So I may have mentioned what a pain it is to shop for my sister. Function doesn’t matter all the time, just whether things are “cute” or not. And then sometimes function does matter. Basically she’s a pain in my ass.

She sent me on another smaller pen quest (only two pens) and I bought a couple more address books for her. I doubt she’ll like either of the address books and one of the two pens doesn’t seem to exist in this part of Japan. Nobody had even heard of the company in two stores. Whatever. In any case, I also found out that her friend Carolyn, who was supposed to get one of these address books is ALSO a big pain in my ass for the exact same reasons as my sister.

Other than that, I have little to report. I bought myself a watch with a 24-hour hand because they don’t seem to exist in the US on watches less than $1000, and I found a Seiko here for $360-ish that had exactly what I was looking for. I can’t begin to tell you how long I was looking for a watch with the 2nd hour hand (usually set to GMT) which was yet another piece of my weird ham radio geekery.

The rest of the day was just a travel day. I got on my train on car 6 because it was about to leave the station with little notice and my seat was on car 12. I got to walk through the smoking car and wow that was awful. The whole car was blue with smoke. In any case, I made it back to Toyama with no surprises, and my mom seems fine. At least she seemed to like the two things I bought for her so she’s not as big a pain as my sister and Carolyn. Yeesh.

Oh, and I should have started doing some of the vacation workouts already. I’ve decided that since I’m on vacation and not near a gym, I’m going to be a fat lazy pig. The biggest workout I got was carrying 3 bags (one full of gifts) from Osaka to Toyama. These train stations need a lot more elevators.