Some Pictures I Just Can't Post

It's true.  I can't post some pictures because I forget to take them before it's too late.  For example, there's a delicious snack called Taiyaki that is like a sweet bread shaped like a fish and filled with some delicious stuffing.  In this particular example, it was filled with custard ice cream and another sweet paste.  I was like "I'm going to take a picture of this to show off this awesome yet cute food" but then I was already eating it, and I couldn't stop, and in the end, I thought it best just to tell everyone about it.

Some pictures, however, you CAN post.  Do you know what a bank deposit and a buying a lottery ticket have in common?  You can do both at the ATM in Japan!  Behold, in this picture.  Actually, for any of my non-Japanese-reading friends, this picture won't mean anything.  But you can see that the characters in the red button on the left are the same as these characters: 宝くじのご購入. So copy and paste that into your favorite internet translator and see what happens!  You'll see that I'm right!  What better place to sell lottery tickets than a place where you're likely to be standing with a lot of cash in hand wondering whether you should save it or keep it on hand for an emergency?

There are two HUGE fat crows who live at our sister company (which is just over the hill behind our building).  Well, I don't know if they live there, but they are always there when I stop by, and there is usually a large assortment of trash strewn about on the ground that they've been sorting through.  I don't know what it is they hope to find; pretty much all we throw away is rubber gloves and chemicals that eat rubber gloves.  You can see here I tried to get a picture of the crows, but they flew away.  That one I call Jim is sitting atop the farthest vent on top of the building.  Russell, his more handsome crow friend, was already gone.

I tried again, this time on the way TO work, to photograph the elusive cliff.  My camera is a little slow, so all I got was this giant dirt pile.  But you can clearly see in the rear-view mirror the line of drivers who are all angry that I slowed down so much for no reason.

While I'm on the subject, I think I nearly killed a security man today.  That is, I probably nearly gave him a heart attack.  When I came home from work, I dropped my stuff off inside and then walked to the grocery store to buy a frozen fish-custard pie and frighten old ladies.  But when I dropped my stuff off, I forgot to disarm the security system.  Then when I got back, the security guy was sitting in the parking lot, getting ready to make a phone call.  I walked up to his car, but he didn't notice me, so I knocked on his window.  That's when the heart attack nearly happened.  A large foreigner tapping on your car window in the dark when you're already contacting someone because security at an apartment building has been  breached is like a Made-for-Lifetime semi-thriller miniseries waiting to happen.  But luckily I explained to him something about frozen custard fish and that my bigger, burlier, foreign-er (more foreign) buddies were on their way.  Everything was fine then.

For my Indiana friends: It's so warm out right now that I just sit on my back porch, whistling a song I made up about how warm it is, eating warm custard ice cream, and drinking an ice-warm beer, playing a different song I also made up about how warm it is on a warm banjo and tapping my bare foot on the warm banjo stand.  I hope you're not too jealous.