Laser Nose Surgery Part 2

Did my second Laser Nose Surgery. During the actual process it wasn't as painful as the first time. I went to work after I was done... then after I got home the pain started! After a couple days and some naps and pain killers I got better, but it wasn't as smooth as the first time. It's still in the healing process so I haven't really felt the benefits yet. I'm hoping it works out though... I have a check up in mid May, by which I should be back to around 100%.

It's funny (well not really), because I haven't really been singing as much as before since I did this surgery. Incidentally, I totally cut my index finger on my left hand, so I haven't bene playing guitar or bass like I usually do. I've still been cheating a bit, but I've had to abbreviate chords which has been a learning experience.

I'll update when the time comes.

Laser Nose Surgery

Since I came to Japan almost three years ago, my allergies (which I honestly didn't know I had until I came to Japan) have gotten gradually worse. At first I thought it was just a cold that wasn't going away... then after I had a cold for like half a year I realized that maybe it was something different. I went to almost all of the ENT doctors in my town. They all told me it was a cold. Then one told me it was allergies. I took a bit of medicine for it, and it wasn't really working as well as I'd hoped.

So I went to the hospital and told them all about it. So I systematically tried all kinds of different combinations of medicine. I found one combination that worked some-what decently, but I was still not 100% satisfied. So I talked to them about other options and they mentioned nose surgery. They told me about using lasers to do it and how easy and quick it is.

Basically what they did was 'laser' away the inside of the depths of my nose. To get technical, I think it's called a turbinectomy. Basically the turbinates in my nose, because of allergies, kind of puff up to the point that it's extremely hard or impossible to breath through my nose. I think it's kind of like trying to breath through one of those coffee straws.

It ended up being a very quick surgury. The prep was very fast. It was funny because I had taken my blood pressure, kind of playing around, while waiting... then they came out to check my tempturature and my blood pressure. I gave them my resutls and that sped things up. So we got started ahead of schedule! The actual surgury itself took less than 30 minutes. I was so worried the whole time... I was totally sweating and shaking when it was over. It took a while for me to get out of 'shock', but it was more or less painless. It actually felt like getting shocked in the nose. It didn't really hurt at all (of course they had shoved a bunch of novocaine-like substance up my nose before hand). The 'shocks' kind of tunneled their way through my head. So sometimes I could feel my k9 teeth kind of rumble and one time I felt the sensation go to my eyes. So it was kind of weird and uncomfortable.

As for the results, I don't really know yet. They do one session, your nose puffs up inside (which kind of defeats the purpose haha), you wait two weeks until your nose goes back to normal, and then they do it all over again. So I'll hopefully be doing fine by May! I will post an update when that time comes.

2011

2010 has come to a close, which means I've been doing this blog for about a year. Since I have started, I have split it up into different sections which concern what are basically different hobbies of mine. Unfortunately I didn't do much posting as far as the last half of 2010 goes. Well, I don't want to spend hours talking about why I didn't post, but I'll just leave it at I was busy with what was both a very stressfull and exciting (in a good way) thing.

With that said, I want to do some more posting in 2011. My original goal was to post once a week or so-- or at least have things average out to that. Shortly after creating the blog I realized that what I really wanted to do was to make videos and music. So hopefully this year I will be expanding into those mediums.

I hope to make something that is very enjoyable for everyone.

Happy New Year!

Clean up

I've decided that my blog is starting to expand into too many subjects. There are a lot of things I like to talk about and have interests in, but I think it's a little bit of a stretch to put them all onto one page. So I've created two new blogs to help keep organized.

The first additional blog I've made is called "Eigo Supreme". It's gonna focus on English education in Japan and language acquisition and all that good stuff. So I'll move my Sunshine English series over there and will occasionally add new things that I come up with or discover.

The second blog I've made is called "Casual Retro Gaming". It's gonna focus on video games. Most of the games I play are from the early to mid 90's, so while calling it retro is a little bit of wrong, just calling it a video game blog would be misleading. I'm going to move all my video game reviews over to that blog and create new posts with videos, reviews, and other random things.

As for this blog, I've decided to keep it simple. I'm gonna keep on posting Obentos, Life in Japan posts, and travelling in Japan posts. I also want to add some new things. I tend to do a lot of little DIY things lately, so I'll post about that some times. I might make a blog dedicated to my music stuff sometime down the road, but for the time being, I'm just going to keep that stuff on this blog.

In addition to new blogs, I have also created two new Youtube accounts. One channel is called "OmiyaST", which is derived from what my wife and I call each other. It will essentially contain videos of some stuff that we do together-- mostly around the house stuff. I'll also use it to post videos for my "Eigo Supreme" blog, so it will also contain some English help.

The second Youtube channel I have created is called "MrStevieSupreme". I will use that as my video game channel. I might post video reviews, but I doubt it. I'll probably use it for gameplay videos and little tid bits of stuff having to do with games.

My original youtube channel, "morrissteven" will continue to be my place to post songs. I'll post videos of my DIY stuff having to do with music and hopefully some gear reviews, too.

I hope that makes this blog easier to enjoy!

Eigo Supreme:
http://eigosupreme.blogspot.com/

Casual Retro Gaming:
http://casualretrogaming.blogspot.com/

morrissteven (Music Youtube channel):
http://www.youtube.com/user/morrissteven

OmiyaST Youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/OmiyaST

Edit: MrStevieSupreme will not be. In it's place, another Youtube Channel Focused on English learning for Japanese called Eigo Supreme will be created.

ST

Obento #1 June 26, 2010

Left container:

White rice with an umeboshi, a small tomato and some kiwi slices

Right container:

Grilled weiners with bell peppers and onions, Tamago yaki (like an omlette) with cheese in it and cashew nuts, grilled salmon.

Overview:

It was quite filling! The kiwi and strawberry combo was actually better than I thought it'd be. I think the cashews would've been better paired with the salmon-- which incidentally could've had a bed of lettuce which would have balanced it out a little better. It was good but definitely needed more veggies.

Note:

This isn't the first 'bento' that I've made, but it's the first one I've taken a picture of in hopes to post it on this blog (albiet quite late). From now on I will take pictures of the 'bentos' that I make and post them on here.

The Cable Caddy

I don't quite know when, but at some point in my life I started getting sick of chargers for everything that I buy. Why does everything have to have a special charger?! Why can't they make some kind of standard size for that crap like they did with USB. Why must it all be so different, and such an emormous waste of space. It's like I'm living in a jungle of wires!

My solution: Using scrap laminate wood I had left over from a rack build (for rack gear) I did a while back. Truth be told, I built this quite a while ago. It has saved quite a bit of hastle and really saves space. I'm sure if I spent more than 20 minutes making it, I might've come up with something a little bit nice and intuitive, but I had reached my limit, and what happend happened.
The basic design is based on a power strip underneath a box which consists of 8 plugs for crap to plug into. I some how managed to fit all the semi wall warts of our cell phones and camera chargers and what-not-doo-hickies. The jungle of wires is mostly contained underneath. I had to tie up and tape down some of the wires to prevent them from "afroing" out thus launching my creation into deep space. I added a rack-like layer at the top to create more docking space for big charger things. As you can see, we also use it as a place to keep our nail clippers, so we don't lose track of 'em.

I have to say, though... my wife and I got a DSi recently, and it has a different plug than the DS... what the hell? Who decides that these plugs have to be different for every minor new edition of some hardware. Just make a choice and stick with it. You'll lower everyone's blood pressure that way. It's not like I'm gonna go out and buy your charger again if it breaks on me-- count me out... you can bet I'm gonna be looking for the cheapest Chinese replacement to tide me over until your crappy hardware breaks and I move on from that, too.

To make a long and stagnant story short, this device has saved us some hastle, but I do believe that I will have to make a new one in a year or two to come. The moral of the story is to make one of these guys as big as you can and store it somewhere easily accessible and as unobtrusive a place as possible. Get the biggest honkin power strip you can (with plug space on the side and on the top). Get a switchable unit to turn it off when it's not in use to save a slight amount of power (which may be debatable).

If I still lived in America, I'd feel obligated to write a letter to congress to pass some kind of law to get power cables for electronics to reach some kind of standard. I'm sick to goddamned hell of dealing with so many different power cables and wall warty non-sense. I thought that's what we were partying in 1999 about... getting rid of stupid things like this. So much for the 21st century of Back to the Future II.

Hobo Nichi Techo

It was some time last year. I somehow discovered that Itoi Shigesato had a website. On that website was something called a "Hobo Nichi Techo", which is essentially a planner.

It was around November of last year when I first discovered the Hobo Nichi Techo. I became interested in getting a new planner because... well frankly it was almost the end of the year, and my current planner at the time was running out of space. I had just gotten Mother 3 for the Gameboy Advance at the time and so I must've been looking for information on its creator, Itoi Shigesato, on the internet. I stumbled upon his website which, given the time of year, was really pushing the Techo. I was a little bit iffy about ordering one from online, as seeing them in person would give me a better idea of which one I really wanted. The problem is, seeing one in person was a problem considering where I live-- Toyama. I had plans to see my school's brass band perform in Osaka at the end of November, so things kind of worked out. I waited and waited, and one day my girlfriend and I were finally in Osaka, looking at what would become our new planners.

