From Golden to Shakin'

I hesitate to give Olivia another reason to hunt me down and slap me, but...

Last weekend plus the Monday and Tuesday that followed were the so-called Golden Week holidays here in the Land of the Rising Sun. Actually, many people would argue that it started earlier, since the first holiday in the chain, Showa Day, was the Tuesday of the week before. That led a lot of people to take Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday off from work, giving them a full eight days to play with. I didn't have it so lucky. Ye Olde Academy had its annual Sports Festival on Showa Day, with a substitute holday the next day. That was fine except that my wife and kids weren't free then, and I had enough to do at home. Thursday and Friday were normal work/school days for all of us. Then followed Constitution Day on Saturday, Green Day (the holiday, not the band!) on Sunday, Children's Day on Monday, and an extra government-assigned holiday to make up for Green Day (since it was wasted on Sunday) on Tuesday. That gave my family four full days to play with. Guess what we did?

Nothing.

Well, virtually nothing anyway.

You see, my son and I were mostly free, but my daughter had a huge pile of Golden Week homework, and my wife had had a whole schlock (as opposed to half a schlock) of work dumped in her lap in the last minute. Neither of them could pry themselves away. To complicate matters further, mom-in-law is still in the hospital, and dad-in-law has been alternating between going to visit her and generally doing his damnedest to interfere in our business as much as possible. And unfortunately, any suggestion that my son and I, or even I myself, go off and do something on our own other than visit MIL in the hospital would elicit a flurry of whining punctuated with a few threats. Needless to say, we stayed high and dry through most of Golden Week...which was amazing considering it rained at least half the time.

In the end the only outing we got, not counting the visits to MIL, was a rather brief shopping outing to Narita on Sunday, mainly so my wife could get a new outfit for a friend's wedding. It wasn't a whole lot of fun for the rest of us, however. I picked up some potentially cool DVDs of American TV programs I'd never seen, but the kids whined they were bored the whole time. The fact that my son's Nintendo DS had broken, forcing him to use his own imagination and entertain himself for a change, made his mood even worse. It was black cloud city inside my BLUE RAV4 when we finally headed for home. I tried to cheer everyone up with a (forced) ice cream stop on the way home, but the ice cream place had a line half a kilometer long. The cafe we went to instead for drinks and cake wound up reeking of extra-potent cigarette smoke from a nearby table, giving all of us headaches, and my slightly larger than HO-scale cake was gone in three bites. (Considering it was a reputable cafe that I'd chosen because my wife had always recommended it, well...let's just say we were more thankful than usual to be back home.)

I did manage to spend a lot of time writing during Golden Week, which is always good. I don't know if any of that writing will be put to any use, but it's still something I enjoy doing. Also, as I mentioned in a recent comment thread, I finally got my new, computer-based studio setup working. I'm still hacking my way through its learning curve jungle, and it has been frustrating. After carefully stowing away my venerable (as in ten years old) 8-track MD recorder and associated gear and replacing it with the new laptop and Sonic Cell, I connected it up, plugged in my Telecaster, opened Sonar 7, created a project, added an audio track, set all the proper inputs and outputs, pressed the "record arm" button, and...nothing. No sound. It took a while to figure out that the Sonic Cell and Sonar were set at different bit resolutions. Fixing that, I was able to record, but no playback. After all kinds of mucking around, screaming, yanking hair, etc., I figured out that there was a conflict in the Sonic Cell's routing. Once I got that down I was able to record and play back an initial rhythm guitar track. Then, using the Sonic Cell as a MIDI synth, I successfully laid down a MIDI drum track which worked just fine...till I tried to convert it to an audio track. I was able to do it using the Sonic Cell both as the MIDI synth and as its own audio interface, but I got so much lag that the resulting audio track was playing at a slower tempo than everything else. I'm sure I could probably fix the problem, but I wound up giving up and using Sonar 7's built-in "Session Drummer" drum synth, which worked just fine (and sounded every bit as good). I really want to get busy and do some more recording, especially to experiment more with the new level of flexibility and wider opportunities at my fingertips. However, since I still haven't gotten the procedure down pat yet, I have to overcome a certain level of intimidation-based reluctance even to switch the machinery on.

Yes, Golden Week wasn't exactly golden. It was more of a faded bronze. As if to add insult to injury, when I finally managed to find a stopping place in my activities Wednesday night at around 1:00 a.m. and bedded down for the night, less than five minutes later the house was rocked by a small earthquake. We get those all the time, but this one was a bit stronger than usual and lasted a long time. That got my attention. Then it was followed by a tiny aftershock, and then another, and then another. That was odd. Worried, I ran downstairs and clicked on the TV news for the report. It turned out that it was centered just off the coast of Ibaraki, but it wasn't particularly serious. Relieved, I went back upstairs and bedded down, but then the little tremors started up again...over and over and over. I ordered the Pacific plate to knock it off, but it didn't listen. (It never does, the insolent sod!) Instead, there was another larger quake at about 1:30 followed by another burst of tiny aftershocks. By now I was feeling jittery (heh), so I tried my best to calm down. I had just succeeded in drifting off to sleep when, at around 1:45, the big one hit. I was jarred to full wakefulness partly by the shaking but mostly by the items crashing down from shelves and bookcases. "Fuggit!" I cried, and I went back downstairs.

Apparently the quake activity ended with that last jolt. That was good, because it was still centered right off our coast. Mito, the prefectural capital, was hit the hardest, but luckily there weren't any injuries or serious damage. It was still odd to have a burst of quake activity suddenly break out like that, especially in this area. Maybe I or Pandabonium needs to go to Kashima Shrine and make sure the kanameishi (the huge keystone, only slightly visible above ground, believed to restrain the earthquake-causing giant catfish spirit under the shrine) is still okay.

Kanameishi. Image compliments of Pandabonium's Pacific Islander blog.