Anything Happen While I Was Out?

Minus the jet lag and the sore throat, it feels good to be back in Fukuoka. My body is still in its own time zone, so I've been catching up on the doings of blogoramaville in 2007. Looks like I missed the final party/brunch over at Berube's old place (start at comment 71 for the fun). And the opening of voting for The Poor Man Institute's 2006 wingnut awards. Oh, and norbizness is now doing weather. I did get my nominating over at the Koufax Awards done before I left, but looks like they're taking nominations until the 21st. Even better, k-punk has been blogging post-apocalypticism, which I read as his tribute to the WAAGNFNP. [Update 1/24/07: via Slant Truth, I just found out that Sly Civilian, following a tradition started by brownfemipower, proclaimed 19 February 2007 to be Radical Fun Day. I hereby proclaim every day is Radical Fun Day here at Mostly Harmless!]

But enough about off-site fun. Have you checked out the comments from WAAGNFNP "alumni" in my next-to-last post? Maybe, just maybe, Oaktown Girl of the Party's Ministry of Justice will join Mostly Harmless as an author. And maybe, just maybe, Mostly Harmless will become a safe house for Party faithful, or a party house for the faithful safe--either is fine with me, so long as it doesn't become a faithful house for the safe party. Stay tuned, as they say.

And as long as we're doing shout outs, I have a request from onechan, the Uh-Oh Diva Girl herself (not to be confused with her imoto, Happy Grabby Science Girl). You see, back on the 17th (in Japan, although it was still the 16th in the US, I think) we were stuck on a 5-hour layover in Kansai airport (on an artificial island of its own off the coast of Japan not far from Osaka--never mind that it's sinking faster than expected, or that it's horribly mismanaged, or that they're not getting as much air traffic as expected, they're building another runway!), and by hour 3 we bit the bullet and headed to their too-pitiful-for-words "play area" (really, people, check out the Nagoya airport for ideas), where for more than a half-hour my wife and I desperately ignored our older daughter's demands that we remove the big-alligator-doll-thing from said area, when, lo and behold, our salvation came in the form of a pair of sisters (perhaps 4 and 1), who entertained her for the next half-hour or so (and her imoto, who had a great time watching the jumping and the falling and the sliding and the chasing). Well, it turns out our onechan had such a great time with the other onechan in particular that she was really torn up when her mom called her and her sister away. So sad that instead of continuing to play she first ran in the direction they left, then, when she couldn't find them, posted herself at the windows overlooking the runways and (I kid you not) called out periodically at the top of her lungs, "Yumi-chan! Doko i-chatta?!" ("Yumi, where have you gone?!") and muttering "Taihen!" to herself (roughly, "oh no!") between cries--for much longer than they actually played together. By the time we boarded our plane, she was crying so intensely that she fell asleep in my arms during take-off and basically stayed asleep until 8 am the next morning. Now, I don't know if the girl's name really is Yumi (which is the real name of a 3-year-old girl my daughter plays with at the playground near her baba and gigi's house in Chiba whom we'd been mistakenly calling "Minami" for months, off and on), but let's say it is, and let's say that her mom reads English and finds this post. On behalf of my san-sai musume, I would say to her, "If you and your super-cute daughters were at the Kansai airport play area near Gate 20 from about 6:00-6:30 pm on January 17, 2007, please get in touch with me so our daughters can write each other. Arigato gozaimas."

All right, the Diva Girl has her first day at hoikuen (kind of like day care but more like school) in a few hours, so I should try to sleep a little. Don't expect much from me here the next couple of weeks, as our fall semester is in its last throes, as they say. Maybe Oaktown Girl, or other WAAGNFNP faithful, will want to join in the fun--such as it is--here. We'll see!