Originally published at Far2wise.Net. Please leave any comments there.

Not sure yet.. Just thought I would bring back some of the older posts.. Stay tuned to see if I start using this again.

Originally published at Far2wise.Net. Please leave any comments there.

I’m working third shift for the next two weeks, and as I sit here trying to adjust to the overnight schedule, kids asleep upstairs, I just finished watching a movie. For some reason this lit a fire under my ass and I started to look into online workshops for writing.

This is where it all went down hill.. I spent probably 2 or 3 hours comparing Stanford, Gotham, Writing, and a few others. Then I moved on to local colleges and universities and remote sites with programs. I looked up summer retreats, and weekend get aways.

Then it hit me.. In the past 5 years, I have spent probably over 200 hours trying to find the best way to learn to write.. And only maybe 20 or so hours actually writing.

If you haven’t noticed yet.. I deleted the blog. I’ve relized that I have a bunch of huge time sinks.. I’m going to list a few of them, so if you see me disappearing from these, realize that I’m trying to do something better with my life.. And not just avoiding you.

1) This blog.. I haven’t been able to write in it for a while.. Been too concerned with all the eyes reading it and what they might think.. But I’ve got over 400 posts in this thing.. If the averate post is 500 words long.. That’s 20k words. Or 1/4 of a novel. I could have written my novel instead of this thing.

2) Facebook/myspace… I had deleted all of these previously, but I got pulled back in. I’ll probably keep my facebook account, but I’m not going to use it actively anymore, and probably delete everything from it also.. The reason for this is because I want to use it as a communication tool with distant friends, because it rocks at that. But I’ve been using it as a time sink for playing games and such.

3) TV… I get much greater enjoyment from a book or a movie than I get from TV.. So why do I keep watching pointless shows? I do enjoy watching House, 24, and Lost, but they are the same shows every week. Now that they are over, I really am not looking forward to anything, so I think I should just stop.

Unfortunately, I still need to keep the tv/cable for the kids. But for myself, its netflix or books.

So what does this gain me??? I’m hoping this gives me more time to focus on the things I want to do, writing and finding a system for beating the lottery. And more tiem for the things I need to do, like get to the gym and back in some form of Martial Arts.

The first two examples are important for my mental/intellectual health. And the last two are important because I am Tachicardic with High Blood pressure. Mix in my weight and I’m not going to be here much longer(This is doctor’s statement.. And with the chest pains I get, I believe her).

With that being said. I will post on this blog major updates.. Stuff like Savannah’s first date, Matthew’s first time being brought home by the cops, etc.. But no more random useless posts.

Originally published at Far2wise.Net. Please leave any comments there.

So I am working 3rd shift for a short time. And of course that means poor little fluffy animals must be sacrificed. Anyone who remembers last time I worked 3rd shift will remember me complaining about all the animals that chose to commit suicide under my wheels.

Its not that I go looking for these fluffy things. But for some reason when I drive in the wee morning hours, they pick my car to jump out in front of. It usually ends up being about 1 a month when I work 3rd shift.

Tonight, my first night on 3rd shift, marked the first murder in a while.. A little possum thought it could cross the road in front of me.. Instead he learned the gross vehicle weight of my car and how that pressure feels when applied through the tread pattern of my michellen tires.

Lets hope this is the only casulty.. But knowing my luck, there will be at least 2 or 3 more before I get off third shift.

Originally published at Far2wise.Net. Please leave any comments there.

So we have a typhoon headed to tokyo.. From what I understand this is very bad news because typhoons wash up monsters like godzilla and such. So even though no one is scared of the typhoon, they are scared of giant lizards coming out of the typhoon to attack us.

But seriosly, people here see typhoon and they think nothing of it. I have a strange feeling that the way typhoons spin backwards from hurricanes make them much weaker than hurricanes. I describe a few of the hurricanes I’ve been through to people in tokyo and they can’t believe it… They have no concept of a real tropical storm…

I just hope the typhoon doesn’t ruin my chance to to go to sumo this weekend..

Originally published at Far2wise.Net. Please leave any comments there.

So…. As I’ve been in japan for two months now I’ve been getting very home sick. I think part of the reason is because I’ve run out places to go so my weekends are calming down alot. Add in the fact that my kids had their first day of school ever and I missed it, they always were taken care of by me or their gradma before, and I’m pretty homesick…

Last night I went to a hanabi festival with a friend from work, the one in the photo from ninja akasak, aye-san. While there we met up with alot of her friends and they all brought homemade food and drinks and it was very nice.

