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New Year's Eve

We're staying in and watching the Kohaku. Which, yes, is ghastly, but we're watching it for the over-the-top, whole alternate class of weird that we had to invent new terminology, production numbers. So far, the opening number was pretty bland, but—

At the moment the cross-dressing enka singer is doing his thing and he does not disappoint. There must be 50 pounds of beadwork on his headdress. He has a huge skirt of parachute cloth which is also being rippled (and worn!) by a dozen girl dancers. Priscilla Queen of the Desert can barely dream of aspiring to this, and that's on her best days. For the first time, I wish I had a digital video recorder so I could YouTube some of these. Words fail.

Still, we're going to have to break out the champagne soon if we're going to get through this. There are a lot of enka singers between the big showstoppers. Oz has already accused BoA of "totally Milli Vanilli-ing." I said, "No! Not on the Kohaku! NHK would never have lip-synching."

We also came up with an idea for an Internet quiz: What Japanese folkloric creature are you? Tengu? Fox lady? Tanuki? Kappa? Too bad we have no follow through.

Did somebody say "bacon"?

Sparky, lured toward the kitchen by the aroma of frying bacon.

We gave him some to try, but the idea of bacon seemed to be more appealing than the reality.

Cooking breakfast at home always sounds much nice than it really is, especially when your standard is the diner breakfast. The key aspects of diner breakfast being that it is cooked by someone else, much faster than I could, followed by the dishes being washed by someone else.

The cooking process took for-damn-ever, mostly because we do this so little that we've never developed a system. Mid-cooking, Oz had to run to the grocery store, because our elderly bacon had little blue spots on. As the process advanced, the air in the house filled with a mist of atomized pork fat. "Yay! We can get that diner smell in our clothes without having to go to a diner, where they would also wash the dishes!" I said as I ran around opening windows. Lucky for us, it was really warm today.

I think the house is about aired out, and we didn't set of the smoke alarm, so okay, not a bad way to usher in the Year of the Pig. On TV Japan last night, they did some YotP duty by running a special on the history of pork cookery in Japan, featuring some interesting (if you're into that sort of thing) stories about the transmission of pork cookery traditions to Japan from mainland Asia through Korea and Okinawa. The dramatizations showed guys with samurai haircuts getting very excited about salty chunks of fatback.

In other year-end Japanese news, nothing to do with piggies, a Buddhist temple had a festival for Fudo, the Immovable One with the flaming backdrop. The festival theme was praying for fire prevention. The main event? A bonfire.

I do like that holiday news.

Shut-eye

Last night I got a good night's sleep. It happens so rarely anymore that it's exciting to wake up and find that (1) the clock reads a post seven a.m. time and (2) I feel like I've actually slept. Yay for sleep! I still woke up a couple times, but that's much less than usual.

Oz put the new carpet pad under the sitting room rug so it's all cushy. This carpet has never in all the ten or more years it's lived on my floor had a proper pad, just a thin rubber non-skid pad and a few old scraps of felt carpet pad. Now both my big rugs have thick, downright sybaritic felt pads. The cats will miss having those comfy rolls of carpet lying on the couch like a kitty-cat playground and napping platform (the pads arrived just before Christmas), but they'll adjust.

At physical therapy yesterday, I picked up a hard foam roller so I can get therapist-grade pain at home. In theory, as my muscle tissue softens up, this will hurt less. Another benefit to having a roller at home is that Oz can use it too. When I was rolling out my IT band (ow!), he came into the room and said, "So, do they make one of those with spikes and extra hard spots?" "Yeah, that's the advanced version. Ow!" Once he was rolling on it, he said, "Owie! Maybe I'm not ready for the spiked version."

Other excitement for the day included buying hippie milk. I picked up a quart at the natural foods store the other night because my inorganic milk from the hormone-injected cows was about to reach the sell-by date. This morning I had some and I have to say, the organic milk is much better tasting than the inorganic milk. Much fresher. You'd think the industrial stuff would get onto the shelves faster, but no, the hippie milk I got today has a sell-by date in February. Maybe that's why it costs twice as much? I suppose we should vote with our dollars and keep buying it. Increasing demand will eventually lead to increased supply and lower prices. I think. I haven't cracked an econ book since I had to take econ.

Wow, this entry has taken a long time to write. I need to get ready for bed and find out if I can get two nights in a row of good sleep.

Various odd things, juxtaposed

At the place where I go to physical therapy, they have satellite radio and they listen to different channels depending on their mood. Sometimes it's all eighties, sometimes it's "lite" mix, and sometimes it's the station with strange commercials. Last week they were doing all Christmas songs, all the time. I don't know whose idea it was, but my therapist wasn't thrilled. She sort of hissed through her teeth whenever she mentioned the music. Today I forgot to ask her how she held up, but since she hadn't gone all wall-eyed, I guess she did okay.

