May 03 2008
Four Day Weekend, Day 1
It turns out we have a four day weekend, not a three day one. Saturday was Constitution Memorial Day (kenpou kinen-bi), today is Childrens' Day (kodomo no hi), tomorrow is Greenery Day (midori no hi) and Tuesday is a freebie because two of the holidays were over the weekend. That freebie didn't show up on the desktop calendar I use at work, but somehow everyone else in Japan but me knew about it. I suspect it's something genetic.
Yesterday (Saturday) I finally hooked up the flatbed/negative/slide scanner (CanoScan 8400F) that I bought second hand for 8000 yen months and months ago but has been sitting in a corner of my room still in the box. I stayed up till the wee hours of the morning looking through my slides from my year as an exchange student in Ecuador and my black and white negatives from college, and found the negative of the best photo I've ever taken:
Here are some of the photos I took while I was in Ecuador in 1985-86. Unfortunately most of my negatives are still at my parents' house in the US. And really, they don't seem so special anymore now that it's possible to search for the most interesting photos on Flickr tagged "Ecuador" and find hundreds of images better than the ones I took.
While I was upstairs in my habitat home office reminiscing and playing with my scanner, Andy was outside playing MTV Jackass with his neighborhood friends:
