Rainy Season

Well, it's been several more weeks since our last update, so let me fill you in. Robert has gotten his last couple of eye-teeth, it's starting to warm up and get humid, it's been raining a lot, and oh, and we had another earthquake -- a big one, though a fair distance from Tokyo.

My desk is on the 17th floor, and a buddy of mine and I were just sitting down to our desks to get a bit of extracurricular work done on a Saturday morning when we felt the floor start to sway, and the mini-blinds on the windows started slapping rhythmically back and forth from side to side. It was actually quite nautical; there was a creak in the ceiling keeping time with the slapping of the mini-blinds that sounded a lot like a mast under load, and there was the same sense of rolling you get when you're on a sailboat cutting through ocean swells. It lasted about 40 seconds too, plenty of time to figure out what's happening and just hope it doesn't get any worse. Happily for us, that's the worst we got of it. Unfortunately, the epicenter was over a hundred miles from Tokyo, so there was quite a bit of damage, though the main affected area is a hot-springs resort area and relatively rural.

The earthquake triggered numerous landslides, so several hundred tourists were stranded at various hot-springs resorts in the area because access roads were destroyed. Oh well, if you've got to be stranded somewhere ...

We haven't gotten up to much mischief since Loki left several weeks back, but the Tokyo Calypso Customer Conference is tomorrow and my folks are coming for a week's visit this weekend, so I expect we will be up to no good sooner or later.

Speaking of "up to no good", Sarah, Robert and I will be back in Seattle from July 13th through July 18th, camping in North Plains Oregon on the 18th, 19th and 20th for the "Northwest String Summit", then in San Francisco from July 24th through 26th to sort through the boxes in our apartment and decide what is coming back to Tokyo with us. I am going to stay in San Francisco through August 1st while Sarah heads over to Yakima with Robbie, then we'll meet up for a friend's wedding on August 2nd, spend some time with Sarah's family, attend her 10 year high school reunion over the next weekend, and ultimately fly back to Tokyo on the 11th. If you are going to be in the same town state as us, please let me know, we would love to get together while we're in town.

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