No.... I Haven't Vanished...

It's been a while....  November seemed like a particularly busy month.  The first 10 days were dominated by work and my preparations to give a speech, in Japanese, on my experiences in Japan regarding the topic of human rights.  The next week after that was spent fighting a cold which I had picked up from a co-worker.  The last part of the month was highlighted by a life event which got me re-acquainted with Japanese emergency wards.  The highlight at the end of the month was a rock concert I attended in Saitama city.  Squeezed in between all that was the excitement of the Montedio Yamagata's push to make it into the J1 promotion playoff (they finished in 6th place and in December they upset the 3rd and 4th place teams in the playoff to win promotion to J1).  "Monte" is an association football, re: soccer, club which more or less is the only professional sports team of note in Yamagata prefecture.  I attended their last home match of the season.  I got to the stadium a little later than intended and in the hurry to get into the stadium after parking my car I forgot to turn off my headlights.  So I had to deal with a dead car battery after the match.  Luckily the nearest gas station/service station wasn't too far away from the parking lot and so I was able to obtain a jump start and make my way home.  Any ways, I'll go into details of the other things later.


Odd thought of the day:  I was looking at a map of south east Asia hanging on a wall in a classroom.  I took a closer look at Indonesia to see if I could spot where Krakatoa's location was.  I had been reading about the eruption of that volcano a few weeks ago.  I sussed out the location and for some odd reason I recalled reading there had been an attempt to get a particular group of people in Indonesia to use Hangul, the Korean alphabet, to write their language.  That attempt failed.  I had read about that because I've recently taken some interest in Korean pop music.  One challenge which quickly arose from that interest was the question of deciphering Hangul.  So I pulled up a web page and read about that alphabet, its history and the attempt to spread its use outside Korea.  Subsequently I printed off a chart meant to help people learn to read Hangul.  Reflecting on the Indonesians and the chart, I thought to myself "Well, if there were Indonesians willing to try using Hangul then what would it be like trying to write Japanese in Hangul?".  I contemplated that for a short moment.  Upon which I thought to myself, "Now there's something that would really annoy a lot of people...".