Anyway, today it was the station with strange commercials. This one commercial was for breast enlargement cream. "Guaranteed to increase your bust by two cup sizes without the pain and risk of surgery." Immediately up after that commercial? "She likes me for me."

In that vein (or maybe we should just open one), the TV at the pizza joint was running MSNBC the other night. The promo for a news story about eating disorders was immediately followed by a commercial for a diet plan.

So, I guess the message is, as usual, for ladies to be busty and thin, but not too thin, and to like their men for themselves, not for any superficial reasons like their BMI or the size of their man parts.

This is a stupid message.

Something less stupid and much cooler is my neighbor's Christmas yard art. She does yard art all year round, but she's really outdone herself this holiday season. I haven't been able to get a satisfactory photo because there's just so much of it: lights of many colors, tinsel garlands, evergreen garlands, glowing plastic nativity scene, glowing black Santa, black Santa heads (I just made a brief digression to see what I could turn up about the ethnicity of Saint Nicholas. He was from what is now Turkey.), a penguin, all in addition to the other stuff she has up all the time. The crowning glory is an animatronic deer head, draped with a silver tinsel garland, attached to the wall on her porch.

It sings.

It does not sing Christmas carols either. The other day when I walked past on my way to the post office, it was singing "Rawhide." Today (another trip to the post office), it was singing "Proud Mary." It also tells bad deer jokes.

I'm wondering if the deer is going to be a permanent part of the installation.

I don't know how many words

I wrote my thank-you notes today and (late) Christmas cards, which I bought today. Half off! That's one benefit to being a holiday slacker. I'm glad my friends and family are tolerant, or if they're not, they're inured and accepting.

I'm not done yet, either. I have to acquire and ship off just a few more things. That's the least of my to-do list which is kind of heavy on the cleaning because my house is kind of heavy on the dust. Also, we had another cat pee event today, not too long after I had to clean up a little dab of cat barf from the living room rug (just back from the cleaners, of course). The glamour! How can I stand it?

I need to get back to work so I can relax a little.

Making every house a fun house

Watts Hall, Union Theological Seminary
Brook Road near Westwood Avenue

As seen through the fishy eye.

It's been too icky outside to troop around on the floodwall, so I've mostly been shooting interiors. But the clouds rolled back a little this afternoon when I was driving down Brook Road and, not knowing when (or if) I'd ever again see Watts Hall bathed in perfect afternoon light, I had to stop. This was not the most distorted picture (I could just about make the building look like a big Victorian gumdrop), but it had the prettiest sky.

The fisheye is a lot of fun and gives a major funhouse effect to those boring holiday pictures of people opening gifts. My mom said, "Why do you want all that distortion?" So I photographed some random thing in her house and showed her the picture on the screen. Heh. Then it was, "Oh! Cool! Take a picture of this!" I think I took, like, ten shots of a little teddy bear beside a miniature Christmas tree. One of them came out pretty well …

Also, people who whinge about getting their picture taken will ham it up relentlessly for the fisheye. I think I've hit on something there.

Blue Christmas

Richmond's financial district at sunset on Christmas Eve

We're too hopped up on sugar to be blue. It's a wet, gray Christmas outside, but we're inside, all cozy and geeking out with our new toys. And the sugar. I made a baked French toast dish for breakfast: a pan of bread soaked in egg and milk overnight, then baked with a topping of brown sugar, pecans, and butter. All that, and then we put maple syrup over it and wash it down with coffee. Oz insists on calling it pudding, but it is not! It is toast, and very French at that.

Oz gave me a fisheye lens for Christmas, along with about four sweaters. Now I can be both toasty warm and annoying. If the sky clears up by sunset, we'll go back out to the floodwall and try for another spectacular skyline shot, but this time with major parallax distortion!

I hope y'all are having a great holiday. Be sensible and consume less sugar than I have!

Window into "cool"

The scare quotes are definitely necessary.

NHK has a relatively new program called "Cool Japan," all about Japanese stuff that is cool. The show is so cool, it's even broadcast partially in English! Still, I have a feeling that by the time a trend comes to the attention of the NHK staff, makes it through production (and past the higher-ups who will probably block any story that they don't think reflects well on Japanese culture [this is a guess based on the uniformly cute and wholesome content of the show]), and hits the airwaves, it is no longer cool. It is merely "cool," a pale reflection of something which might have been sort of cool six months ago.

Add to that the five month delay between the air date in Japan and when the episode is finally aired on TV Japan, and I'm solidly behind the curve on Japanese cool.

Last night's episode was a special broadcast from Paris, where Japanese stuff is really trendy right now, or at least, it was back in July when the show was put together. Risa Stegmayer, one of the show's hosts, wrote a blog entry about it, all in Japanese, but with pictures of the Japan Expo in Paris. It was a total French geek fest! French geeks look pretty much like American geeks. Possibly even dorkier.

