Blessed by the Potato

So just before leaving for Japan, we noticed a vague burning plastic smell in the house when the A/C was on. Not finding any actual fire, we ignored it and got into the business of winning 3rd place poster. Upon returning, I noticed that the house smelled pretty foul, kind of like skunk. Of course, the skunks were working their way through the neighbourhood gardens, so I could really only hope that it would go away as the skunks moved on. Wayfare investigated a bit further, and found a dead skunk in the garden.

Eww.

Not a huge deal, I used to have to deal with that sort of thing for a living. We made plans to bag it and dispose of it in the morning (it being close to night when Wayfare found it), and thoroughly searched the internet for any sign of a city department that would handle it for us.

It being morning now, I went out to see the skunk with my own eyes, and well, eww. It looks like it’s been dead since before I left for Japan (which might just explain the earlier burning plastic smell), and I seriously fear for the structural integrity if I try to move it for disposal. So now we’re discussing our in situ containment options. I have considered a concrete sarcophagus, but wonder if that might draw too much attention to the situation. Since we don’t really want to disturb it to bury it deeper (if we thought we could move it without unleashing hell, we would go back to the garbage bag idea), that leaves us pretty much with the option of covering it with topsoil. The main complication here is that the damned thing decided to die right outside one of the air intakes for the basement — air that then goes into the A/C and thence into my personal space. So if we’re going to let it rot in peace, we’ve got to be damned sure that the smell stays down through these hot summer months. Currently, my plan is to cover it with drano, then bury it with a nice big bag of potting soil. Wayfare, however, thinks that plan is a little too crazy, partly because it would lead to a dead spot in the garden, and partly because I got the idea from reading about covering plague bodies with lye. I’m cool with a little herbicide, but I am concerned about the effectiveness of this plan. Particularly with regards to the ability of the sodium hydroxide to neutralize the specific skunk stink (it may work for other animals, but skunks have their own particular problems). Some hydrogen peroxide may be needed as well (as that forms the bathing solution to remove the smell from skin/fur).

Anyone with any knowledge or experience of this sort of thing care to chime in?

Also joining our garden woes is that whatever moved in under the front porch has been pooping right outside its entrance hole. I thought animals would be smarter than that… though perhaps its our dead skunk and we won’t have that issue anymore.

As was reported previously, my house has been a victim of creative contracting work in the past. I’m faced with that issue again today as I try to replace a halogen potlight in the kitchen. The bulb itself is pretty standard — the only type of halogen the grocery store carried. Changing it out and getting light was no problem. However, now I find that I’m stuck with the bulb hanging by the wires out of the fixture, completely unable to get the faceplate assembly back in the ceiling. The assembly looks like it should be supported by three hooks, arranged equilaterally around the circumference. The part of the fixture in the ceiling, on the other hand, has two slots in it. I tried just getting one hook in one slot, but not only does the light hang down that way, it hangs down crooked. So I honestly have no idea how this light was up there to begin with. I’m tempted to try to take out the matching light, to see how it’s held up, but I’m so dearly afraid that it will simply be held up by pixie dust and wishful thinking, and that it will never go back in again, and I’ll be stuck having to replace two potlights (or waiting months for my landlord to do it).

So the first thing I did when I got back was to get a pizza. I missed pizza so much over there… 10 days isn’t much to go without pizza, and I’ve done that many, many times in the past completely without noticing, but going without the possibility of pizza starts to erode the psyche. It makes their whole society seem like its a hollow sham, waiting to fly apart at the seams into unbridled anarchy. After all, where can a society expect its members to function normally when they must live each day without the security blanket that is knowing good pizza lies just a phone call away? Of course, they probably think the same thing about our society and the lack of good train/bus service.

They might be right.

The flight home was ok: completely packed this time, so we didn’t have the luxury of the empty seat. We were getting awfully sick of fish and rice, though. I mean, I don’t even eat the stuff yet I was sick of seeing and hearing about it. The dinner on the plane was fish and rice (we were aware of the fact that chicken and pasta was also an option, but it looks like everyone at the front of the plane opted for that so they were out by the time they got to us), and it reeked. Breakfast on the plane was… fish and rice (or a nasty-looking omlette and a sausage that even Dave wouldn’t eat). Our lunch/snack was an assortment of tiny sandwiches, and a giant seaweed-wrapped concoction of fish and rice.

