I had a little free time last week, so I checked the Amu Plaza website events page to seen if anything interesting was scheduled for the weekend. They had another of the "marugoto" (local products) fairs listed. This one was to be for Kagoshima, the weekend of Sept. 28-30, and then the following week (Oct. 6-8). These things often have live events stages, so I at least wanted to find out what the schedule would be. I had a lot of work on Friday, but I managed to take a break at 4 PM, and walked up to the main train station.
Things were slow. The only stage stuff in the afternoon were comedy bits featuring the manzai duo, Party. They were riffing with one of the event people, but there was almost no one in the audience watching them (3-4 people, maybe). I've seen Party before, and I know they don't like to be interrupted when they're working, so after a couple minutes I turned around and went back home to keep working on the computer.
I had classes on Saturday pretty much all day (there was a short 1-hour break in the middle of the afternoon, but that wasn't enough time to get up to Amu Plaza and then back to the school before the next lesson. However, Typhoon #24 was approaching Kyushu (I was told it would hit on Monday), and we started getting bursts of rain and some wind. My 7 PM student canceled, and the school owner wanted to close up so he could get home before the storm hit. That gave me enough time in the evening so that I wanted to go to New York, NY, the pseudo-American restaurant in Tenmonkan, for dinner. When I got out on the street, it was raining again, and I didn't have my umbrella. When I got to the restaurant, I discovered a sign at the front saying "closed for a party reservation, please try again." Sigh. On the other hand, the rain was picking up a little, and I risked getting drenched if I hung around outside eating.
(Introducing a new mascot - Satellite Dish-kun.)
I stopped at a konbi to pick up a microwave burrito and a spaghetti bento, got home and ate dinner while I got work done. At about 10 PM, I finished my current project, and tackled a cipher solving program I wanted to write. That took 4.5 hours, and when I was done, I had a working filter script for doing dictionary searches on groups of words that appear in crypto-quip type puzzles. That was good. But, I didn't get to bed until 3 AM, and I kept waking up during the night.
The typhoon hit Kagoshima somewhere around 8 AM. Strong wind advisory alarms started going off, and I eventually gave up on trying to sleep after 8:30 AM. We only got light rain for about an hour, but the winds have been shaking the building off and on during the day, and whipping tree branches around down on the streets. I haven't bothered going outside at all, (I'm writing this up on Sunday) because I know from past experience that the city is buttoned up tight. The marugoto fair got canceled, and Amu Plaza would be closed. The only food I have in the apartment are a couple bags of potato chips, and a lot of bottled water. At some point, I'm going to need to go out and check if the nearby konbi is open, and maybe get another bento for dinner. Otherwise, I'm bored. I've done all the contract work I needed to do, I don't have any new manga to read, and I don't have a TV. Sunday radio programming is stupid, and I'm just listening to Can on youtube as I type this up. On my one day off during the week, I'm trapped in the apartment. If the wind would settle down, I'd try taking a nap.
Such is life in Japan.
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