happylife

Demolition Work

My happy morning sleep has been disturbed for these five days because of the demolition work of my neighbor house. As my room is adjacent to the demolition site, I can see their whole work from the best seat. Sure the dust, noise and vibration are terrible, I can fully enjoy the demolition show instead. The first part of the show was boring because the whole house was covered with construction sheets and five workers were mainly working inside the house. However, it has changed since yesterday after a new hero came on stage. The hero has a pair of caterpillar tread and a huge, iron claw which can break off a thick wooden column in a moment. I don't know its actual name even in Japanese. It is not a bulldozer but very close to it. For most people, building a house is one of their biggest events in their life. A lot of people sink most of their money into it setting up a loan, but it is so fragile that just a one hit of the claw breaks it off. After enjoying the climax of the show, I couldn't help feel the vanity of life.

A Kitchen Timer

It is sometimes a good idea to limit our time. As we are a lazy animal, we don't move until the deadline comes close. Projects without deadline will not be accomplished forever. A kitchen timer is a useful gadget for limitation of short range time span -- I usually set 15 minutes for writing this blog article. I had been using the built-in timer of the iPhone until I got this carrot-shaped kitchen timer. The advantage of this single purpose timer to the iPhone's built-in timer is its easy operation and loud alarm sound. As you can see on the picture, we can set the time of 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 1 minute and 10 seconds by one touch operation. We can set 15 minutes by tapping 10 minutes and 5 minutes button. As we rarely need to set the time for example 18 minutes and 15 seconds, this user interface usually works better than the iPhone. When I feel sleepy, I set this timer 30 minutes and go to bed. Before enjoying net surf or playing video game, I set it 20 minutes. If you feel you are wasting time, this gadget will save your precious time.

Shinjuku

Shinjuku is my home town. This picture might depict the typical impression of ordinary people to this town -- skyscrapers, lots of people, bright city lights until midnight and so on. However, Shinjuku is a big city and my living area is far from this image. There are no high buildings with more than five floors, no all-night bars and no crowds. Of course there is no nature such as streams, forests and mountains. All we can see around my area is a small subway station, a few convenient stores and lots of apartments. It's not so convenient and not so pleasant. Furthermore, the situation is gradually getting worse year by year. The number of useless parking lots is increasing and old big houses are being divided into small and cheesy houses. I recognized this bad tendency more than ten years ago and I can't find any clues to stop it. I don't like this area any more though it is my home town. I have been looking for a better place to live in and have found some candidates such as Vancouver, Obihiro and Sapporo, but they are still not perfect. So my idea is to live and move among those cities. As far as I have practiced this idea for a few years, it is rather pleasant. In order to keep going this way, I have to do some more things and that this is my objective this year.