We ended up getting out of Kyoto a half an hour late, and lost another hour due to traffic jams on the highway, of unknown origin. We would have been much later still if our timing would have been a bit less lucky -- after finally getting out of the hour-long holdup, we came across a 10-car accident, apparently about half a minute or a minute after it had happened. Two cars in front seemed to have had a minor rear-ender, and then behind them were eight cars were accordion'd together. I guess they were following too close (as most do in Japan, as elsewhere) and couldn't stop in time. Lucky for them, there were two highway services patrol cars just in front of us, so they were on the scene very quickly.

Watching cartoons half an hour into the flight

Sleeping at the 11-hour mark

The flight turned out to not be so bad. Anthony slept much of its 12 hours, albeit fitfully (waking up and crying momentarily several times an hour), but the super-fantastic part of it was that I got a whole row of five seats to myself -- I could push back the armrests and actually lie down flat. It was fantastic.

The nice family that sat in the row in front of us
(front-to-back) Erin, Elena (same age as Anthony), and Erika.

In Chicago, I had to go through immigration, pick up luggage and go through customs, re-check luggage, then get myself over to the departure gate for my next flight, which involved lugging all my non-check-in stuff (stroller, car seat, two small suitcases filled with baby stuff, and two “drink pack” carrying cases, and one two-year-old boy) up to an airport tram, ride three stops, down to one concourse, through security, down and through Chicago's “funky tunnel” (if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about) which goes underneath some taxiways, then up to the concourse and to my gate

This gate-to-gate movement was one of the things I was dreading, since I'd have so much stuff, but I found a wonderful way to deal with it: put the car seat in the stroller, then one of my bags in the car seat, and then let Anthony sit on the bag. It made moving around a breeze.

Although I could get from gate to gate within the alloted two hours, United apparently couldn't do the same for my checked-in luggage, as it wasn't there when I arrived in Cleveland. Mom was, though, so we headed off to Rootstown. Anthony fell asleep along the way, and we arrived at about 10:30pm, almost exactly 22 hours to the minute after our 1:30pm departure from Kyoto. Thankfully, my luggage eventually did arrive (at 11:30 the next morning).

I really don't care for flying. It's not that I'm scared of it, or anything like that -- it's just that I'm sick of it. I used to fly a lot when I worked for Omron -- mostly 9- to 11-hour flights back and forth across the Pacific and the US.

Just on United Airlines, which I have tended to use the most, according to their Mileage Plus point record for me, my “Lifetime United flight miles” is 391,730, which is equivalent to more than 72 trans-Pacific flights. And that doesn't count the miles I did before I signed up for their point program, nor the numerous free flights (I had lots of mileage points back in the day), nor the many flights on other carriers (including multiple transpacific flights on each of at least ANA, Korean Air, Northwest, and Asiana -- perhaps more that I can't remember.)

So, as I said, I'm sick of it. A short-hop flight, such as across the US, doesn't bother me -- it's the 12-hour flights across the Pacific.

So, it is with some sense of dread that I soon (just after posting this) embark on a long trip from Kyoto, Japan to my parents' place in Ohio:

All in all, it runs from 1pm Tuesday (Japan time) to about 10pm Tuesday (US Eastern) -- just about 22 hours total.

What makes this particular trip more interesting is that I'm doing it with Anthony -- we're traveling buddies. I hope he sleeps most of the way there -- the real challenge will be on the way back in July, where we leave in the morning rather than the evening -- he'll likely be awake the whole flight.

In either case, another challenge is to carry all the stuff. At least now, at 2.5 years, he can walk by himself (if he so chooses, of course). So that means I can use the stroller to carry some of the bags, and strap the car seat (also used in the airplane) to my back.

Despite the challenges, I'm actually looking forward to it. My opinion my well change --- ask me in about 22 hours......

I've moved my blog to: https://regex.info/blog/

Yahoo!360 was sufficiently well done (and sufficiently easy to get started with) that it got me to start the blog I'd been wanting for ages. But once Y!360 got me hooked on the drug that is blogging, it didn't follow through with enough features to satiate my needs. I realize that it's a beta product, of course, but a blog is a very, very sticky, all-or-nothing thing, and if it doesn't have enough features, well, it doesn't have enough features.

The most unforgivable lack is that of view statistics. Have 1,000 people seen my latest bit of written inspiration? Or 100,000? Or even 1? I have no idea — Y!360 doesn't tell me.

It's also fairly unforgivable that there is no notification (e.g. email/IM) when someone comments on a post. If you've got 10 or 100 or 1,000 posts and want to see what comments are left, you must inspect each post for them.

More forgivable, but still exceedingly annoying, is that you can't put images inline with a post. You can only upload images from your local machine (you can't upload from a url), and at most one per post, which appears at the top. I can imagine various security / implementation reasons why they chose this limitation, at least for the first round. It wouldn't surprise me if they lift this restriction in the future (but then, by then, it'll be too late for me).

When deciding to host the blog on my own server, I had to decide what software to use. It seems that the two main contenders are Movable Type (MT) and WordPress (WP). MT was the name I knew, but WP was recommended to me, and a perusal of various commentary articles indicated that WP had more features. So, I went with it.

WordPress was easy enough to get set up and start working with, but the more I looked at it, the more I couldn't believe how poorly engineered it is. (Well, it's written in PHP, so what should I expect?). I seriously considered bailing on it and just writing my own blogging software, but unless I want to get serious about it and release it as a real project, it's probably just better to try to diddle things as minimally as possible and spend my time elsewhere (like writing, or playing with Anthony, or doing the dishes, etc.)

I mean, these people (who develop WordPress) don't even know how to keep track of time. It has a nice feature where you can use different themes (I wrote my own, so the style, or lack thereof, of my blog is my own fault), and the default theme has some commented-out code for displaying a “2 hours ago” type message along with a blog's post date. It's commented out because it doesn't work unless you happen to be in the same timezone as the guy who wrote it. Actually, let me be more specific in that it's not the writer that has to be there, but the server hosting your blog (which may be halfway around the world from where you are, as is the case with me). It's simply moronic. At least it was commented out.

Some day soon I'll write a blog entry about how to keep track of time and temporal events like blog posts. Maybe the WordPress people will see it.

Of course, WordPress is free and likewise, I'm free to not use it. I understand that. But that doesn't mean I can't complain 🙂

What a difference a few days makes. The two pictures above were taken six days apart, one before the blossoms had bloomed, and one after. (Actually, I have another picture taken just two days after the first which shows equally barren branches, but it's not as perfect a match location-wise.)

Here are a few more comparison shots: one, two, three.

There was some sun in a few of my cherry-blossom pictures, but for the most part there was very little sun this cherry-blossom season, and I was sick for most of it. I finally uploaded my most recent shots, and there are a few nice ones.

If you're good at making panoramas, you might give this sequence a shot. In many places the blossoms literally litter the street.

Here are some more attempts at blossom closeups.

Truly, the cherry blossoms are quite pretty around where I live (map), thankfully neglected by the majority of both tourists and locals alike. While sitting with Anthony under some blossoms yesterday, I thought about how many have tried to put the feeling into words, and how they certainly must have failed. Not being one to pass up a chance to fail miserably, I've given it a go myself:

            Oh humble Cherry Tree
            Passing the year in quiet slumber
            Alive after the long winter
            Heavily laden with Spring's finest glory
            Beauty beyond the grasp of words
            Not retarded crap like poetry

the end