Matsuri-try

There was a festival today.

People marched.
I took pictures.

It rained.
I'm wet.

Some horses came by.
I have 600 pictures.

There is another festival today.

どこにおいてあった？

Where does the sky keep all this water?
(It's raining.)

Today

Today has been... rainy.

So I donned my rain gear and crossed town to go to club, finished up a bit before five and headed home, donning my rain gear once again.

I found a small mom and pop meat shop on the way back, and they were selling コロケ for cheap, so I got two of them, and I fully expect they both took a year off of my life, looking at the oil they were fried in. But they were pretty decent and I'm always in favor of deep frying things.

Got home, studied a little, watched a little anime, and jogged to the store to get some groceries: Kagome, tofu, more Kagome, a few bars of chocolate, and nearly a kilogram of strawberry jam that was on sale for $2. Used my small umbrella on the way back and have been lounging about studying and watching anime. I'm most of the way done with the grammar, but I'd like to put half an hour or so into practicing kanji before I go to bed as well, so the sooner I finish going through the grammar, the better. Tomorrow, I'll practice the kanji some more and read through some of the compositions if time permits.

Anyway.

Today has been... rainy.

Surprising Weather

Last night was really cool. By that, I mean that it was actually cool enough to be slightly chilly. I usually keep my door open so that the humidity and heat from me and my electronics doesn't build up, but I actually got cold last night.
I climbed under the blanket, I guess, and had one of the best night's sleep I've had in a long time. Also, a really nice dream that lasted nearly six real-time hours.

There were explosions, it was nice.

Bland Map of Explanation +1

So in case you're wondering why it's so hot here, you might want to look at this map. I mean, Japan is generally considered to temperate, but it's on par with southern California, which is not generally a chilly place. And we've got large bodies of water in two directions within about 30 miles.

View Larger Map

Sleep

I'm supposed to get up in about an hour to start getting ready, but I've only slept for about an hour tonight. I've laid in bed, staring at my ceiling, listening to the rain. It actually woke me up and one point and I had to go into the bathroom to try and turn it off. Then I realized the weird dripping noise was the drain outside, and not my sink.

Air Conditioner-ing

The air conditioner in our rooms is pretty cool. It not only is an air conditioner, but a heater as well, and has timer and temperature control settings. You can have it turn on or off after anywhere between 30 minutes and 10 hours, but nobody I know has gotten the temperature control setting to work right.
It has three blower settings, though they don't seem to affect how much it cools off a room, just how many papers it blows off my desk

One of the most convenient features is that the output fan is, instead of built in with the rest of the unit, down on the veranda, pointing across, which means that running your heater/AC makes your clothes dry faster.

Flash Rust

[Edit: I took some pictures so you can see what's going on.]
It so hot and so humid here that the flash drive I carry with me has started to rust.
Actually, I don't know how long ago it started. I checked it this morning, and it was worse than the last time I checked. Seems like the metal had some kind of protective finish on it, and by filing off the old rust, I took off the finish and only encouraged new rust to grow.
So this morning, I filed off what rust I could, then put a thin layer of cooking oil on it. Oil is a great insulator, and while flash drives get warm, I sincerely doubt it'll reach the flash point of oil.

It may not be the best solution, but it's worked great since I put the oil on two days ago, when I started writing this post. No visible new rust, and the oil seems to be holding up fairly well.

This is Becoming Normal For Me

Well, I may have mentioned once or twice that it's... rather hot here. And it's fairly probably that, between the four-ish posts I've showed it in, you're aware I have a massive sliding glass door that essentially makes one wall of my apartment a heat exchanging chunk of glass.

Something I haven't mentioned is that my bed was a little too soft, so I pulled out one of the blankets I had stuffed under the futons.

Now, those of you that have seen our place in Ellensburg will know exactly what I did next.

For those of you that don't: blankets are great insulators. Or any good blanket is.
And, uh, what's the opposite of a heat exchanger?
"An insulator"?
ding! Very good!

...

So now there's a blanket in my window.

No, I don't have any aluminum foil handy or, yes, I would've used that, too.

More Storm

There's a smallish thunderstorm going on again, with some wind, too. Sounds like there must've been a ground strike or something nearby, 'cause I've heard a couple of ambulances for the southeast.

An hour later, it seems to have died down, and after some rain to make it nice and muggier, there's not much going on.

Cool!

For the first time in months, it's actually cool outside. It's probably about 69F, and boy does it feel good.

Underpants Judo

Today was my last day of judo until school starts up again in the fall. There's just no point in going when it's this hot. I mean, the dojo's pretty nice and has fans, but nobody feels like doing anything, so we all just sit around. And it consumes my entire evening or morning, depending on the day.

Today was so muggy that two of the guys took off their clothes and were jumping around the dojo in their underpants. One guy started taking those off, too, but then his girlfriend hit him and he stopped.

It's pretty muggy here.

An Otherwise Unheralded Advantage

We just got a thunderstorm. It went from no rain to "I'm in the street and I'm drowning"-type rain in the span of about thirty seconds. I was standing outside, admiring the rain when I saw the quick flash of lightning nearby, followed about four seconds later by thunder. By the time the thunder got there, I was inside and checking which things I would need to unplug to isolate my computer gear. The answer is "Just about everything." I'll be optimizing that in just a few minutes.

Anyway, in spite of having no connection to any outside circuits, I'm still able to post online. Why? Because I'm using Wi-Fi, and a lightning strike that fries my $50 router won't fry the other $800 of gear I have on my desk because they aren't physically connected. This would be the unheralded advantage, by the way.

I'm not too worried, just a touch paranoid. I think there are a lot of buildings nearby with lightning rods, which are a rather fearsome thing to actually look at up close, if you ask me. I think it's because you know what it's for, maybe. In any case, Jusco has twenty to thirty 10m rods on their roof. I think that's cool.

An ambulance just drove by.

Br.

Apparently, it starts to get a little chilly once it's around midnight. Or at least, too chilly for sandals and a T-shirt.