Four Years of Marriage = Four Years of Blogging!

Four years ago today, on 7/7/2007, Nana made me the happiest man alive by agreeing, against her better judgement, to be my lawful wedded life, so on and so forth.

I responded by subjecting her to two years in Korea, a year in Edinburgh, a year in Japan, and a four-year concurrent sentence of intellectual property tirades and horrible, horrible puns. Even if she weren't already awesome in all the countless ways she's awesome, Nana would be awesome anyway for the mere fact of having put up with me for these 48 months.

Here's to you, Nana! How about four years going on forty?

Earthquake/Tsunami volunteering: Do For Japan

A lot of people have asked since we've been back how much our part of Japan was affected by the Tohoku quake and tsunami in March. As we've said, Fukuoka was essentially unaffected - some people coming and going based on nuclear fears and evacuations, some fluctuations in produce availability and price, but no power shortages and certainly no damage. Fukuoka prefecture (a prefecture is a bit like a state or a county) has, as a consequence, tried to give a lot. The local campaign is "Ganbarou Nippon," or "Do for Japan." You can see its web site here, and here partially in English courtesy of Google translate (scroll to the bottom).

Under the auspices of this campaign and in collaboration with Tohoku International School in Sendai, fellow FIS faculty member Matt and his wife Ashley organized a volunteer trip to the Sendai area. You can see their amazing photographs through their blog and on their Picasa album here. I've pilfered this picture of three of our students in Onigawa to show you a bit of what they experienced:

Obviously, much of Japan is still in serious trouble. In the interests of, as Fukuoka Prefecture put it, "doing" for Japan, I hope that the school will be able to arrange some more volunteer trips when I'm in the country and can go along. If you are interested in "doing" something financial to help, you might consider the Japanese Red Cross (you can donate through Paypal here). On a smaller scale, I have just discovered that Tohoku International School has a fund for families in the Sendai community. You can donate through their web site here.

Belated post: Fukuoka International School Spring Festival

FIS has a spring festival which used to be annual, switched to biannual because of the colossal workload involved, and has swung back to annual largely because it is much easier to advertise when you can get people into a rhythm: it's spring; time to go to the FIS festival.

For all that the day is a ton of work, it's also a big success for the school, raising lots of money for PTA and raising the school profile. We also were able to raise a lot of money for earthquake and tsunami relief - 100% of flea market sales and if I recall correctly 10% of the overall sales. Besides the flea market, there were food stalls showing off the culinary prowess of the diverse parent body, a used book sale (expat GOLD), and tons of games for kids of all ages put on by the various homerooms. Justin's class had a balloon shoot using a dart gun, which was highly popular, but I am proud to say the most profitable of all the games was the 9th grade coin drop. We filled an aquarium with water and cups and invited kids to drop Japan's obnoxiously tiny, plasticky 1-yen coins (seriously; they're like something that would come with a game board) into the cups to win prizes. I think we got a lot of tickets because we were the best game for the under-3 set: you didn't need any hand-eye coordination to play.

There was also a stage with various performances, which was the original rationale behind this belated and really uninteresting post. I apologize to readers who have been spoiled by Justin's excellent posts of the past weeks. We've been in Pittsburgh at family events for the last few days receiving hugely flattering compliments from people reading the blog, and now I have performance anxiety. This, for instance, will be Justin's aunt's hairdresser's inaugural subscription post (hi, Di!) and I am deeply chagrined that it is so below par.

But what are you going to do, complain about it? Before you do, bear in mind that I did this during the Martial Arts club Spring Festival mainstage performance:

(Actually, breaking was about the only part of this performance that went well for me. I help our PE teacher Raffy with his after-school program, which is Tong Il Moo Do. My black belt is in Taekwondo. This means that although I help him wrangle the kids and correct them on basic techniques (pro tip: when you punch, don't lead with your knuckles), when it comes to forms and other choreographed sequences, I have no time to learn and therefore have no idea what I'm doing. After my spectacular failure on one-steps, preset patterns of defense in response to a punch, fellow teacher Kevin voted to demote me to a blue belt, and I can't really disagree.)

If you are not intimidated by my martial arts, perhaps you will fear Justin's African drum club? (I don't know why. Maybe you don't like loud noises, or funk, or you are a Korean baby and you've just caught sight of Justin's beard. He makes children in supermarkets cry, and then I have to bug my eyes out at them to confuse them and then they forget to be afraid. It's very stressful.)

Some of you may be concerned by the fact that our students seem to have no faces. Rest assured, they do in reality all possess eyes and ears, although in the grand tradition of middle schoolers often prefer to use neither. I'm just not comfortable with blogging photos of the kids so I try to blur them for discretion.

