The colorful wolf

Here's some pictures I made today. I made them near my room, and on a supermarket run.

The view from the window next to my desk. Not too spectacular really.

This first door to the right is my front door. The drainpipe to the left is leaking. Every time it rains, the rain falling through there makes a lot of noise when it hits the concrete floor. It keeps on dripping down long after the rain has stopped.

Since my room is a corner room I have a flat area of space next to my room. It's a great place to sit during summer, especially in the evening when it cools down.


That's my room seen from the flat area.


The youth heim's parking lot as seen from the fifth floor.

I think most of the rooms of the building are actually empty. They've been doing work on a lot of the rooms in the building, and there don't seem to live many people actually.


That's my room, seen from the street.

These vending machines provide a wonderful variety of weird drinks for when you're too lazy to go to conbini in the evening. The light of these things shines so brightly that it blinds you every time you turn right to enter the youth heim after you come home from work.


This place is quite close to the youth heim, on the way to the city center. There's lots of frogs in there, and they make an amazing noise in the night. I can hear them quite loudly if I sleep with the balcony door open.

The road that goes towards the city center, the nearest conbini, and the nearest supermarket. I must have takes this road a thousand times already.

This time was different though, as I found a (IMHO) huge snake on the road! Quite a weird find in the middle of the city. It didn't move at all though, so I took some pictures of it. When I returned by the same road it was still there but in a different position.

The nearest conbini. It's a 7-11. There's a different conbini called Lawson in the opposite direction, maybe slightly further. I prefer to go Lawson, because the 7-11 smells bad and the people in Lawson are more friendly. This 7-11's crappyness has it's charms though, and I often use(d) it as a meeting place for my friends.

That's Bert, the resident Peruvian/Korean/Canadian/US Spanish intern. He told me he could see me from miles away, since I stand out a lot compared to the Japanese people. Good, I haven't shrunk yet ^^


Kimisawa, the closest supermarket. A bit expensive for some stuff, but they have all I'll ever need. Which includes stuff like Dutch peanut butter and Dutch soup o_0

Yup, pretty normal for a supermarket. The only difference is that Japanese supermarkets sell things with tentacles too.

The majestic touring bike reduced to doing the supermarket run every week.

That's it for boring Atsugi :)


So, what's up with me? Well, for one thing: I got my new laptop! ^_^ The Sony Vaio arrived Thursday, and I'm quite happy with it. The one thing I still have to get used to is the Japanese version of Windows Vista though T_T, but I'm getting the hang of it. It runs great, despite the huge amount of useless software installed by evil Sony. I spent the first hour learning Japa nese, the next hour uninstalling Sony's crap, and another hour installing useful software. I'm typing this post on my laptop :)

It's faster than my normal PC o_0 (except for 3D games, of course). It's got more memory and it runs smoother too. So far the only crash I had was when I tried to read my camera's memory card with it. Trying to access the drive in explorer crashes Windows Vista. I can't believe those stupid lazy people at Microsoft spend all their time working on the user interface, and forget to handle one of the worst problems of Windows, that has been there since Windows 95. When Windows Explorer crashes, you lose the taskbar too and your taskbar icons disappear. Come on Microsoft, you guys couldn't have overlooked this problem. Meh. Microsoft sucks. Still, I'm too lazy to try Linux so I guess I'm stuck with it.

I was watching an anime called Stellvia of the Universe. It's a fairly regular anime without any special elements, but one thing interested me. It talked about the invisible wall. It means that, when you are learning something new, in the beginning you can make great progress, but as you learn more and more, you hit a limit, a wall, and it's hard to become better at something. This goes for anything: programming, sports, games, life. The learning process itself is great fun if you see yourself making great leaps forward, but one tends to lose confidence if after a while the progress is not that great anymore. I think I hit my invisible wall in programming a long time ago. The invisible wall of life is still nowhere to be seen. Because it's invisible. Hahaha.... Meh. I haven't bumped into that wall yet, anyway.

In anime, when a person gets depressed or insecure, all they have to do is say 'Ok, I have to do my best!' (ganbarunakucha!). This seems to work for the person all the time, and I suspect a lot of Japanese people to do this in real life when dealing with hopeless situations, like having a boring job, a nasty deadline, or just a crappy life in general. It helps them to accept bad situations, and 'endure' them better than for example Europeans or Americans, who would just try to change the situation and not put up with it. In this way, I think my attitude is more similar to the Japanese than for example the European way. I put up with it, and things get better by themselves. Whenever I not put up with it I seem to make things worse than they were before, so I guess it's best for me to leave stuff alone :)