Red Lobster and Other Fine Japanese Things

It's been a long week and I'm glad today is Saturday. We haven't done many tourist activities in the past couple of weeks because we've been busy with getting all of our possessions unpacked, organized, and reintroduced into our lives. Not sure if I mentioned this previously, but after our shipment of goods came in, we were having a lot of trouble finding our telephone. And we looked everywhere for it, finally figuring that it must have been lost during the move or it was in one of the unfortunate boxes that may have fallen off of the back of the boat on the way over here. It didn't matter too much to me, because we have been making all of our international calls using the computer (more on that in a bit), but when I'm at work and Nicki and Josh are at home, it'd be nice to have a "land line" phone hooked up for easy local calling. Plus, people have wanted to call us from the States, but we've had no way of answering... Until yesterday, that is. Nicki happened to open a box that we had both opened 100 times before, but this time she somehow recognized something we hadn't seen all those previous times... our precious land line telephone. So we're now a fully-functioning communications center.

Now, if only I could find the box containing my Masters degree and my Professional Engineering license, I'd be alright. Fortunately, I made a copy of the latter, so I keep the copy hanging in my office at work as the law requires.

I mentioned above that I'd refer back to international telephone calling on the internet, so I have to give some proper respect to our internet calling software provider. If you have never heard of Skype and you have a computer with DSL or a cable connection, and you make long distance phone calls for more than 2-cents a minute, log onto www.skype.com and see what they are all about. So far, we've used Skype-Out to call people's land phones and cell phones in the US and it costs us 2-cents per minute, every minute. Even more amazing is that you can call someone from your computer to their computer (we haven't done it yet), but it's supposed to be completely free. Anyway, if you ever get hooked up and want to chat, let me know and I'll give you our Skype-ID... so long as you mind our time zone differences and call at a decent hour.

In other news, I finally figured out why every time my parents came to visit us in San Diego and we plugged their digital camera into our Dell's USB port, my mom would always say, "Geez... your computer downloads slowly." Turns out, our computer is older than my parents' and we've been using a USB 1.x version. I don't claim to be one of those guys with a lot of (or any, for that matter) knowledge of computer software or hardware, so I asked my coworker Jeff about USBs and what could be done differently. He recommended that I get a "USB 2.0 PCI card" to help increase the speed. So I did... and as it turns out it came with FireWire, too, which some computer-intellegent people told me would be helpful if I ever do anything with video on the computer. The fun part was trying to figure out what to do with the PCI card once I got it. But between the directions that came with the hardware and a couple of advice columns on the web, I figured out that I had to find an open slot inside the back of the computer and jam that little thing in there gently. The good news is that it worked and now I have four USB 2.0 ports and two FireWire ports waiting for the next visit from my folks.

Nicki and I did a boat load of holiday shopping this morning and actually got gifts for most of the people on our list, though we hear that if we don't send them out soon people may not receive them until 2006, so we still have some work to do. When we got home from shopping, we continued putting Christmas and Hanukkah decorations around the house. We put up our "free" (short for "fake tree") last night after Josh went to bed and hung a few ornaments througout the evening. Today, I put up strings of lights on the outside of the house while Nicki wrapped presents, but I still hope to buy more lights in the next week or so. My goal is to have enough lights up that from an aerial view, it looks like our yard is Tokyo. Hey, what better time... my work is picking up our electricity tab while we're here.

We celebrated our successful Saturday - and my successful USB 2.0/FireWire PCI card installation earlier in the week - by going out to dinner tonight at a famous Japanese restaurant that translates loosely into "Red Lobster". Okay, you got me... it's the same Red Lobster chain that is all over the U.S., but the menu here is quite different. Nicki and I got the Lobster Platter for Two, which included a salad, steamed oysters, an appetizer pizza, a whole steamed lobster pulled live from a lobster tank, a large plate of rice topped with various sea creatures, and post-dinner tea. I was a bit skeptical about sticking a fork - yes, they had forks, not hashi (chopsticks) - into some of Disney's Little Mermaid characters, but when I found that there was no actual mermaid on the platter I figured it would be alright to try everything else. I'm guessing here, but Nicki and I think that we tried all of these tonight: lobster, oysters, shrimp, squid, octopus, clams and maybe one or two other bottom feeders.

I'm hoping that tomorrow can be a relaxing day of sorts so that we can possibly drive around to the other side of the peninsula to see what's over there. I've been told that the views of Fuji-san (Mt. Fuji) are spectacular from over there on a clear day...