Our time in the US continues until August (this is a great opportunity for you to burgle our Japanese apartment, where you will not find enough valuables to offset the cost of the plane ticket) so you can look forward to many future inane catch-up posts until we get back overseas and start doing interesting things again. Carry on!

Back in Pittsburgh, with a New Outlook on Life

I finally made it to Pittsburgh yesterday around noon. All told, it took me about 44 hours to get from door to door, with roughly the last half of that getting from Detroit to Pittsburgh.

Yesterday did have one more dash of bad travel karma in store for me: a seatmate from Russia and/or Brazil (he was carrying both passports) who must have weighed about 500 pounds. You could see everyone at the gate eyeing him up, praying that they wouldn't be next to him, but I could have told them not to worry. Luckily, it was only about a 30-minute flight. I don't know how much longer I could have spent with my knees pressed together like a debutante's.

There was one upside to this whole Detroit ordeal, though: I got to share it with a party of four hilarious rednecks from Oklahoma who'd clearly never seen the inside of an airport and had never been off the Great Plains. All OU graduates about my age, they took everything the day threw at them with a sense of childlike wonder. The moving walkway, for instance, was a treat, as was the $6 dinner voucher for the cancelled flight and the free (!) hotel room provided by Delta. "Daggum," the ringleader said, without a hint of irony, "I thought we was gonna have to sleep on the floor."

Seriously, these guys provided of free entertainment. At one point they even told the gate agent that they'd take a standing-room-only ticket if they had to. I mean, how do you have a bachelor's degree and not know airlines don't sell standing-room-only tickets?

Then, when we finally took off, they were pumped it was cloudy. Apparently, they'd had clear skies all the way up from Oklahoma, so they'd still never flown through the clouds. Coming into Pittsburgh, they were amazed by the size of the Ohio river and all the big daggum hills.

The crowning glory, though, was when we flew over a Sheetz right before landing.

"Hey! Look! It's a Sheetz!"

"Bigger 'n any Sheetz I've ever seen."

What an inspiring outlook on life!

Welcome to Detroit! My Home for the Next 20 Hours (At Least)

I knew I had some karma to pay back for finally defeating that driver's license thing.

I suppose I should start at the beginning.

Now, Delta. Tsk, tsk. An incredible record of failure today, from the moment I fell into your capable hands at Narita. First, the check-in kiosk apparently wasn't showing the seating charts correctly. I chose what looked like an aisle seat, but turned out to be the middle of a row of three; the young woman next to me was pleasantly surprised to find that what looked like a middle seat was actually a window. Seems they had the seat letters off by one.

During the flight, the A/C malfunctioned, causing a fine, chilling dew to settle on every surface in the cabin, for which the flight crew seemed very put-upon to apologize. Partway through, when they dimmed the cabin for the in-flight movies (no in-seat video, of course), we all realized the reading lights weren't working. After another put-upon apology from the flight crew, I decided to pop a couple Dramamine and knock myself out. I certainly wasn't about to watch the movie.

Upon arrival, then, the police greeted the plane, apparently to question a woman who got angry at the flight crew when they couldn't re-seat her, though her seat was saturated with dew. (I was lucky--the damp never got worse than a thin film in my part of the plane.) Customs and immigration was fine, but the baggage claim was not. Our bags came out on two different carousels, one marked from Tokyo and one marked from Taipei. Granted, the flight originated in Taipei, but you'd think they'd list both departure points on both carousels?

Naturally, my bag showed up on the carousel from Taipei.

(A happy side note: in the customs line I ran into an old colleague from APIS--Nadine, the former elementary school principal. She's teaching in Singapore now and was heading back to Canada for the summer.)

When I got past customs, I checked the big board, only to find that my flight to Pittsburgh was delayed by 3 hours, which on a 20+ hour travel day really isn't all that bad. While I was en route to the gate, though, they cancelled the flight and automatically re-booked me for the next one--which was subsequently delayed, then cancelled. As of right now, I have a confirmed seat out of Detroit tomorrow morning and I'm on standby for the last flight to Pittsburgh tonight.

I could have had it worse, though: apparently, they've cancelled every flight from Detroit to Pittsburgh today, so some of the folks on my cancelled flights were actually booked to leave Detroit this morning. To add insult to injury, about a third of them were coming to town for the Pirates' game tonight. Needless to say, these were Red Sox fans--I'd think twice about driving downtown to see the Pirates, let alone boarding a plane. That makes me wonder that perhaps this wasn't my karma after all: maybe I was just caught up in the karmic aftermath of the Boston Bruins' Stanley Cup win. The fact that Boston fans are suffering does lighten the burden a bit.