Today though I just stayed home and watched Lost, bought it on itunes so I can watch it here.. Around dinner time cho-san called me and we went to get yakiniku, bbq where they sit a bbq on your table and you cook your food. He could see I’ve been kind of down lately and finally I said, lets go to pachinko. He hates pachinko but I just wanted to do something instead of going home. This time though, I knew what I was doing.. I put my 2000 yen in the machine and played.. The bells and whistles sounded and I kept playing… Then after another 30 minutes the bells and whistles again and such.. I ended up filling up three buckets with balls.. I figured each bucket was about 2000 yen each so I was up and decided to quit.. We exchanged the balls for a card, then took the card upstairs and exchanged it for some chocolate and some “Plastic”.. I took the plastic downstairs and around the back of the place and there was a door with a small whole in it. The opening was barely enough to slide a hand through. I slid my “Plastic” through the whole and the guy gave e back 16,000 yen.. I hadn’t doubled or tripled my money.. I had gotten 8x my money.. w00t… I love pachinko now ;).. Especially evangelion pachinko…

That is all.. Still homesick, but at last got to have some fun…

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Ok, so last weekend.. I went out to ninja akasaka with a few friends. This was a very hip/trendy/pricey restaurant. You show up and the entrace is kind of hiddent and blended into the side of the wall. After you find the entrance you are told you must go through ninja training to eat there. A secret passageway opens and a ninja escorts you through the maze. The maze is the training grounds and sometimes you have to duck pretty low to get through. Once you finish the maze you end up in the restaurant. But it doesn’t look like a restaurant, it looks like an anchient village with each table being in its own little ninja house. We climbed the rocks to our ninja house and proceeded to eat. All the food was presented very well in a fun manner and was very delicious. Only issue was the price was a bit high, but what do you expect when a japanese ninja theme park restaurant focuses on presentation and serves things like caviar potato ice cream ;)…

After ninja akasaka me and cho-san went for a walk to roppongi where we had some drinks for the rest of the night and caught the first train home in the morning. It was all in all a good night even though I was sick from all the vodka for 2 days later…

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So its been a while since the last update… I’ve been quite busy partying, drinking, and working so haven’t had much time to keep up, but I want to make sure you all know I still lub ya..

Two weeks ago or so I went to Kamakura(Big bronze buddha place), and enoshima(Sufer town).. It was alot of fun, you could even climb in buddha’s ass. We walked around and saw a few of the temples there, I think there are 60 temples in total so we didn’t see anywhere near all of them. Afterwards we caught a train to enoshhima and watched the pretty girls on the beach, and hiked to another temple and lighthouse. All in all it was alot of fun and to finish the night off we ended up going to see a live performance by a coworker in fujisawa area.

Check out the photos… Video of band will come shortly..

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So I installed a new comment plug in for wordpress.. Its called commentluv and it should now visit any comment posters website and download the latest post on their site via rss and add it to their signature. Please post some comments if you have a blog and use your blogs url for your sites url and it we should start seeing some comment luv..

Originally published at Far2wise.Net. Please leave any comments there.

Soooo. Lets start with pachinko… I went to a real pachinko parlour the other night. Not the “Game” house that featured pachinko like last time.. And sat down with my 2000 yen to play. While playing though I aparently won something big.. I didn’t know what it was.. But the machine started beeping and flashing, and playing a music video.. It was really cool, the guys even walked up and put a flag on my machine because I was A WINNER.. The problem was, I turned to cho-san and asked him.. What is this.. And he said “Its a popular song”.. So me, being gaijin I thought when music was over it would spit out a shit load of balls.. Well, 5 minutes into the song with me and cho-san watching it someone finally explained that I had to play through the music video to win big….. WTF??????? 7 minute music video and you tell me this after I sat here watching for 5 minutes? So I start playing and the balls just pour out of the machine.. I must have doubled or trippled my money in just those 2 minutes of playing.. Imagine what I would have if I had played through the whole song instead of being a LOOOOOSSSSEEEERRRR and watching the music video.. Le Sigh…

Second thing that makes me a looser.. I installed Hardy Heron — Ubuntu, in a virtual machine.. But get this.. The japanese archive servers for ubuntu are sooooo bad that 50 percent of the time I get 404 errors when running apt-get update.. And you know, installing SDL libraries? Impossible.. How can Ubuntu not keep the japanese mirrors in sync with the US mirrors?

Originally published at Far2wise.Net. Please leave any comments there.

Went to Nikko this weekend. First up, Nikko temples. There were alot of georgous temples there and hot water onsens. And yes I got my ass naked and got in a onsen. Was a pretty good time, will let the pictures speak for themselves:

Secondly we went to Edo wonderland.. Which is home to many ninjas and samurais.. This was alot of fun as they had alot of shows and it was like a festival atmosphere alot of places. Again I will let the pictures and videos do the talking for this one also:

And now the ninja video: