More bugs.

A pretty uneventful week. Except for paying rent, which was an adventure. I took the cash to the bank I was told to go to. I looked at them blankly, they looked at me blankly, I showed them my piece of paper, and a helpful clerk led me to the ATMs. He touched a lot of buttons on the screen, I typed in my last name at some point, and stuffed the wad of bills into the open slot. The machine counted the money, spat out change (!) and a passbook, the guy said a bunch of things and pointed to various numbers on the passbook having to do with the account number and amounts of money. I bowed, arigato gozaimasu, and left. I have no idea how to duplicate that transaction. I guess we'll figure it out next month.

I also got up the courage to ride my bike to the minimart just now. Those of you who know me well know I just learned to ride a bike last summer, to give M courage to do the same (he now rides circles around me, of course). I only rode on the less populated roads, nearly got hit by a car only once, dodged the kids coming home from school, and walked it when I got to the busy road. I can't even fathom riding my bike with an umbrella in one hand, a cellphone in the other, right next to or on the road. Everyone does it here. Kids do it. But I couldn't do it in Seattle and I'm not doing it here.

Saturday we went to a huge bazaar on the base in Yokosuka. Asian crafts and furniture and all kinds of crap. We got some cool stuff, like a Chinese jacket, a couple presents, and an antique-looking metal bird to burn incense in. M got a light-up soccer ball and a silk change purse. D got a bunch of bug stuff - plastic beetles, dead butterflies, etc. Macky talked Jeff out of getting any furniture, cool as it was (I love those step-cabinets), because they were Chinese copies of Japanese antiques. J wants the real deal, apparently, so we'll have to wait til we take a trip out to the country or something.















We went to the Pop Circus! It was in a real tent, but no animals besides some dogs. The coolest act was a pair of acrobats flying on long swathes of red fabric, swinging around, high up, no nets, looking like they were in love. The weirdest act was a clown with stuffed animals he was trying to get to perform with the help of a wind-up key. He got nothing out of the lion and the giraffe, but when he got to the tiny zebra, it marched behind him for a minute, then slumped over and fell til he wound it up again. We had a really hard time figuring it out, because it looked like a stuffed animal, and he even picked it up by the tail, but it didn't move like a wind-up toy or a remote-control thing. After he made it march a couple times and it flumped over again. he picked it up in disgust and ripped it's head off! Then he pulled the whole skin off and lo! It was a tiny dog inside the whole time! The look on Macky's face was priceless. The only bummer was when we were approached as we were leaving. Busted! We had been caught videotaping. The guy was very nice about demanding the tape, no yelling or threatening as an American security dude would've done. We got him to agree to taping over what we had instead of surrendering the whole tape. I was sad because we had some pretty shots of acrobats I'd wanted to paint. I've wanted to paint circus-y acrobats for a long time. Must be a Toulouse-Lautrec homage.

D was having one of his moody moments a bit later, so to cheer him up, we let him get the stag beetle he's been wanting as an early birthday present. We happened to pass a pet store. The full-grown ones were really pricey, and we almost talked him into getting a ready-to-emerge adult still barely in its pupal stage. But he didn't want to wait the 6 months for it to mature. SO we ended up with a male-female pair, which was how they came. Luckily, they don't breed unless you put this weird log in the cage for egg-laying. Yech. He's been on Cloud Nine since, tho, so I guess it worked. The male, pictured below, is about 3.5" long.


















D was for letting the praying mantis go, but Jeff decided he was going to take it on as his pet. He wants to get a cool cage for it. Feeding it is fun. It likes spiders, we know, and last night we figured out that it loves crickets. Damn, that thing is fast. It grabbed that thing in less than a blink and after it killed it, it ate one its legs like spaghetti. Amazing to watch.




























Sunday evening, after Jeff had pretty much decide we shouldn't go, we decided at the last minute to go down to Club Lizard to catch Abby the Dingo. It was worth it. Little Zukyan got up and wailed on her harmonica. The kids, after whining for the first 20 minutes, had fun, too. M got a shoulder-view of the second band.



















































As we were leaving, Jeff showed me a bag of snacks he was eating. He said 'it's a good thing they put pictures on the bags, so you know what's inside. Like, for instance, you should eat these when you're a drunk panda fish-thing wearing red lipstick.' I don't know why, but I couldn't stop giggling over it.


















We found a video store at Namamugi, on the way home. Jeff managed to get an account, despite not having any proof of address, because he somehow communicated that he used to be in the Navy. I don't know how he does it. We got a Pokemon movie and a MushiKing movie for the kids, both in Japanese. I guess with those types of movies, it doesn't really matter. I couldn't find anything with English subtitles or soundtrack that I hadn't already seen or had any desire to see. I guess I'll have to wait a few months until a new crop of new-release movies get here. Jeff picked out an awful movie: The Demon Hunter. It seemed like a low-budget Constantine, but at least the guy looked more the part than Keanu did (a travesty of casting). I fell asleep before it ended because I just couldn't bring myself to care what happened.

Well, gotta go get the kids from school. It looks like it's going to rain again.