While waiting for word on my second flight, I got to chatting with a stranded Delta pilot about the delays. Apparently, none of them have been related to weather. He seemed to think they were knock-on effects from earlier in the week, when storms kept enough planes a pilots from getting where they were needed. Why this should affect the Pittsburgh flight exclusively is beyond me--I don't see any other cancellations on the board.

The second cancellation was particularly farcical: they apparently re-routed a larger plane to handle the extra passengers, but failed to locate a first officer for the new plane. No one bothered to tell the gate agents, however, so we sat waiting while the delay grew longer and longer and the scant few seats left tonight disappeared. By the time we were officially cancelled, there were basically no seats out of Detroit going anywhere.

If I weren't so jet-lagged, I'd simply rent a car and drive home, but I don't trust myself on the road in my addled state. At least Delta is putting me up in a pretty nice hotel (Hilton Garden Inn, when everyone else got Best Western). Pro tip: always, always, always be polite and friendly with the airline agents, no matter how badly their employers have ruined your day.

Decaf coffee? In Asia?!? And, Back to the Burgh

Yes, I am currently drinking a glorious cup of decaf at the Tully's Coffee overlooking the north wing international departures hall at Narita. This is the first cup of decaf coffee I've found anywhere in Asia. (I love the taste of coffee, but can't handle the caffeine.)

Though I could probably use a slightly stiffer drink after that landing. It is windy in Tokyo today.

Anyway, let this serve as notice that Nana and I will be languishing in Pittsburgh and Ohio for the next several weeks, so aside from some posts from Nana on her conference in DC, you may not hear much from us for a bit.

And if you're anywhere within road-tripping distance of Pittsburgh or Columbus, let us know!

Chapter the Last: In Which Justin Finally Shows Fukuoka Prefercture Where It Can Put Its License--Namely, In His Wallet)

As of yesterday, I was ready to declare my epic battle with the Fukuoka Prefecture Driver's License Center a resounding Pyrrhic defeat. (You'll find a chronicle of the mighty struggle here, here, here, and here.) Sure, I walked away from the ordeal without a license, but at least in giving up I could claim victory over my pride. I was actually kind of pleased with myself for accepting that, as a great man said, one can't always get what one wants, and for walking away from the whole stupid thing before I let it become some kind of silly obsession.

Then I woke up today and dragged myself back there again. I tricked myself by saying I was just going down to Tenjin for lunch, and if I should happen to finish around noon, and then if I should happen to find myself on the 151 bus at 12:20, then I might as well take the test one more time, because it's not like I'd have anything better to do.

And it's a good thing I did. When I woke up this morning, getting behind the wheel of a car would have been a felony. As of 4:30 PM on this the 23 day of June, 2011, I became just like every other chump on the road, except my piece of plastic was all shiny and new.

In the end, victory was a bit of an anticlimax. (Isn't that always the case?) I suppose I was expecting an ovation, or some tickertape, or at least a bit of a smile.* All the examiner said at the end was "Okay," then he rushed me off to buy some stamps I'd forgotten. (In government offices in Japan, you don't simply pay for stuff--you buy stamps at one window, stick them on a piece of paper, then return them to another window. Sometimes, the same person actually goes from the first window to the second window in the interim. I have no idea why.) So I bought stamps, waited, handed someone a piece of paper, waited, had my picture taken, waited, signed a piece of paper, waited, then got my actual, physical license . . . and waited, because I was kind of on a roll, until the guy at the counter told me I could go. Then I got the heck out of there in case they decided to change their minds.

Oh, and how did I pass, you ask? By doing the exact same thing I did on Tuesday, but with a different examiner--plus an extra centimeter or two between my tires and the stop line.

In the end, though, I have to say I look on my victory as a mixed blessing. Success is less interesting than failure, and I'm afraid by succeeding I've ruined my narrative. There was something arresting in the story of a man who must learn to suffer nobly the shame of not being able to drive his wife to Costco. Almost Greek. Maybe it would have been better for my soul to have left this one enemy unconquered.

Aw, who am I kidding? I can drive in Japan now! Whoopee!

*I should note that the guy at the counter through this whole thing had obviously started to take pity on me. When I turned in my application (again), he whipped out a map of the course and circled the stop sign three times in dark red ink, as if I had somehow walked away from that whole thing where the examiner got out of the car and crawled on the ground without realizing that, yes, the freakin' stop sign was the problem. But he did shake my hand when he gave me my license, which was nice--it's not a common gesture in Japan, so it showed a nice little hint of cultural sensitivity on his part.