MetaAnomie

We had some chicken breasts in the refrigerator and we were kind of at a loss for what to eat tonight so I did a quick search on the internet and put together a recipe for baked chicken out of the spare crap we had in the kitchen. It was super experimental though. Shit, we don’t even have an oven. We have this really old hand-me-down microwave that is supposed to work as an oven, so I figured I would give it a try.

It came out something like this:

Considering I was just cramming something together, it actually surprised me how well it turned out. Tasted really good too, especially with honey mustard sauce.

Anyhow, not too much going on today. Just went to the store for some diapers, had lunch at this cool Nepal restaurant down the street from us, played the Wii a bit, played with the princess, etc. I also started doing some more band preparations. I have a pound of stuff I have been needing/wanting to do (especially regarding the website), and I’m trying to get a general schedule for the beginning of next year worked out. I’m in the progress of getting some new events booked and depending on how that works, I’m thinking we may be able to hit the studio again once around February. So yeah, more details on all that as it materializes.

We went out to the lot again this week to check out the house. It seems to be moving along well. We did however find another issue: the window we put in the bathroom is much smaller than we expected it to be. The wifey and I talked back and forth about if we would want to pay extra to get it changed out, but at this stage in the game, it would probably be rather expensive. Anyhow, we are still considering it.

I made some meat sauce for the first time today:

I had been wanting to learn how to for some time now (considering all the stuff you can do with meat sauce). It turned out rather decent I suppose. Nothing mouthwateringly fantastic perhaps, but then again, it is just meat sauce.

I had a decently productive day at work yesterday (note we don’t get off for Christmas here in Japan for obvious reasons). I’ve been looking into setting up a virtual development server off and on between all the other little projects I have going on. I’m considering using VMware Workstation as it appears I can use it to make multiple snapshots — something I would love to have so I could store and cache an ass load of build environments.

Monday is my last day of work and from there we get into the new years holidays. We still have no set plans which is actually rather nice considering how busy I have been these days. We may take the bullet train back to Gifu but we haven’t decided on it for sure yet.

We went out to ThinkPark again last weekend and had a drink at the pub while the princess ran around and did her thing. It was so pretty out — a bit windy, but really nice. Weekends in this area are lovely because the whole work crowd is gone and it is essentially empty. We were at the pub literally by ourselves. Granted it was before lunch, but bah, what can I say, us parents have to get our alcohol in one way or another.

“Those fuckers stole my soccer field!”

We went out to the lot again the same day (it’s becoming a bit of a ritual now) and things are continuing to progress. All the windows were in and pretty much all the insulation was up. We did find one fuck-up though: the door we choose that connects the garage to the house only opens from the inside (oops). Oh well, we don’t really plan on putting a car in it anyway. We were thinking of using it more for storage so I guess it’s not a huge deal.

Now I think it’s time for some much needed sleep. The wifey is going to be out of town tomorrow and work should be insane so it should prove to be a rather busy day. Maybe I won’t die.

Seems like I have been sick with one thing or another for almost a month now. The princess was sick first, the wifey caught it next, and then I got it. My fever went down, but then a got a horrid cough (due to a bunch of crap running down my throat), and now as I’m finally getting over that, I’ve manged to break out in a really bad rash all over my upper body.

I went to the hospital over the weekend and our conversation went something like this (in Japanese of course):

Me: “I have this rash all over my chest.”
Doctor: “Really?”
Me: “Yea.”
Doctor: “…”
Me: “…”
Me: “See?” (lifting my shirt)
Doctor: “Oh, ok. ”
Me: “…”
Doctor: “…”
Me: “Um…”
Doctor: “I’ll give you some medicine to try.”
Me: “Thanks?”

Note that I had to wait literally half the day for this interaction. I was kind of hoping for, you know, an idea of what was causing it? A blood test maybe?

At least the medicine helped I guess.

Oh right, it didn’t.

We went out to the lot this weekend to check on the progress of the house. They had just finished putting in the wiring and were working on putting windows in. The carpenters were giving me shit (playfully) over the big ass sliding glass door we are putting in the living room on the second floor. It’s fucking massive, and apparently it was a bitch to put in.

I honestly don’t know where this comes from. She has never seen a broom let alone watched one of us use one. Still, she targets it, picks it up, and uses it correctly. Same thing with mops. We are starting to think she was extremely domesticated in a previous life.

If only I could get the wires for my computer to be strung up this pretty.

I made dinner last night, which almost never happens, and quite honestly, for good reason.

I recreated the mushroom soup Lorne made last weekend. I did it all by memory so I was rather pleasantly surprised when I didn’t brutally fuck it up. We judge food as being bad or good by the princess scale these days: good meaning she will eat it, and the level of bad is determined by how far she can throw it across the room. Luckily she ate it.

And chicken of course, because everyone likes chicken. Except for vegetarians maybe (they like it too, but they just won’t admit it).

Akasugu, 2009 Jan-Feb Edition

The princess’ model photos just got published (in a Japanese baby magazine). There were three included in total but the above is probably my favorite.

The wifey went out on the balcony last week and the princess managed to lock the door behind her. This of course wouldn’t have been much of a problem if say, I wasn’t at work, she had had her keys or her cell phone on her, the princess was capable of unlocking the door, or even, um, if we didn’t live on the fifth floor of an apartment building. Luckily enough, our apartment is currently under construction so the wifey was able to simply scale down five floors of scaffolding, get the attention of the dude who manages our apartment, and ask him to call out for a set of keys that were an hour away by car. From there she climbed back up the scaffolding to try to consult a sincerely distraught fairy princess. When all was said and done, after crying for the full entire hour, she just collapsed from exhaustion. The princess that is, not the wifey.

“What, did I do something wrong?”

The framing on the house was completed last week and we went out to the lot with the architect and builders to make final confirmations, sign a metric ass-ton of paperwork (or “stamp” rather, Japanese people love their fucking stamps), and confirm all the outlets, switches, and lighting for the upcoming wiring work. I was figuring we might change maybe one or two things but we ended up essentially rewriting the blue prints. In fairness though, there were some things we weren’t sold on to begin with and I think we finally got it worked out to be as ideal as possible. Oh, and we had our city inspection completed this week — which passed. I’m rather curious what the hell we would have been supposed to do if it failed though.

“Say, are there any doors around here I could lock?”

Maggie finished up her Japanese proficiency test on Sunday and came over with Lorne to celebrate (read get drunk and play Wii). Lorne made some mushroom soup from scratch (that was insanely delicious) and I tried out making some desert:

There was also this strawberry conglomeration that went on top and I assume it was pretty yummy, but I was a bit too drunk to care by that point anyway, let alone take any pictures. I do have a blurry photo of a cucumber though, for those who would be intrested.