Category: Uncategorized

It’s a party I tell ya.

Par-tay.

Sometimes, when dealing with selfish sucks-at-life-ers, I wonder what it would be like to be such a person.  To be completely clueless and awkward and destructive?  Like a wrecking ball walking through the catacombs or something.  What would it be like, you know?  What goes through the mind of a jerk?  (Slightly less than nothing, is the likely answer).

Tomorrow I get to watch fireworks.  ^__^  That’ll be nice.

Glowy lights, friends, and food always make things better.

Things like sitting at work on a Friday night, writing a blog post.

I suppose I could…work.  Alas,  the mind has wandered far, far away…

So far away, I signed on to Facebook and updated my profile picture.

Dire times, my friends. DIRE.

Last Sunday was the eighteenth annual Tokyo area one near-far target shooting competition.  You get eight arrows at each at a 60m(far) and 28m(near) target.

Having never shot further than 28m before, my fellow archers were a little concerned for my score (read: their safety).  They kept saying stuff like “Oh, you need to raise the bow more so that your arrow reaches the target.  Maybe you should raise it extra high just in case.”

It was kind of cool, because the tournament was at the Tokyo Budokan, which is a big complex hosting tons of Japanese martial arts.  As we waited for the venue to open at 9am, there was apparently also a junior high karate competition.   Another bonus of using the Budokan was … air conditioning!  Made the waiting and watching so much more pleasant.

In Japanese martial art-time, everything starts ten minutes earlier than they say it will.  You might think things start at 9:30, but really…you’ve forgotten to factor in the time it takes to line up before the 9:30 bow-in and announcements.   After scrambling to get my stuff (bow strung, arrows in the arrow box) in gear a few times, I’d learned to (gasp) be early.   “Hurry up and wait,” floats through the mind quite often.  Goodness knows it never actually starts late.

Anyhow, at the end of the day, I hit a record of ZERO arrows out of 16.  A personal low.  But I was air conditioned and hadn’t really expected to hit any of my long distance arrows, so I ended in a surprisingly unflustered state of mind.   The awesome rationalization machine that is my brain even said I did rather decently, considering my arrows were nicely clustering together rather than scattering, like they sometimes do.  Duplicability is a good thing.

Two friends and I have been trying to go on a hike since April. Derailed multiple times by sniffles and bad weather, we finally dragged ourselves out last weekend to enjoy fog, trees, and weird (non-human eating) bugs.

Moths and beetles and cicadas and bees, and only one mosquito! Well, only one that I saw, AND I killed before it could get to me.  Take that, vampire bugs!

I say “in nature,” but really, this is still Japan. Mount Kumotori borders three prefectures – Saitama, Yamanashi, and. .. yeah. Three.  (Wikipedia tells me the third is the ever-elusive Tokyo.  Sounds kinda familiar, Tokyo..)  Apparently it’s part of the Chichibu Tama-kai national park.  Right. So after a 1.5 hour an express train to Chichibu station + one hour bus ride, we started our hike at Mitsumine Shrine. The path was nicely maintained, but real enough that only twice did hissing cars replacing chattering (noisy!) birds to remind us we really weren’t that far into anywhere.

Tokyo is alternating between muggy rain and muggy heat these days, so the cool mountain air was all the more a treat.  With the smell of warm cypress and damp leaf, I could feel the gray city grit being flushed out by clean fog  and the translucent green of backlit trees.  There were weird mushrooms too, lots of ’em.

We stopped at one little shack two hours in, where the elderly male proprietor was selling bottles of water for 400 yen each. Eek! (The vending machines at the shrine sold them for 150 yen.)  That was about halfway to the actual mountain top.  To reach that, we probably would have needed to stay in Chichibu the night before, and get an earlier start.

Back at the bottom, we checked out the shrine while we waited for the return bus.  Mitsumine Shrine itself was a little odd – very colorful for an isolated shrine; a little reminiscent of the flashier Taiwanese or Chinese temples than a Japanese one.  The donation box was lined on either side by fortunes of all kinds – by blood type, straight up, by age, gender…I grabbed a blood type one, but have been too lazy to decipher so far. Supposedly there was a bathhouse there too, but we couldn’t find signs to it anywhere.

This being Japan though, on the bus ride back we stopped at another, better advertised onsen.   After a hot soak, some cold milk and koala yummies, life was looking good.   That, and some spicy onion (think shredded green onions) ramen at the station before the train, put me into a pretty solid state of happy.

Slept very soundly on the train back. (The local train in Chichibu is totally old school.  They even have the “Paleo,” a coal/steam engine that runs during the day.