Of course the weekend rolls around and the rain does too! Drove past the Hawaii Kai carnival thing, think they got it worse than Punahoe!
(0)Archive for the 'rant' Category
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Oblivious drivers, just saw a silver compact SUV drive down S King street the wrong way, for three blocks. They didn’t figure all the honking from the oncoming cars meant anything?
(0)I’m lying head downslope in knee-deep powder looking up the underside of a leafless tree canopy, the sharp pain in my front leg beginning to dull with the onset of the adrenaline rush. I manage to get my board untangled from the ice-ball rock garden that I have wandered into and try to rub out the Charley Horse in my right quad. I know from the dullness this isn’t going to be a minor injury, so I focus on getting the board under me and traversing out of the sidecountry and onto a groomed course before I go shocky and black out in the worst-case-scenario. I am a little wobbly, but the leg doesn’t fold under the weight. I complete the drop into the little bowl I was S-turning down onto when I found the icy Linga of Death, crossing a little gulley and toe-siding out to the Echo course. After a little breather, I ride out to the base. Continue reading ‘Oh, Snap!’
Back from dealing with buffet sensou with yelling Chinese tourists in Noboribetsu. Figured going to a less-known property would be a safer bet against the throngs of foreign tourists, but apparently where we went was specifically marketing themselves toward the package foreign market. Onsen itself was not bad, though the scenery was lame, and the baths themselves set in the concrete industrial underside of the hotel. Had some good gyutan for lunch in a new place in the basement of JR Sapporo-eki, North of the Mexican restaurant. Dinner was at an unremarkable ramen-ya. Organic, but not all that good. If you like niboshi-based broth, you’ll like it, but if you lean more toward chicken bone or pork bone bases, you’ll find it painfully fishy. I guess I’m not too upset I forgot both my camera and phone in the rush to get dinner. It’s in Maruyama, around the corner from the second location that Bozu was in before he went under. The place screams, “former salaryman with a dream to open a ramen restaurant”. There was a centimeter or two of new snow in town, so that might be enough to get me motivated to catch the bus out to Kokusai tomorrow.
The warm weather has made all the unremoved snow in the streets melt and the vehicular traffic has churned it into a brown slurry. The snowpack on the sidewalks are corny slush in the sun or slick ice-slides in the shade. I’ll never understand the half-measures in this city. It’s not like it has never snowed before. It’s not like they don’t have front-end loaders and dump trucks. They’ll clear the center turn lane and the inner traffic lanes of a four-lane highway, but leave mountainous piles of snow in the outer lanes. I can understand just getting some lanes open immediately after a blizzard, but that’s where the work stops. They don’t clear the remaining mess in subsequent days and it just keeps piling up. When the temperatures drop next week, all that slush in the streets will harden up into an ankle-twisting egg-crate of ice. Continue reading ‘Wet and Messy’
I’m in Sapporo after a painfully long flight and long bus ride. To add Sendai to their list of destinations, Hawaiian puts them in as a stopover on the 441/442 Shin-Chitose flight. That means 12-hours in the packed-out seat of one of their oldest 767’s instead of 9. It’s not unlike a OGG stop on a ITO flight from HNL, but imagine your frustration if every time you had to go to HNL from OGG, you had to go all the way to ITO! I guess they are banking on capturing the Tohoku market with this destination, though maybe only a quarter to third of the nearly full flight got off at Sendai, and maybe 20-30 new passengers got on. A good part of the ramp time was security coming on board and inspecting the plane, and a brief cleaning on the open seats that would be reused: I think the actual flight from Sendai to CTS was 30 to 40-minutes. Considering the past experiences I’ve had on Hawaiian, this aircraft (N588HA) was dirty and run-down. Considering it was cold at the gate, they had all night and morning to clean it properly, so it’s the Hawaii cleaning contractor to blame. Continue reading ‘Shimari-yuki’
Seeing J-girls in sweatpants and UGG boots at sweltering HNL is funny enough, but K-girls in shorts, fur jackets, and fur-trimmed boots is something else!
(0)Hey, it’s that time of the year again! I’m feeling a bit ambivalent about watching the Kohaku this year, but I figure once it gets going, I’ll be more enthusiastic. I better set the VCR though, just in case I fall asleep or miss something. Here we go! Continue reading ‘2014 64th Annual NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen’