A little bit of this and that.

I haven't updated my blog lately, although rather than being a symptom of not having anything to write about I have instead been too busy. Most recently this involved going to the hospital to get some testing done (I feel fine, don't worry!). Being right after work on a Friday, I had all of my school accoutrements with me including Alistair. He stayed in my backpack most of the time, but during a long consultation with a nurse he ended up peering out of my bag at all the goings on. At the end of the meeting I asked my supervisor (who's been wonderful and my interpreter) to explain why there was a stuffed alligator wearing a tie in my backpack.

When I'm not sharing immaculately dressed alligators with Japanese health professionals, I am learning how to live by myself. I've been self-sufficient for a while, but sometimes I really need a second opinion on daily house activities. This has led to some mistakes, the most recent one being an especially pronounced “bachelor moment”. Consider the following:

• Andrew buys a frozen pizza. He adorns it with additional toppings and feels pretty clever about his culinary smarts.
  

• The pizza comes on a Styrofoam tray. It says on the wrapping not to microwave the Styrofoam, however Andrew plans to bake the pizza.
  
• Andrew recalls that Styrofoam seems to be resistant to heat, as we drink hot beverages from cups made of the material.
  
• Andrew assumes that the Styrofoam tray is for baking on. He puts both pizza and Styrofoam try into the hot oven and turns to making a salad.
  
• Andrew checks on the pizza a couple minutes later and find out that He Was Wrong.
  

With some quick action on my part I managed to save the pizza and then peel the stricken remnants of the tray from the bottom of my toaster oven. I also took pictures; perhaps because I was high on victory and plastic fumes.

(The tray used to be the size of this wrapper...also, this picture really doesn't do justice to the burn marks on it. ^^; )


In addition to frozen pizzas I've been sampling other traditional Japanese foods such as M&M's trail mix. This is an especially good example of how much fun it can be to have a basic grasp of two different languages, because it can provide endless entertainment. This particular bag of snacks had the clever phrase “いろいろMIX おいしいMAX”. In stilted English this might translate into: “A mix of various things, it is delicious to the maximum.”

I'll leave you all on a happy...er, jolly, note.

-Andrew