The wet season in Southeast Asia: obviating the need for daily weather reports since time immemorial.

I don’t know who the owner of wireless network 000DOB323970 is, but he’s my new personal hero. After exactly a month and a half without an online connection, I’m wired again. How this has happened is a mystery known only to the spirits of the internets, to whose fickle caprices I’m surely in debt. I’m considering a ritual sacrifice to demonstrate my gratitude. What do you think: my Blackberry or a goat?

Shortly after I moved into my new apartment downtown at the beginning of February, I abandoned hope of picking up a stray wifi signal near my building. A week’s worth of hunting, during which I carried my laptop around the apartment in every conceivable position and elevation, yielded diddlysquat. I have no idea what I would have done if I’d found a signal an inch from the ceiling, but I tried it. I joggled the PC card, read and re-read the unhelpful help guide, and tweaked countless advanced options. Nada. When you’re dealing with something as insubstantial as an electromagnetic radio wave, it seems counterintuitive to have to hunt for it. It’s like air; it just seems so simple and ubiquitous. It doesn’t look like it’s there even when it is; why should it never not be there? But not there is just what it was.

For 41 days my sleek laptop sat whirring quietly on my apartment floor, a throwback to the ‘80s. I fell out of touch with friends and family. My blog became a binary ghost town. Then, last night, while I was in the kitchenette cooking up some dinner, my laptop suddenly let loose with an electronic *ping* of joy. It was the kind of ping that a computer makes only if it has a good reason, and it got my attention immediately. I hurried over to see what was going on. There, at the bottom of the monitor, I saw something that made my heart leap: a little icon of a wirelessly connected computer. The angry red X that had lain over the little icon for so long was gone, replaced by dancing circles of the happiest color that exists: green – the color of life, of money, of spring, of go.

Is it just me, or are things amiss when it’s 2 p.m and I can see my breath inside my house?

Yes, I’m aware that our ancestors survived for tens of thousands of years, through ice ages and even prehistoric Chicago winters, without the benefits of central heat. (And I would not say no to a mammoth fur hoodie right now.) But this is 2007. It’s the middle of the afternoon on December 5 and I can see my breath. In my kitchen. That’s all I’m saying.

While I’m here, may as well post the latest Bad English T-shirt O’ the Week, fresh from Kyoto. And it’s a doozie, I don’t mind telling you. Feast your eyes on the following. The mind reels, doesn’t it?

In my ambitious goal to spend as much time on Japanese trains and buses as possible, I’m heading out this afternoon for a weekend in Kyoto, which is about 115 kilometers (do the conversion yourself) to the southeast of Fukui. There, I’m staying at my friend Inna’s house in the city. She’s promised to show me the “real” Kyoto, which I really hope does not involve a lot of karaoke.

The last time I was in Kyoto, it was mid-August, my second weekend in Japan, and it was 39º C in the city, which made breathing difficult, not to mention walking around. Given that there are an estimated 1,600 temples to see in Kyoto, almost all of them on the International Register of Outlandishly Important and Unmissable Historic Sites, I’m fairly wriggling with happiness over the fact that while I’m there this time, it’s going to be a bracing 10º, on average. (Okay, fine: 50º F. Happy?)

Also, I realized this morning that I hadn’t properly posted any links to my Arashima-dake photo gallery, and hadn’t made any mention at all of my trip on Saturday to Katsuyama’s Heisenji Shrine, picturesque rebuilt castle, or space-age dinosaur museum. So here they are. As an aside, I should note that eventually – sooner, hopefully, than later – I’ll be moving Man and Ultraman out of its current digs in Wordpress’s free blog-hosting ghetto and into a spiffy new self-hosted ranch-house in the upper-middle-class suburbs, now that I’ve ponied up for my own domain. There, I’ll have access to loads of new customizable options, which will include bell-and-whistle-dripping photo gallery plug-ins as well as curbside trash pickup, though I’ll also probably have to deal with a dictatorial neighborhood association. You take the good with the bad, I guess.

For the moment, then, a couple of photos from (and links to) my trips last weekend to Katsuyama and Arashima-dake. Unless I manage to file a report from Kyoto (say, by sneaking out of a karaoke club and into an internet café), this blogger will return with Kyoto stories aplenty – and an impressive new bus mileage total – next week.

Katsuyama Castle and Old Woman Working in Field

Sunset on Arashima-dake (No I did not wet myself, thanks very much - that’s sweat. Note also the soaked boots. That’s not sweat, that’s ice water.)

Fukui, Japan (Fukui)
Detailed Current Conditions
1:34 a.m. Thursday, November 22, 2007
Current Summary [ English | Metric ]

37°F

SNOW
RealFeel® 30 °F
Winds ESE at 9 mph

Well, ok. If they say so. But it looks a lot more like rain out there if you ask me.