Nothing But Words

Flying from Philly to Rhode Island for Christmas View at Picasa Flying from Philly to Rhode Island for Christmas22-Dec-2006 13:58, Canon Canon PowerShot S230, 2.8, 5.40625mm, 0.017 sec

Greetings from Newport, RI. We are having a wonderful but exhausting time running the loving gauntlet of my myriad relatives. You name it, I’ve got it – siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, step-siblings, half-siblings (who are not related to each other…), even ex-steps. What it all boils down to is this: lots of love and presents for Kai and Eidan. We’ve been here for 5 days so far, and we’ll spend the day tomorrow in Boston with even more relatives. Then we’re off to San Francisco, where we have a packed 48-hour schedule before we fly to Tokyo.

The two weeks leading up to our departure from Philly was a marathon. It turns out that preparing to leave the country for six months isn’t all that different from plain old moving, with the added complications of having to pack very judiciously, and dealing with bureaucratic overhead (for visas, international drivers’ licenses, etc). Maria and I kept a running to-do list, but every time we went to check something off, we ended up thinking of new things to add, so the list never seemed to get any shorter. To make the final week even more lively, we decided to sell our car. We were planning to get a new one when we returned from Japan, and we finally realized it made more sense to sell it before leaving than to let it sit and depreciate for six months in the driveway. We did the title transfer last Thursday night and left town on Friday.

I’ve set up a Skype account with a local Philly number (calling that number is a domestic US call, but I’ll receive it on my computer in Tokyo). Send me an email if you’d like the number or my Skype username (which you can use to call me from your own Skype account – no phone necessary!).

Here are the pictures from Maria’s 3 week stay in Newport with Kai and Eidan. I was there first with the boys for one week (that’s the previous batch of pictures), then Maria and I switched places. I came to visit them on the weekends, thanks to Southwest airlines cheap fares from Philly to Providence.

As I mentioned before, I worked on remodeling the bathroom while they were away. The pictures will be coming…Maria had the digital camera, so I had to use our old film camera, and I still need to finish the roll.

The farm pictures are from the farm where my brother John works. The Taiko drummers were part of Newport’s annual Black Ships Festival. They were playing at none other than Toppa Field (named after my relative and local legend, football coach John Toppa). It’s a shame the photo of Maria, Eidan, and my sister Rebecca has so much glare in it – otherwise it would be a great picture.

Please don’t use the navigation arrows when you pull up the pictures, otherwise you will miss many of them. A project I’m hoping to get to during our stay in Japan next year is the photo management software I’ve been wanting to write – I want to do things like pick my own order for displaying photos, even if I’ve picked photos from different albums.

Here are the pictures from my trip to Newport with the boys last week. They had a great time playing with their cousins. Here are a couple choice Kai quotes from the trip:

• On our first day there my sister asked him, when I wasn’t around, what he wanted to do in Newport: “Well, I don’t really have a lot of options – I have to do whatever my dad what’s to do.” That’s me, the tyrannical father.
• After a long session of dancing (see the video below): “Daddy, I want to go home now. I’m really tired of dancing, but the music is still playing, and I can’t stop.”

Maria was in Japan for a conference while we were in Newport. She looked at the apartment I wrote about a few weeks ago, and she liked it. She’s checked on some other options as well, and so far this place seems to have the best combination of price, amenities, and location. The only downside is that it’s really small, but anything bigger that we could afford would require a long commute from the suburbs, and Maria doesn’t want to do that (she’ll be working long hours, and if she had a long commute, she’d never see the boys during the week).

Maria’s taking the boys back to Newport in a couple days, and they’ll stay there until the end of the month. I’ll stay in Philly and put a new tile floor in the bathroom (we only have one full bathroom, so this will be a good time to do it).

I’m in Newport right now with the boys, visiting my family. Maria is in Japan this week for a conference (and to look at some apartments for January). I remembered the camera, but as usual, forgot the memory card reader, so I’ll post pictures after we return on Wednesday.

If the title didn’t give it away already, I spent the holidays in my ancestral home state, Rhode Island. To be fair, folks in my home town of Newport don’t talk like that, but travel inland to a town like Warren and you’ll hear a variant of the New England accent that would make even a native Bostonian blush (if you don’t believe me, wicked pisser is in the Alternative English Dictionary).

Anyway, we decided to do the 6 hour drive north rather than fly, and Eidan handled his first road trip well (mercifully, by sleeping most of the way in both directions). We first stayed with one of my aunts in Boston for a couple of days, and we took Kai to see the Nutcracker. We were seated roughly in the middle of the theater, and within a radius of 10 rows of us, I spotted 3 Caucasian couples with Asian toddlers. Maria’s friend Yuka was with us (she’s from Japan, and is in Boston right now learning English), and she said that it’s the latest trend in Boston: well-to-do but older or infertile couples adopting Chinese babies, as orphanages in China are apparently overflowing with kids these days. Leaving the theater, Yuka commented that one of the dancers was Japanese, and you could tell because she was “all technique and no spirit.” Maria was sympathetic to the dancer though: “she was the sugar-plum fairy, that’s not much to work with!”

Our time in Newport mostly consisted of running the gauntlet of my relatives. I have a large and complicated family, involving halfs, steps, and ex-steps (including a brother and a sister who are my blood-relatives, but not each others). On a typical day we’d visit two or three different houses, and after a week we had managed to see everyone at least once. For Kai it just meant more love, and of course, more presents! Actually, it was a great trip, and we’re looking forward to going back in the summer, so Kai and Eidan can play with their cousins on the beach.

The only downside to the trip was that we came home to find that our 3rd floor toilet had leaked. There were water stains on the wall below it on the 2nd floor, the hallway floor warped, and the kitchen ceiling was water damaged as well. I stopped the leak simply by tightening the nut on the toilet’s incoming water line. I installed that toilet over the summer, and this was the first time the toilet had been in air below 55 degrees (since we turned the heat down while we were away), so my guess is the cold temperature caused a slight contraction in the seal, letting the water out.

Now I’m looking forward to a relaxing day at work .

Kai and I had blast in Newport last weekend. Our flight from Philly to Newport was a nightmare though. We were supposed to leave at 2:30, but we didn’t board the plane until 4:00, and then they kept us sitting on the runway for three hours. We finally took off at 7:00. Kai was a trooper – he actually handled the frustration better than some of the adults on the plane. The worst part is that we missed that night’s celebration of my father and step-mother’s 25th wedding anniversary. So much for my feelings of superiority over those who drove for the holiday weekend.

We spent most of our time in Newport enjoying the beach, along with my mother, my sister, and her two kids. We also visited my brother John at the farm where he’s working this summer – see the pictures below of the kids with the animals! I also got to catch up with a couple of old friends I hadn’t seen in years.

We also had trouble getting back to Philly – our flight Tuesday night was canceled, so we came back Wednesday morning. We got to the airport just in time for Kai to get on another plane to Denver! He went with Maria to visit her folks again. Since she’s nearing the end of her pregnancy, this was her last chance to travel for a while. Her father is just hanging on – we’re hoping he’ll hang in there so we can bring the baby to meet him once the kid’s a month or two old.

While they were away I moved our bedroom from the 2nd floor to the 3rd floor. In our old room, I patched all the holes I had made in the walls for new electrical lines, and got the room and the adjacent hallway ready to paint (we’re going to turn our old bedroom into a rec room). I’ll have more home improvement pictures soon. In the meantime, enjoy the Newport pictures

The “Live 8″ concert is coming to Philly this weekend. With over a million spectators expected, and a massive “no car” zone being set up in the middle of the city, Kai and I are getting out of town for the 4th! (Maria will stay home and enjoy some peace and quiet.) We’ll be staying with my sister in Newport. She lives across the street from the Naval base, where they’ll be launching the fireworks, so we won’t even have to leave the yard to watch. With round-trip airfares to Providence still at $60, and flights that last about 40 minutes, it’s actually a lot less hassle to head to the beaches in Newport than deal with the New Jersey Shore traffic, where backups reportedly last as long as six hours. Of course, it also helps to have a free place to stay and an army of relatives eager to take Kai off my hands. We leave this afternoon and we’ll be back Tuesday night, so the blog will be silent until then.

Kai and I returned last night from a 3 day trip to Newport. With a family as big as mine, it was just enough time to have at least a short visit with everyone. Kai had the most fun yesterday, as he got to spend the day playing with his cousins, Robbie and Taylor (if you’re wondering why there’s no family resemblance whatsoever, it’s because they’re my step-sister’s kids).

Sunday night Kai and I returned from our whirlwind 3-day visit to Newport. This is the first time I’ve made a trip home that wasn’t at least a week long, so it was a bit hectic squeezing in time with everyone in my inexusably large family. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun