard pool. My parents got her a special bathing suit with inflatable parts on the front and back so she wouldn't sink. She really liked swimming. We took her to the Austin Children's Museum and she loved running around trying to talk to the other kids. She can't really speak English or Japanese yet, so nobody could figure out what she was trying to say, but she was babbling a lot. She also enjoyed chasing the two dogs around the house, and actually got to the point where she wasn't outright nasty to them, instead properly petting them and being nice. They were still terrified of her though. You can see all the action on Hana's YouTube channel.

The day before I left for Texas, I had my annual physical at work. As mandated by Japanese law, the health checks here are much more thorough than anything you would get from an employer in the US, unless you were suspected of stealing something. This year I was 35 or over for the first time, so a new test was added to my already-comprehensive battery of proddings, this one the most invasive and ridiculous of them all; the stomach inspection.

I was made to strip down and then swallow some barium sulphate, together with some bicarbonate powder. This powder gets all frothy and expands your stomach when it gets down there, and the barium coats the lining of your stomach and esophagus so it shows up easily on an X-ray. So you drink that down with a bunch of yogurt, and then have to hold your belches down until the test is over. If you burp at all, you have to drink a new dose. Fortunately I have trained myself in the fine control of my sphincters from an early age, so it was no problem for me. But some people had to do it five or six times.

It's harder than you think, because once you've swallowed the barium, they make you lay on this sarcophagus-like table and flop around a lot. You have to raise your arms above your head and then roll onto your stomach and your right side and so on. While you do that, the coffin is rotating into different angles so that sometimes you are upside down or diagonal or vertical or horizontal or just mixed up. The speaker that the guy's voice was coming out of sounded like a drive through, so it was really difficult to even understand his Japanese instructions while doing a handstand naked and holding back a massive powdery white belch. Of course he was in a different room speaking to me through a speaker, because the whole time this was going on, he was flying a little robot X-ray camera all around me and looking at the details of my esophageal lining. It was over in about 5 minutes, but the whole time it was going on, I felt sure that my coworkers were going to jump out from behind a secret door and tell me what game show I was on.

But, the test ended uneventfully, unless you count my belch of relief. Apparently, the Barium makes you constipated too, so they gave me some laxative to take. I kept burping for about the next three hours, and then I laid some nice like café au lait easter eggs.

Okay, I'm leaving for Texas. It's eve hotter there than it is here, so this should be a mostly indoor experience for me. But before even worrying about that, I have to get through this 12 hour plane ride with Hana. No sleep till Houston!

Hey everybody, I'm going to Texas! That's right, that whole family and I will be spending three wonderful weeks in sunny Texas. Okay, what I mean to say is that we will be attempting to survive three weeks sweating our balls off in Texas, rather than sweating them off here. I led to believe, by certain Texas apologists, that while the temperature is hotter in Texas, it's actually a dry heat and as such won't feel as hot as the wet nasty armpit cheese heat of Japan. I for one will believe this when I smell it. I suspect that the majority of my time will be spent slinking around in the shadows like a rattle snake or [insert hokey Western metaphor here]. So anyone who has some free time and wants to be sweated on by real live foreigners, please come to Austin, Texas from July 16th.

Holy crap, it was Father's Day the other day. And I am a father. I didn't even notice. Of course Hana is too young to get me anything. I even talked to my own dad and didn't even realize it. I guess I'm pretty out of it. Because it's so hot. Yes, it's time to complain about the heat again.

On w him, I went to look at a model house the other day. We got an advertisement in the mail, or at least in the mailbox, advertising the all-natural, all-wood construction, which is actually pretty rare/expensive in Japan. It was really near here so we went to check it out. It was pretty nice. All the floors and walls and stuff were wood, to the point where it seemed wasteful to use so much wood. The heavy wooden chairs and tables were especially annoying. At least the fireplace wasn't wood. (There wasn't one.) But it was fun to look at anyway. Of course there's no way I'm planning on buying a house; I barely spend any time in the one I have now. The last thing I need now is a more expensive, all-wood place to store my stuff and my family.