Today was Mother’s Day so I sent the wifey out with a friend for a massage while me and the kids worked on a cake for her:
Unfortunately though, it turned into less of a cake and more of a pancake:
You can tell who is in charge here:
Second family portrait of the month. We are on a roll here:
Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers out there!
Just been so much going on these days. So much I want to write about too, but I’m just too preoccupied. And old — I’m getting old. And when you get old you get all conservative and practical which means less writing and more get-off-my-lawn.
But in fairness I’m much happier in my 30s than I was in my 20s. Guess I had 10 years to find more important things to worry about.
And I should be working on my taxes and blah, blah, blah but after three days in a row of 13+ hours of work and waking up at 5 am, only to stay up to the middle of the night to work on taxes… I’m pretty shot. And I should be sleeping now but I’m so used to being awake and being exhausted my body can’t seem to figure it out. And I want to go climbing tomorrow but I have no clue if I’ll manage to make the time, let alone the energy, and DAMN YOU RED TAPE BOULDER PROBLEM I DID ONCE THAT I COULDN’T DO LAST TIME I SHALL CRUSH YOUR SOUL!
I took the family out to Lake Yamanaka for Golden Week:
Golden Week, for the unaware, is a string of holidays at the beginning of May in which everyone in Tokyo, um, tries to go somewhere else. Lake Yamanaka (Yamanakako) is one of the five lakes surrounding Mt. Fuji, and offers views such as:
The cottage we stayed at was ancient but rather cool:
We got stuck in over 40 km of traffic jams on the way there, but we arrived in time for dinner and a quick stop at the Benifuji No Yu hot spring (which was crowded but cheap and really nice). The next morning I woke up early for a 5 km run, went out to Kirara plaza and checked out some of the docks around the lake:
We met up with some friends on Friday and went to a couple parks with the kids:
Ren being awesome:
Went out on the lake on a peddle boat on our last day:
From there, back to Kirara plaza because the weather finally got nice (and I wanted to show them the point):
The park even had a cool little bouldering wall the princess was digging:
Finally, we headed to a friends for a BBQ and got in the car for the long, long ride home. With lots of coffee. And Red Bull.
Went bouldering at the gym again today. Didn’t make a whole lot of progress though to be honest. I did manage to climb a new overhang though:
It’s another technically easy climb but it’s still pretty tough for me because I lack the strength. Good technique practice being I have to play around to compensate when I start losing energy however.
I’m climbing at about the top of what a beginner should be climbing at the moment but jumping into the “mid” zone (4 kyu/6a and above) is still quite out of my reach. The holds are just too hard and I’m usually lucky just to be able to start the problems. I figure I’m going to have to build up a more solid base on 5 kyu, and maybe some 6 kyu overhangs before I have much of a chance.
Oh and by the way, I have pretty much run myself out of chalk. I just bought a pre-filled sock last time as it was my first one, but I figure it should be cheapest to refill so I bought a decent size bag to do that from:
Moon Dust from Moon.
300g for like 840 yen which is rather affordable. Note the sock I’m using holds just under 50g and it took me a good few months to exhaust it, so this should last me a long while.
Been learning some tricks and getting a bit better at these. The above is actually already tiled 3×3 and is a pretty detailed sample of the wallpaper in my living room. I found a way to normalize colors and brightness by inverting the image and blending it in with the original, and it seems to work pretty well with one drawback: you get a kind of crappy drop in resolution. But if the source you are working with is big enough you can get around it.
Went bouldering at the gym again tonight. Managed to do a new 6-kyu and 5-kyu I had started working on last session. In honesty though, I got the 5-kyu on half luck, and I couldn’t repeat it. I’m getting closer to being more constant at it, but it’s a pretty damn hard one (for me). Pretty much blew out my arms constantly repeating the open, but I did manage to find another 5-kyu I think I might have a fighting chance at. Another 6-kyu on the same wall looks pretty fun too. Will probably start working on those while trying to repeat my nemisis from today next time.
In other news, I have been throwing around the idea of going out to Mitake and ended up buying me the bouldering guidebook:
The wifey tells me I have to finish my taxes first, so I guess I better start working on that. It looks like that have some pretty easy boulders out there as well so I’m considering taking the whole family with me. It would be something different to do anyway!
I just finished Portal 2 (finally).
I have to admit I had my doubts at first buy wow, what a fantastic game! The ending was horribly good too — extremely creative and probably one of the best PC endings I have seen in some time.
And let’s face it, the “Want You Gone” song during the credits is just fantastic (laugh).
I’m still making lunches for myself believe it or not. Well kind of. I’ve gotten pretty tired of it after three months so I just don’t really try too much anymore. The wifey has been starting to help a bit as well, cutting up veggies for me and what not.
Being that I’m about completely sick of salads, I tried my hand and making this chicken, paprika, salsa thing:
They actually came out tasting really good, but the calorie count measured higher than I wanted it, forcing me to cut it up in to real small portions to hit my goals. Not bad though actually: I have another “meal” of vegetables and the smaller portion bothers me a lot less than I thought it would because I’m still decently full off that.
I also experimenting with making these things:
It’s heavily baked pizza crust cut up into chips with shredded cheese and cumin. And they taste much crappier than they look unfortunately. Oh well, gotta play around right?
I planned to continue on my tax journey tonight and I started by investigating the new 8938 form that’s been instated this year — only to put my head in my hands with disbelief. It’s sad, but I think I actually would go through significantly less paperwork just to change my citizenship.
Had a pretty rough day. Drank a good bit last night and had to get up to leave the house by 6 am for the early shift which didn’t help, but ended up working close to 14 hours doing nothing but fixing problems all day.
I want to just pass out but I’m going to force myself to try to get at least one thing done; namely calling the IRS over some tax questions so I can try to get these damn forms over with sometime soon.
I read an article on Yahoo the other day about American’s living abroad changing their citizenship around tax season because we are one of the only retarded nations that tax our citizens even if they are living and working overseas and are already getting taxed by another government. And I so relate because every year after struggling through forms that really don’t apply to my situation abroad, and after asking questions to tax representatives that are only allowed to read the stupid tax guide back to you and can’t give you a legitimate answer to ambiguous situations — well, let’s just say it gets more tempting ever year.
Played around with making some semi-complicated seamless textures for the first time tonight. My prototype came out like the following:
Here is what it looks like tiled:
Not a horrible job for the first time making one I suppose, but I still got a lot to learn. For example, I think large patterns like this don’t really lend themselves to tiling. Smaller, more detailed patterns are better as you wont get that “repeating” feel to them. I’d also like to learn how to have mixable tiles, and I have a decent idea how to do it, but it’s going to be a royal pain in the ass to make. I may try one next time I’m up at 2 am though.