The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

These pictures are intended for Daniel, who'll be taking over the apartment soon, but they seem an appropriate thing to blog about. We have a pretty nice apartment, I think!

TV stand: The TV, under it is the region free DVD player, and under that is the VCR; because of the stand, the VCR is really not obtrusive. Beside the TV is a bookshelf with the VHS collection on the bottom shelf.

Couch: The loveseat in front of the sliding glass doors in the living room. The skinny lamp is the broken lamp. You can also see the living room rug under the sofa, and the stool that we normally use as an endtable. Note that is a small corner of the living room, the actual room is quite spacious as later pictures show.

This is really tough. On one hand, having not been home in over a year, I'm getting very homesick. I'm looking forward to seeing my family and friends again, and to just being somewhere spacious and familiar. On the other, I have so many friends here, so many people I can't be sure I'll ever see again in my life. So many of them are wonderful people: Saito, Iizawa, Aizawa, the entire staff of Icchu - and that I say with no exaggeration - my students, who have been incredibly sweet the last week or so... this is getting really hard. Perversely, as I get more upset about leaving, my homesickness is also building as I get closer to the hometime date. I think that's partly because Japan, and the leaving thereof, is causing me a lot of stress right now, so I am looking forward to being home and out of it.

I've been in contact with the fellow who will be moving into my apartment and taking over at Nichu in August. It's pretty weird getting ready to pass all this on; he seems like a decent guy, and as much as possible I want him to be able to pick up where I'm leaving off in some ways. A common tendency among ALTs is to dump the successor in a totally clean slate, but for me that meant spending nearly a year getting to know people who could tell me where the neat stuff was to do. I don't quite understand the point of that, besides laziness.

Wow, somewhere along the line my Japanese got more than good enough to understand the news. I haven't tried in ages.

There have been three major subquakes at 9:20, 9:30, and 10:00. There is a warning out for a possible large earthquake again, but so far no fear of tsunamis. All trains are stopped, so it looks like it's a good thing Jen and I decided not to go to Yamagata to go hiking today. Traffic is running normally though, as are buses. Some folks in Sendai living in condominiums are pinned in by lack of elevators, though! It's pretty interesting to be going through this. There are some reports of minor injuries, but nothing worse than a broken leg as far as I can tell. I'm not really certain though as I'm not getting a hundred percent of the news. A report Jen is watching right now says a bridge has been taken out (rather spectacularly, judging from the footage) and that at least 30 people are in a nearby hospital with injuries.

Whew

We just got hit by a rather large shaking of the earth, far more potent than anything I've been through. It was a 6.9 in Iwate, the prefecture north of us, and local sensors say we got hit with a high five/low six. The coffee in the coffee pot was sloshing up and almost out of the carafe (which was less than half full), the shelving unit in the kitchen swayed back and forth like an able seaman on his first day of shore leave, and when it was all over many of our belongings were scattered hither and fro around the house. We're still getting aftershocks now, thirty minutes later.

Everything is all right, and the friends we have contacted so far are all right as well, so anyone hearing about the earthquake that hit Northern Japan: yes, it hit us, but no, not too hard.