I thought November would be a boring month. It wasn’t. December is shaping up to be an enjoyable month too – but one mostly at home, I think.
In early November, on a whim because the rain, the short days, and the start of the cold wasn’t very fun – I booked a ten day trip to Vietnam, which was absolutely awesome. Almost as soon as I had it booked, my sister asked if my daughter and I might want to join her for Thanksgiving. My daughter and I were in close communication almost daily, but I needed to see her and I’m pretty sure she needed to see me. So the answer was yes – so I booked an end of the month trip to Honolulu, then to California, then back to Honolulu and back to Tokyo, then Sapporo, then back to Otaru, and Satoshi Manor. Almost as soon as that was sorted, a job I had expressed interest in reached out to me to do some training and a few test working days – so that was five days between my two trips. It was a very ‘not-boring’ November. In addition, I somehow managed to write my first young adult novel too. All of that was awesome but what wasn’t so great was catching a cold before my trip to Vietnam, being slightly buggy for most of that trip, getting back and getting better, then catching another sort of worse cold from the new job, and then being buggy for almost all of the second trip. I’m home now and suddenly not sick. It feels great.
While I was gone the weather shifted from rain to snow. Today there’s about a foot of light, beautiful powder around my house. I love it. The cold crisp air suits me. I brought two wool Pendleton blankets back with me and a variety of cold weather clothes. My pipes didn’t freeze while I was gone and I’m really hoping they won’t freeze while I am here either. I can’t believe it’s already December 6th.
As I wrote in my previous post about the American trip, I definitely wasn’t feeling at home there. In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that almost no one feels at home there. I think that it’s likely that the unsettled, anxious feeling I have in the USA is a result of intentional conditioning by the power brokers. A control system extraordinaire. I’ll go back, because I love my kid and love seeing her, but I have no desire to ever live there. It might happen, but I think I can probably manage to avoid that scenario until it suits me.
I shared this on the Baoism Discord – so I’ll copy and paste it here for you:
This was mind blowing – Hawaiian Airlines booked me on connecting flights using their partner Japan Airlines (Honolulu -> Tokyo -> Sapporo) with JA handling the internal leg from Tokyo to Sapporo. At checkin – I pointed out that I would have to gather my bags, clear customs, transit from Terminal 3 to Terminal 1 at Haneda (a long transit) and then recheck my bags with JA and do it all in about 50 minutes – which was frankly speaking – impossible. Hawaiian Airline’s answer “You’ll be fine” and then when I raised it again at the gate “Sorry, we can’t put you on a later flight from here”. Arriving in Japan, I realized that Japan Airlines had seen the issue and unleased a small army of smartly clad Japanese Airlines gate agents to solve the issue. One agent came out to greet the plane with a placard with my name on it, she had Hawaiian Airlines staff page me on the plane and met me as soon as I was off. She put me on a bus from the tarmac to baggage claim where another agent was waiting with a name placard. This one helped me to tag my bags with JA tags and escorted me to the fastest route through customs and immigration before putting me on the Tokyo Monorail with detailed instructions where to exit, recheck my bags, and go through security the fastest. She also informed me that my flight had actually been delayed by an hour so they thought I could make it if I didn’t delay (Hawaiian had no way of knowing this would be the case, the flight was scheduled to be boarding when my HA flight arrived – it was a stupid booking that they did nothing to fix). Another JA agent met me to make sure my bags got put on the right flight. I got to the gate just as boarding began. There is no way that I would have made it without Japan Airlines deploying smart, organized, hard working employees to make it happen. There is so much here that shows why I prefer Japan over the US because it’s not just airlines, it’s everything.
Today, I woke up with no jet lag somehow. No travel weariness. Just a desire to chill at home, but I didn’t have much in the way of food here so I went and spent 5100 yen at the nearest convenience store (about $34) and got everything I need to just chill and relax today.
I’ve decided to just grow out my beard for a while. It definitely is nice to have a beard in the cold weather. I bought some funny soap though that is supposed to revitalize and rejuvenate hair all over the body – I don’t know what that means but I wonder if my beard will turn from grey back to brown or black. That would be fun.