Here is a video posted by Itoi Shigesato featuring his Hobo Nichi Techo on youtube:

I absolutely love that video for some reason-- and the song, too. Anyways, as you can tell by my pictures, I got the safari beige color, with the "cool" looking stripes on the pen holder on the side.

Anyways, I have had mine for over half a year now, and I wanted to post a semi-review of it. In short, I think it has worked out great for me. However, I think there are quite a few reasons why it's not very approachable (particularly to non-Japanese).

For starters, I really like the simplicity of it. The books themselves, as you can tell by the video, are mostly all very interesting. I quite enjoy the color I chose, although it has admittedly faded and gotten a little dirty with time (on the outside). My girlfriend got the red one, which is a nice color as well. I particularly like the designs of the two-tone "Cousins", but they are a little bit too large for what I need.

The planners are filled with little pockets and slots to fit all kinds of things in, from business cards to nearly paper thin calculators (incidently made by Itoi's company). They also sell additional books to what would be the main planner. I bought a weekly schedule planner book and a set of 3 simple "note" books. I have to be honest, the weekly schedule book is a waste of money, as it seems to be exactly the same as what's in the main planner. I found the note books to be the best part, though. The note books are simply smaller books filled with pages of blank graph paper. I use one of these books to do my finances in. I mark how much I've put away every month (and for what particular purpose), I keep track of my gas milage, I keep track of how many coins I save, and also keep track of my bills and work expenses. That all fits snugly in the inner page of my techo, which is really handy (don't get too excited, as there's no personal information in it besides yen symbols and numbers). I also bought what the Japanese call a "Shitajiki", which is basically something hard to put under the paper that you write on. I also found it convenient to make my own little cards to keep up with my class scheduling (which remind me strangely of old-school library book checkout cards).

The planner part of the set, or what is basically the meat and potatoes of this thing, is wonderful. They sell two versions: A weekly planner starting from Sunday, and a weekly planner starting from Monday. It was brought to my attention by my girlfriend that starting from Monday is actually more traditional in Japan. As a teacher, it is quite convenient. Going vertically down the page, the time is revealed (on the left side). This works out great as I can write down my class schedule for the week ahead of time and kind of figure out when I'll have time to make lessons or have meetings with other teachers. It is also nice because I can plan out what I will do before and after school. On the right side there is extra space to write in detail what you will do, or if you have done it or not. It also has check boxes on the top of the page to help you make goals for the day. At the bottom of the page there is some blank space and lastly a short story or anecdote from famous people, a random person, or even from Itoi himself (in Japanese). Some of those are actually quite funny.

At the beginning of the planner book is a calendar section to make long term plans and have a big calendar to look at. At the back is some space to make weekly schedules and some blank pages for notes.

One reason why I think these are a little bit inaccessible to non-Japanese is... well, it's all in Japanese. That takes away a certain dimension of the experience. Another thing is that all the pages are graph paper. It really helps to make well thought out ideas; but only in Japanese. Writing in English on graph paper is frankly a waste of space. There simply isn't enough realestate to jot down even the simplest ideas. In Japanese, though, you can. I have to say, though, that the boxes are a little bit on the small side (although this changes from year to year based on customer input, supposedly). I could imagine, though, that if you have a short hand system, you could probably get along really well with one of these. It's small and compact and I think quite stylish. It has two book markers for quick navigation-- I use one for my day to day business and another for the calendar section to get a big picture.

Something that I have noticed since I have started using my techo is that when I don't have classes at work (like during summer/winter/spring vacations), I simply don't use my techo that much. When I do have classes, I use it quite often in a day. At home, I find that I rarely use it for scheduling and more often than not use my note book to help keep track of expenses and savings. The beauty is, though, that it's all there. There's even space for my pen. It's like a computer that you don't have to plug in or start up and shut down. It's a funny thing to think like that, but having grown up with computers, I often lose track of the convenience of a pen and paper to get down ideas quickly.

A funny story about my pen, by the way... my girlfriend and I got married recently -- on my birthday incidently. We were at the city hall filling out some forms and I guess I must've forgotten my pen there or something. We got a call from them a few days later saying that I had forgotten to sign something. I went there and signed what needed to be signed, and on a whim asked if they had seen my "multi-pen". The man stood there with a well expected dumbfounded look on his face as I scanned my surroundings only to find my pen sitting in one of their pen holders. I explained to the man that there was a high chance that it was my pen, and upon taking a closer look at it, I realized that indeed it was. I retrieved my pen and my wife and I drove home. In retrospect, I suspect that maybe they had accidently collected my pen which caused a hiccaugh in the process making me forget to sign that last document! Yikes! I'm happy to say, though, that my pen is back in its Hobo Nichi home at long last.