One of the French geeks was a woman who was totally into the maid thing. She wore a maid costume at all times (she claims her husband loves it). I had never seen an actual French woman in a French maid's uniform, even if it was a Japanese French maid's uniform.

Still, maid cafes are mainstream enough in Japan that there's even a Japan Maid Cafe Association. How can they forestall the inevitable progression from edgy to ordinary? Well, they can take a page from the book of the goth-loli nun maid cafe, which may implode from sheer trendiness.

The Cool Japan crew went shopping in Paris with a couple of the French geek ladies. At boutiques carrying Japanese stuff, the ladies pointed out all the items which they thought were kawaii while the Japanese film crew said, "Huh. That? Is kawaii?" One of the women picked up a kanzashi and demonstrated how she would do her hair up in a French knot and fix it in place with the kanzashi. "And it looks cool with my Kitty T-shirt!" At which point the film crew had palpitations. Wearing a kansashi with a T-shirt is roughly equivalent to wearing an evening gown and using a toothbrush for a hairpin.

How cool is that?

Wait, what season?

I had kind of a shock today when I realized that Christmas was next weekend. Ish. I'm usually really prepared for Thanksgiving, which has the courtesy to fall on the same day of the week each year, but Christmas is harder. There's more to do and it's easier to put off, somehow, especially since I do so little anyway.

I have one decoration up. It's been up for several years now. I should probably dust it off.

That is not to say that I don't enjoy the year end holidays. I like to see the pretty decorations that other people put up. I like getting gifts for people (though I'm glad my list is short). I like baking up the things that I only make at this time of year.

Here are some signs of the season that always make me happy.

The first snows have fallen at the monkey hot spring.

Japanese news covers the opening of the hagoita market at Asakusa. Long ago, when I was an exchange student in Tokyo, my host mother took me to the hagoita market. I still have my pretty hagoita , I'm looking at it right now.

Japanese news covers the start of the New Year's card mailing season. They show us a popular actress dolled up in a fancy kimono dropping cards into a special mailbox decorated with cute, cartoon inoshishi (wild boar, look at this great picture of a temple carving (?)), to signify the Year of the Boar. Which reminds me, it's exactly twelve years since my trip to Japan to visit friends (with whom I browsed through the inoshishi merchandise) and to make an aikido pilgrimage.

My neighborhood has its annual Christmas festival, in which I'm not really involved, but which is pretty to see. This was today. The gaslights south of Broad Street are decorated with red bows, and people are wandering around with little maps looking for the houses on the house tour. The very mellow spectacle included a horse-drawn carriage jingling through the neighborhood and a lady in a red satin riding habit riding sidesaddle here and there and through the parks. There's nothing like horse-based transport to give you a different perspective on your neighborhood. From across Libby Hill Park, I saw the lady on horseback riding along 29th Street and towering over all the parked motor vehicles. Horses are tall! (Oh, how profound!) People on horseback are even taller, but look more properly in proportion to nineteenth century houses than cars do. Huh. Funny how that works.

Still here

Still not dead. Or on hiatus. Really, this is not a hiatus!

I'm still doing physical therapy, to the tune of 40 minutes of abdominal exercises and stretchy-type things every evening, plus trying to get regular cardio type exercise every day. My abs are really strong now. I was getting less and less enthusiastic about PT (it makes me feel better, but it's really boring), then I measured my waist and it was smaller than it was back in September, which is my baseline for my measurements because that's when we ordered the bridesmaid's dresses. Now I'm more enthusiastic about the PT. Less pain should be enough to keep my interest in the therapy, but you can't measure less pain with a tape measure.

The Princess is still getting married in January. The bridesmaid's dresses came in last week and mine is at the seamstress now, getting taken in. The dress is pretty good. The Princess chose the designer (Bill Levkoff), the color (European Satin Red), and the length (full), but we bridesmaids got to chose our own dresses. I picked this one, number 403. 403 looks not very exciting in the front, but is bustled up all fancy in the back (that's the official picture from the designer's website, not a picture of me in the dress)(pictures of me in the dress are more comical). The train is rather longer than you'd think based on the picture, so I'm going to have to figure out how to add a little bustling to keep it out from underfoot at the reception. I just know that if I don't, someone (maybe even me) will step on the train and the dress will get yanked down and wouldn't that make a great addition to the wedding album? I'll have to get right on that, as soon as the dress gets back from the seamstress, a mere week before the wedding.

Right now on Cooking for Today, the guest chef is doing something atrocious to shrimp in the name of traditional Japanese New Year's treats. They pureed raw, peeled shrimp with potato and some other kind of starch, now they're patting the resultant paste into a rectangular pan. It looks rather gray and pasty.

In other cooking news, we made a Guinness chocolate pie. It is too bitter. We may give up on the pie and stick to cake.