So Orie left today at 5:50AM (I drove) for Japan for the next month, give or take a few days. It’s her yearly pilgrimage back home to Gunma to help out her family, and probably her last. Her uncle is finally, FINALLY getting married, and while he is still a nice guy yet total unrepentent home-slacker (he makes tons of money, yet grandma still makes his meals, cleans his clothes and room, etc: Grandma has a bad back and he doesn’t think things like “maybe I should hire a maid”, “maybe I should get someone to drive her to the doctor for physical therapy”, etc) that means that his nice new Filipino wife approx 20 years his junior will *hopefully* be picking up in that regard.

Meanwhile, back at the main ranch sis-in-law is keeping home-home locked down, doing cooking and cleaning, so that’s nice. But neither she nor brother-in-law think, “Maybe we should go help out grandma who lives a mile down the road” (though they visit from time to time). That’s where Orie comes in.

But this is her last year doing that. 3.5-4.5 more weeks of this, then no more unless there is a crisis. Next time we go to Japan, it will be for Us. An Us-Vacation, with Us-concerns and an Us-itinerary which will involve going all over the place by train, like to hot springs and the like. I cannot wait.

Also in the news:

Mount Gagazet can bite my left nut. The game has random combats, and that’s understandable, but in the Gagazet region they happen every 4-6 seconds. That is, as we say in the States, ASS.

Work is busy as hell.

Story Games has been having mysql slowness/outages constantly. I turned off a few features to try to mitigate that, and unfortunately it looks like that may have been part of the problem. Which sucks, because those features are very handy features. Sigh, oh improperly hacked code.

Since I’ll be pretty much alone for the next month, I’ll have to keep myself occupied with friends and stuff else I turn into Crazy Cat Man.