Today’s featured Facebook gift is a paper crane. LOL, I can’t escape!

I slept 14 hours last night. It was pretty good — it would have been better if the fan at my parents house didn’t have an auto temperature detector/shutoff that made it cycle on and off all night. Stupid electronics trying to be smarter than me…

At least three times now I’ve meant to go out for ice cream (once leading an expedition for it), and three times we’ve found all the places we could find closed up. Today I finally went to the place that had the fancy crepes and ice cream, and got myself a tiny bowl. It was much more expensive than I thought: 300 Yen (~$3) for a tiny, tiny little scoop. It was really good orange ice cream though (not quite sure if it was sherbert, gelato, or something else… I think its closest to a traditional sherbert), so I think I might go back this afternoon before they close on me again, or maybe tomorrow morning, and spring for the 1100 Yen crepe + 2 scoops + toppings. Plus I probably should try the green tea flavour (thankfully this particular store doesn’t trade in whale flavour).

Yesterday, Dave completely lost his mind. Too many nights in a row drinking and not sleeping, and all of a sudden he was giggling like a madman at anything. As he was trying out the TMS stimulator, he was giggling uncontrollably. At dinner, he nearly lost it laughing over the picture of the sausage in the menu. This, I assure you, was not a normal giggling fit, but clearly one that bordered on madness. Actually, it lay on the madness side of the border, so I should say it bordered on sanity. Despite desperately needing to sleep, when he got back to the hotel he stayed up until dawn (which, to be fair, is at 4 am here — I don’t think they’re in the right timezone for their longitude) uploading photos to facebook.

Facebook, meanwhile, has started to scare me. They have all these stories, pictures, information on links and relationships between people, and chintzy gifts. The only purpose I can see for all this is that they aim to slowly replace us with robots, or perhaps pod-grown versions of ourselves, and this information is necessary for the first wave to fit in without drawing undue alarm.

For dinner tonight we found an out-of-the way Italian restaurant that was fantastic. It only had two tables and seating at the bar for about 6, but the food was really quite good, even by Canadian standards of Italian food. I had a plain penne with arrabiata, and Gen had linguini with salmon and I think a pesto sauce. The proprieter was a very friendly old woman who spoke 4 languages (including passable English). Like many places, we had a bit of trouble walking out with a receipt: it seems to be a pretty foreign concept here, at least for food.

For all those who doubted its existence, behold: bacon bread!

Well, the conference has ended, I’ve taken a nap, won 3rd place in the poster competition, and now I have to figure out what to do with myself for two days. About half our group is heading to Kyoto, perhaps to climb mount Fuji, and the other half is already in Tokyo. Presently, I’m leaning towards going to Tokyo, if only to make my trip home an 18-hour one instead of a 24-hour one.

Tonight, we went looking for dinner down one of the many long, winding alleyways. We found yet another, smaller, dodgier alleyway off of that one, which was barely wide enough for 3 people to stand abreast, and where the roofs were below Dave’s head. So far we’ve done okay ordering off menus with pictures, even where English was completely lacking. At the end of that alley though, we weren’t feeling quite as adventurous, so we went to another place on the main street that was kind of interesting. Before going in we thought it would be sushi and the like, but instead they had a variety of other things. I ended up getting fries with a strange spice/flavouring on them, while my travelling companions Dave and Carlos got large shrimp, chicken, seaweed (plus lettuce and some other stuff) salads.

The last day of the conference was quite interesting. I got to participate in a live demonstration of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), and watched as my motor cortex was involuntarily stimulated and my hands jerked. It was especially interesting because I had read somewhere that the scalp nerves were painfully stimulated at the same time. I mean, it just makes sense that that would be the case, since the induced fields that are activating the brain are even stronger in the scalp… but surprisingly, it didn’t hurt at all. When my arms were being stimulated, it felt like being electrocuted (I’ve never been seriously electrocuted, but we did have a short in the lab that sent a bit of a tingle up my arm, and I have touched the electric cow fences in PEI).