the best laid plans
My weekend in review:
Originally I had planned to go to Hachiman for the yearly fire festival, where everyone burns all their decorations. I'd been to the event two years ago but two people in my area wanted to go as well, and they didn't know where it was. At the same time, I had planned to go to Tokyo for a night to visit Lane. I had figured I could catch a late shinkansen down to the big rice bowl after the burnination. Then a work-related problem came up that would require me to be back home by 11am Sunday. At this point I figured the trip to visit Lane, now to Yokohama, wouldn't be worth it if I couldn't at least spend a little time sleeping, so I cancelled that. Then one person cancelled on Hachiman because of a ski trip, and the other started flaking out because a paper she's been working on for the past several months was finally due on Sunday. She never did call me to cancel; I just lost contact with her and eventually cancelled the damn trip myself. Somewhere along the way the Sunday requirement got scrapped as well.
So what I really did was have a nice dinner with George from the next town over on Friday night. We chatted about politics and history and who is going to be the next U.S. President... pretty interesting stuff, if you consider that George is from Britain, and he knows more about U.S. politics and history than most Americans. His car wouldn't start on the way out, so we push-started it on a sheet of ice. An interesting thing to try, if you've never push started a car before. I guessed right on the gear (2nd seemed to work just fine), and it started on the second try.
On Saturday, I rested, and played computer games.
On Sunday, I had made plans to ride snowmobiles with my motorcycle buddies, but due to a miscommunication I didn't make it on time. We went to grab some food, and then a couple of my buddies ran back with me to the snowmobile rental place. Let me tell you, snowmobiles are scary as hell. Then I made new plans to go to a jazz performance in Sendai with Kasumi, a girl I met through Lane. Kasumi is quite the pianist; she has a grand piano inside her tiny studio apartment. I have no idea how the hell she got it in there. She told me the store she bought it from had to disassemble it and use a crane to get it inside. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it. Anyway, she was practicing a minuet by Ravel when I got there. I had her play the whole piece, and it was magnificent. We went to the jazz concert-- pretty damn cool, a little basement club with mellow lighting, seating around the sides and the band in the middle; the only thing it was missing was coffee. The band consisted of a jazz pianist, a bass, a drummer, and a sax, and they did two sets. (Their last number was a Charlie Parker "Bird Gets the Worm" progression, it was sweet.) Kasumi and I passed a notebook back and forth, writing about English and Japanese and the problems therein. A couple puns and bad jokes came up. At one point she was confused because when I said "insult" she thought I said "in salt," which conjures up an image of some guy buried up to his neck in rock salt. Heh. Anyway, at the end of the evening when the coffee shops were closing up, we headed back to her apartment to chat for an hour or so. Nothing really happened, but I dunno. We'll see, I guess.