My room is clean

Well, compared to yesterday anyway. I feel much better just being in a tidy atmosphere, but the downside was that I stayed up later than I should have and ended up sleeping and being 15 minutes late for work. It obviously depends on where you work and what sort of boss you have, but I think that generally being late to work is pretty taboo in the US. I've done it a couple times and gotten yelled at, anyway. It's really bad to be late at my company, and not because somebody screams at you. Walking into a largely silent open office with no cubicles when everybody has been working for 15 minutes is humiliating in itself. If you try to put a very serious expression on your face and run to the changing room to hang up your jacket, you will look foolish and dissheveled. If you try to look cool and composed, you probably will get sharp remarks from your boss/supervisor/coworkers to the effect that being late is a big deal and asking you to reflect on your sin.

That was the battle I faced this morning, and I chose the former: already sweating slightly from a furious if laconic bikeride after just having waken up, I blinked rapidly as I passed each person on my 25-meter jog from the doors to the Purchasing Department to the changing room. I put my coat on the hanger as fast as possible and apologized with very humble but consise words, and set to work. My stragegy largely paid off in that I didn't have to hear that damned speech once more. Hurrah for reverse-engineering the Japanese business culture!

There was one other nice surprise today. I went to the Family Mart, one of the major Japanese konbini (an abbreviation of "convenience store") where I often buy my lunch. Up until now my choices have been limited to either a nattou onigiri (fermented, slightly rotting beans in a rice ball...seriously, better than you might think from the description) or a kombu onigiri (a salty seaweed rice ball), but I was happy to see that they had a salad with thirty different ingredients, all vegetarian. The dressing had a smidgeon of egg-white in it, but I ate it anyway. It was leaps and bounds more delicious and nutritious than the standard cabbage salads you find in such establishments. Also, I ate outside overlooking the Watarase River, and the weather was gorgeous. I wish I had been able to spend the whole day outside.

I recently bought a HUGE external hard drive (ca. 250 GB) and have archived all my pictures and music on it. Once I get Photoshop installed again, I will resume work on editing the many thousands of pictures I took from my year in Japan and my trip to Thailand with Anna two years ago. I have already color-corrected, cropped, resized, optimized the contrast, and done other photographic manipulations on about 8,000 pictures and deleted 4,000 or so duplicates and clunkers. Eventually I would like to make them available on my website with captions, which I still haven't started writing.

I am going to be taking the JETRO Business Japanese Proficiency Test later this summer so I need to get serious about learning higher-level grammatical patterns and vocabulary. No time to lose...

Oh, I may go to Okinawa during the Golden Week holiday at the beginning of May. Anna and I would like to meet up with our friends Nancy and Hitomi. Not sure if they will have any time available to hang out with us, but we want to go anyway!