Spring cleaning!

Today's beautiful weather inspired me to stay inside all day and clean my room. Well not quite. I did get out for a bike ride in the afternoon to the next station over to take some pictures of some of the sakura in the local park. Maybe I'll post some pictures tomorrow if I get some time. I decided that it was time to switch around the furniture in the bedroom and the living room-spice things up a bit. And I washed about a month's worth of laundry so that kept me going for a long time too.

Jared got stopped by the police again yesterday so all day today he has been the biggest $*%&$# all sullen and angry. I like him a lot more when he's loud and angry. Fortunately he's finally managed to get the cork out of the wine bottle so hopefully that will chill him out a little.

Back to my bike ride. I almost capsized on my bicyle a couple of times because of dust in my eyes. Those of you who actually believe that Tokyo is a modern metropolis will be surprised to learn that the entire city is actually 95% dirt. I don't know how, but somehow they manage to fit 12 million people into only 50% of the actual land area inside city limits. The rest of the area is taken up by NOVA schools and fields. Yes that's right. In a city where they sell land by the square inch, your nextdoor neighbour is, more likely than not, a cabbage. Anyways the soil makeup is a very fine grain, probably only a few steps above sand and on windy days like today there's really no point to even stepping outside your door.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go back to the 7th Circle of Hell, or as Dante sometimes refers to it, the Japanese Immigration Office. I'm not sure if I vented about this the last time I went (tomorrow will be my third) so I'll do it before I forget. Last time I went, I had all my forms in order went up to the counter and the lady checked them over and gave me a number and told me to sit down. There were about 15 numbers before mine and it took at least 25 minutes for the first number to go!! Is it because the forms are so complicated that it takes a long time? No, it's because the lady who is processing the forms is the same lady who has to check over the forms the first time and then give you your number!! She's so busy with people just walking up to the counter that she never has time to deal with the people who have already received their numbers and are waiting.

Now this in itself is maddening enough but when you consider that this is a country that hires useless people to do useless jobs it makes it even worse. I felt like screaming, "You hire old men to direct cars out of out of the supermarket parking lot onto the street but you can't hire one single person to stand at the door and check over forms and hand out numbers! IN CANADA WE CAN DRIVE OUT OF THE PARKING LOTS ALL BY OURSELVES!! IT'S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!"

Well I feel better now. Hopefully I don't need to vent again after tomorrow.