what a day
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I've had a bit of a wobbly week, and today just capped it off wonderfully. This morning was one of those Tokyo Rainy Season days. Not actually raining, but at once very windy and bordering on 30C. I managed to wrap up the work I wanted done this week, editing some image 25 files for the retail website that my partner and I are putting together.
With my head still spinning from all of that, I did some research into what sort of out-of-the-box web management tool we should use for our company's extensive library. That ate up another couple of hours.
Then at 15:30 I hit the streets. My first stop was the post office in Gotanda where I suspect I left my sunglasses about a month ago (grasping at straws, yessir). They hadn't sen my glasses but took down my details. Cycling on to Nishiazabu, I picked up a roll of slide film that includes photos of our recent trip to Disneywhatever. There are some good pics on the roll, as it turns out, such as this one taken by darling Mari.
Rather than double-checking where I was going next on my journey, I set off for Shinjuku where there's a photo lab and film store that I frequent. I figured I had three rolls of film to pick up, so I might as well buy some more while I was there.
Only when I got there the staff told me that I had the wrong store. Blinking stupidly at the tag I'd handed them, I saw that not only did I have the wrong chain, I'd gone twenty minutes beyond what I'd needed to in the heat and wind. And it would take me another fifteen minutes (at least!) to get back to where I wanted to be.
So I bought some film. Not the film I should have bought to even out my stores at home, but I simply couldn't think through what I had at home. There's no worry that I won't use the stuff I bought (a brick of Ilford's 400 ISO HP5; what I'd wanted was the similar 125ISO FP4, my favourite film in the whole wide world).
So on to Shibuya, by a route that was pretty wasteful and which exposed me to more delivery morons than I'm comfortable with (I swear those people are guided by voices, because they are guided by neither the rules of the road nor the conventions of driving). All went well enough with the pick-up (it helps to be at the spot where your film is waiting) except that I brained myself on a low-hanging bank of TV's cleverly blocking entrance to the store. Happily I was still wearing my cycling helmet, but the collision truly did wonders for my mood.
Heading on for home, I decided that I wanted some alcohol to go with dinner. So I stopped in at the market on the way home and picked up a few things. But not the chu-hi I'd stopped in for! I had another surprise waiting for me when I got in. Instead of buying a 1L container of the dry-tasting 'houjichya' Japanese roast tea and a 500mL container of the sweet Western-style "lemon tea", I'd bought both 1L and 500mL of the Japanese stuff. So I couldn't come home to my self-mixed blend which goes so well on a hot day.
Mari and Kenny got home shortly after I did, and Mari was keen to see the work I'd done on the site. While I showed her, Kenny was milling about at my feet playing with something.
The power bar, as it turned out. He switched off the power to the PC, causing me to lose many works-in-progress (and giving the PC a punch in the metaphorical guts, too, though OSX recuperates much better from such indignities than does Windows). I hollered at Kenny, then apologized when I recognized that I shouldn't have let him play with it.
But the tone for the evening was set. He grabbed a handful of either of my thighs while I bathed him, an excruciating moment that elicited a laugh from him. Somehow, I did not drown him.
All evening, Kenny and I butted heads. I even had to take him to his bedroom and dump him in his "old" crib (since he no longer sleeps in it, it's effectively only used as a small prison) and leave him in the dark. He'd been throwing his food on the floor and then punched his mother.
Then I set about scanning the various rolls of film I'd picked up. During the week while tidying up the clutter in the closet, I'd discovered that one roll of the high speed film I'd set aside had in fact already been shot. Thinking back to the last time I'd used any Fujicolor 1600 film, I could only think of Kenny's birth. Meaning that I'd misplaced a roll of exposed high-speed film that was doubtless now fogged due to the passage of 17 months of shelf-time.
But it's still good. Ish.
Last but not least, I got up while scanning my film to get a pen for writing the name of the roll onto the film's sleeve. In doing so, I stumbled over some toy on the floor and came down hard on the inch-worm pull-toy I'd made for Kenny. I broke the axle. So the toy's now sitting in pieces on the table. Don't know when I'll find time to fix it.
My last item of note: a musician friend seems to have dropped off the face of the Earth in the past six-eight months. Right after he was slated for a string of surgeries. I don't know how I missed his absence for so long, but the email address he's used for the decade+ that I've known him is now invalid and his website looks defunct. Yikes. I hope all is well!