Reading

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weekly reading

Weekly Reading

Recently Finished
The Girls Who Disappeared
On the 20th anniversary of a car accident where three girls mysteriously disappeared, the MC is assigned to do a podcast on it and goes to the town to conduct interviews, but strange things start happening. I didn't love the reveal of what actually happened, but overall this was interesting.

Mirage City
Fourth in the Evander Mills mystery series. I had no idea a new book was out until I saw it pop up on my goodreads feed. Looking back it seems like every book has come out in October, so I guess I should try and remember to keep an eye out around that time next year. I enjoyed this one a lot.

Murder on Harley Street
Most recent Cleopatra Fox mystery. Still enjoying this series.

The Final Curtain
Final book in the English translated series of Detective Kaga mysteries (and I believe final book in the original, too). I can see why the four books that were translated into English were chosen, if they knew they weren't going to be able to do the whole series, those ones all tie into each other somewhat. I liked these a lot, so I'm definitely going to try and see if I can find some of the ones that didn't get translated when we take our next trip to Japan (sadly they are not available as ebooks).

Murder at Merry Beggars Hall
New-to-me mystery series. And fairly new in general as the second book is just coming out next month. I enjoyed this a lot and am looking forward to the next one.

The Ghostkeeper
Graphic novel about a man who almost died as a child and can see ghosts ever since. He uses his powers to help ghosts deal with their issues and move on to the next life, but one day a ghost girl steals the key to the door to the next life and all the ghosts start flooding the town because no one is able to move on. I liked it.

My Home Hero vol. 17

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Fujisawa groceries

"How can you feed yourself with a car?", some Americans and Canadians ask.

As mentioned before, a Lawson's conbini (convenience store) is directly downstairs, though that's admittedly unusual. Despite being rather small, it has milk, oranges and presumably other fruit, ham, raw pork, pasta, olive oil, udon, eggs, and frozen vegetables. This is just from popping in and out of it, without mentally cataloguing everything it does carry (thus the 'presumably'.) You could probably cook a balanced diet just from it alone, if you wanted.

[Edit: okay, so I checked several other conbini today, and mine is unique in passing for a small grocery store.]

( Read more... )

And you know? Most of all this area is detached single-family houses. Two-story, minimal yard, not that far from each other, but houses not sharing walls. Sample, sample, sample, sample, sample, even some two-story apartments/houses in the commercial zone

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Daily Happiness

1. It's the weekend! I had a pretty productive day today and finished up what I was working on earlier than anticipated, so I just ended up going home early (around 2:30), which was nice.

2. It was warm and sunny when I took a walk after work, but it's very overcast and chilly this evening, and we're supposed to have cooler weather for a bit. Tomorrow says it will be overcast all day, which would be nice as we are planning to be at Disneyland and I don't want it to be too sunny.

3. We got burritos and tacos for dinner. Very tasty! Not agreeing with my stomach too well tonight, but worth it.

4. Look at this sleepy boy!

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Fujisawa Dec 10-12

Let's post something so I don't fall totally behind... last 3 days were mostly spent exploring the area on foot. 10th, I wandered down Rte 467, and over into Shinbayashi Park, which is properly large, and also has lot of steps in one place. Many more steps than I realized. And I didn't even get a good view at the top, just some TV/cell towers surrounded by shrubbery. And then I got to see if I could go down deep steps without injuring myself. Yes, but it felt fraught... apparent safety rope was often too far from the steps to hold! ( Read more... )

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Daily Happiness

1. Still no word on when we will actually get the car back, but at least Carla popped in and got the stuff we needed from it so even if we don't have it back for this weekend, we can use the sip and savor pass at DCA.

2. I have really been enjoying Horizon Zero Dawn. And now that I have the Playstation Portal, I can easily pick it up for a short session at my desk whenever I want to. I've already put a lot of time into it and only barely got past the Proving and started on the main game, but that's because I just keep running around killing machines and collecting parts.

3. Jasper's gotta investigate that bag. You never know what might be inside.

So weird

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Daily Happiness

1. Today was the last day of the heat spell. Whenever it's hot this time of year, it's always a very dry heat, and I do prefer dry heat, but ugh, too dry today. My eyes were stinging really bad this afternoon (and still a bit now). It seems the weather will still be warmer than I prefer for December for the rest of the ten day forecast, but at least it won't be hot. :-/

2. The car is still in the shop. The issue is that while they know something in the AC system is leaking, they can't find the leak, despite having used various methods. Carla spoke to the guy today and he said they're getting in some sort of specialized equipment tomorrow, so it may be fixed by the end of the day? We'll see. She did ask if we can go by and get some stuff out of the car and he said any time, so I'm going to drop her off there tomorrow before going to work so she can get my Disney backpack which has the sip and savor pass in it, so we've got that for Saturday if the car isn't ready yet.

3. I had a work from home day today. Tomorrow and Friday I've got to go in for sure as I have stuff to do in our system that is difficult to do remotely (it can only be accessed from within our network and that requires me to remote into a pc at work and just adds extra hassle), but the main thing on my to-do list today (aside from meetings) was just checking stuff in excel, so no need to go in, which was nice.

