Sunday, busy Sunday
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This morning presented some challenges. We spent a night on the bare tatami mats on Saturday night, with only comforters beneath us. My aging bones aren't up for that sort of thing any more and I spent a fair bit of time awake with hip pain. Also, I awoke with what appeared to be a rash across a fair bit of my arm. It had been a reddish patch the night before but had now resolved itself into a series of raised red dots. Concerning, especially if it proved to be bed bug bites!
But we'd need a lot of things to make the place livable, so we headed off to Tachikawa ('Stand up river') and visited some stores. We'll be wiring the home with power-line adapters, which convert the electrical wires in the home into an IP network. Absurdly, there are phone jacks in every room, consuming spaces that should have been dedicated to power jacks at a minimum (but Gigabit Ethernet, ideally). But who am I kidding, the lady who lived here since the place was built in the early '90s* never had an Internet connection**.
When the telco guy was at the house yesterday, he presented me with two options as to where the Internet connection should go: behind where we wanted to put the bed, or at a point where there was only one power jack (because of a phone jack, one of three in the room). I chose the one-jack solution, knowing that it would mean I'd somehow have to connect the power-line adapter to the only source of power in that corner of the room. And I wouldn't want to be stringing Ethernet or power cables from that corner because it was immediately adjacent to the double glass doors that lead out to a small balcony. Making things more difficult (you still with me?) the power-line adapters in this country don't seem to have pass-through power jacks, so you can't connect anything to them once they've occupied a spot. Constraints, constraints!
So today I went to find a power-jack splitter, the sort of thing I vowed many years ago not to use (after having attempted to use one of my late grandfather's which was of dubious provenance and caused sparks). While I was puzzling through all of the above, Mari and the kids picked out some "back to school"*** stationary. We also bought a kettle, and looked at gizmos they have here for drying dishes. You might not think such a thing is necessary, but in this climate I've seen dishes not dry overnight.
We looked at beds and at mattresses, and wound up buying two 8 cm futon mattresses. Mari also took The Girl clothes shopping, which is always a treat, and The Boy and I waited for a time at a cafe. We took a taxi home and were surprised that the trip was so short; Tachikawa is way out at the edge of the city, on the edge of the hills. Yet, it was a $25 taxi trip from our place (that's half the fare from our former place in the Beaches in Toronto to the airport).
*Shudder, the early '90s.
**I imagine it was like a kind of prison existence. I mean my father's had Internet access for thirty years, was she a hundred?
***The kids were out of school for six months!