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Long time no talk!  We ended a pretty hectic period of work last Friday.  It had been about two months since I had any sort of holiday beyond the weekend, and a month and a half since Kuniko had a day off at all.  So we were pretty bushed at the end of it.

The last days of last week I joined two work parties.  The first was with my new department, in an izakaya in Sannomiya after work on Wednesday.  The group of people I met were really nice, and it turned out that the party was more like a welcome party for me and two other employees that started last April.  It was good for me to meet the people that are technically my department coworkers.  By chance the attendees also included the receptionist and support staff, which meant that I knew a few more people than I expected to.

At first everyone sat in pre-arranged seats, and I was lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) to sit with the older men of the department.  They were fill of bad jokes, deep questions, and they used some pretty difficult Japanese.  Luckily during the party the organizer had us rotate a bit to mingle, and so I had a chance to talk to everyone.  I even met the company president’s staff driver, who plays roller hockey.  We talked ice hockey for a while.

I didn’t drink so much being that it was on a “school night”, and got home around 11pm – not so late for these kinds of things. The party the next night was with two of my former students, one of which is going to transfer to the Tokyo office.  She wasn’t thrilled with the idea of the commute, and so we talked about her future life there.  She’s hoping to finally settle down in one place – she grew up in Kyushu, has worked for a couple of years here in Kansai, and I think she’d like to end up somewhere, be it Tokyo or another place.  I think she’s the kind of person that will enjoy Tokyo life, though.  We ate of Mikaen, an authentic Chinese restaurant in Sannomiya.  The food was good, and my student even had a chance to practice her Chinese with the staff.  I think it was a good send-off party for her.

After all the partying, Friday night was a nice calm affair.  I walked home in a torrential downpour, laden with groceries for the weekend, but it was a relief to walk in the door and start nine days off.   I made up some Greek wraps for a healthy dinner, and Kuniko and I dined in while the rain poured down outside.

Saturday was my day to zone out.  I read books, watched some movies, ate leftovers, and killed time before Kuniko got home from a school event.  Once she got home we had cocktails and celebrated the end of her work week.

Yesterday we both had off, so I went to the doctor in the morning to complain about some back pain (lose some weight, he said) and then Kuniko and I went for a three hour walk around town.  It was pretty hot outside, but after we climbed the hill to the home improvement center, everything else was downhill or flat.  No problem.

At the home center I bought some of the tools I would need to work on my major project this week, and once we got home I got it kicked off.

The big project was to run LAN cable to behind the TV in our living room from the router upstairs.  Back when we were designing the house, I felt like just using wireless throughout the house would be enough bandwidth for day to day usage, but recently I have been streaming TV and movies to the TV in the living room, and WiFi wasn’t cutting it.  Half the work was already done for me – there is an ethernet jack across the room about 30 feet away.

So the trick was to remove that jack, run cable down inside that wall, drill a hole to the crawlspace high basement, run the cable across the basement to under the TV, drill up into the space between the inner wall and outer wall, push the cable up, and wire it to a jack behind the TV.  It was even more tricky than I thought.  Luckily, I caught a couple of big breaks and was able to split the project over two days.  The only major problem was my colorblindness causing difficulty in wiring the RJ45 jacks.  The brown and green wires looked pretty much the same to me, causing several do-overs.

Now things are all hooked and working perfectly.  I saved big bucks, and the wire is invisible beneath the floor.  No trade-offs, just some sore muscles from crawling around under the house on my belly.  Hooray!