4. Molly!

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universal

2025 Universal Studios Trip #1 (11/27/25) Part 2

First post is here.

After lunch, I decided to try my luck on the Jurassic World ride. It's a water ride and I googled and the consensus seems to be that as long as you're not in the very front, you don't get too wet.

( Jurassic World, Simpsons Land, Minions, and more. )

Overall it was a very fun trip and I'm looking forward to going again on Christmas with Carla.

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Daily Happiness

1. Carla made pesto and we had cheese ravioli with pesto for dinner. Since it's homemade, we can make it without garlic, and IMO, it tastes perfectly fine without. The ravioli were just Trader Joe's fresh ones where you just boil them for a few minutes, so it was super easy to put together. And delicious!

2. Another puzzle done. This one was fun, but went pretty fast. I'm definitely starting to feel like the 500 piece ones are less of a challenge (but still enjoyable to do).

I have a few 500 piece Christmas/winter ones that I'm going to do next, but then I think I'll tackle one of the 1000 piece ones and see how that goes.

3. Chloe! She is very much making use of the warming bed lately.

Shawl!

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Masking in Japan, and Dec 09

So, you know that Japanese people mask more than Americans or Europeans. But how much more? Some numbers from today: ( Read more... )

So, 40-50% generically outside, and 50-75% on trains. On the "masks and exercise" front, I'd note that many bicyclists have been masked, too.

Further, almost but not entirely all of customer-facing employees have been masked. Train, bus drivers, retail shop employees, the few waiters I've seen. I'd say at least 80% conservatively, 90% likely, maybe not much higher (it takes few outliers to push a ratio away from extremes.) I think Seki said that waiters often aren't, but I dunno.

Now, is this the New Normal after covid? Not necessarily. Japan has been having a bad flu season, huge spike in cases, and a major strain (coming soon to a school or hospital near you) wasn't in the vaccine this year, so I think the government has been urging people to mask again. Also it's winter-ish and some people here may have noticed "masks are like a scarf but better."

( Read more... )

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Daily Happiness

1. We had a nice dinner at Disneyland today, though it was way more crowded than I was expecting. (Though after thinking about it, I should have known! This week is the last few days the lowest tier of passholders can go before the blackout, and the second tier only has a couple more days than that, so everyone's trying to cram in a last visit.)

2. Gemma was so cutely writhing around with this carrot.

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disney

2025 Disneyland Trip #76 (12/8/25)

We went down to Disneyland for dinner tonight. I very foolishly did not get my Disney backpack out of the other car before we took it in for repairs, so I don't have the sip and savor pass for the Festival of Holidays booths, and decided on Disneyland rather than DCA, but that ended up being a bit of a mistake as we got there right before the parade started and the park was suuuuuper crowded because the lower two levels of passholders only have a few more days before being blocked out for the rest of the year.

( Despite the parade crowds, we still had a good time )

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Fujisawa 2025-Dec-08

So, yesterday: I worried I'd gotten a germ after all, since I woke up with a slight sore throat and almost-congestion. There was an alternative explanation, "sleeping in a cold dry room", but who knows. I went out for a walk and ended up out for 3 hours, which suggests good health, though I was doing easy pace. ( Read more... )

Blorgh?

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Daily Happiness

1. I walked to the donut shop again this morning and this time tried one of their holiday offerings, a gingerbread donut with biscoff cookie topping. It was really good!

2. The Christmas tree is pretty much finished. If we see some sort of topper we like, we might buy one, but otherwise the decorations are done.

3. Ollie is very curious about what Tuxie is doing out there.

Turkeys!

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time zones and food

Gonna take a while to get used to these time zones differences again. I realized in the shower that as I was preparing to go to bed before Monday, for most of my friends, Sunday morning was just beginning. Also, that's probably why Oglaf hasn't updated yet -- it's Sunday! My webcomics schedule is in confusion. ( Read more... )

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New travel series begins

After three years in friendly Very Cheap Rent houses, I'm back to nomadic life. After bouncing around Philly a few times to get things sorted, I'm now in Tokyo, because (a) Japan is cool and (b) old family of friend is old, tick-tock tick-tock. If you want to follow along, well, keep checking in for the travel2025 tag. Some random observations to start: ( Read more... )

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Daily Happiness

1. I picked up my huge pile of holds at the library, so now I am all set for their closure during Christmas and New Year.

2. We had a nice time at Knott's today. It was very sunny but not super hot (though warmer than I would prefer for December) and we had the most delicious loaded tater tots I've ever had.

3. I got some persimmons at the farmers market today. There are a ton of stalls selling them, but the one I got from had samples out and the sample was very good, so hopefully the ones I bought will be as well! I do love persimmons.

4. Look at these sweetie boys! A lot of times when Ollie comes over for a snuggle Jasper just up and leaves, but this time he stayed an snuggled and gave Ollie some nice grooming.