Hidemi’s Rambling No.123

The last time I was leaving Vancouver, I narrowly missed the hotel’s free shuttle to the airport. I had enough time for my flight and waited for the next shuttle, which ran every 20 minutes. But the next one didn’t show up. Half an hour passed. I was beginning to be worried. At the 35 minutes mark, I realized it was lunchtime. They skipped one service and the next one had been 40 minutes later. I told myself not to panic because it meant only five minutes more to wait. But five minutes later, it was still a no-show. It was running late. Now it was too late to call a cab and I started to panic. The shuttle finally came 10 minutes late. By then, I consumed the margin of time for the check-in counter. I was running almost crying through the airport, and found no line at all at the counter. I checked in right away without waiting and was easily be in time for my flight. It wasn’t LAX after all. But I was already exhausted from the fuss before 10 hours’ flight to Japan…

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Hidemi’s Rambling No.122

Vancouver is my favorite city. I’ve visited there, though I’ve only been in Richmond area near the airport. But a hotel, a shopping mall there and the airport attracted me enough. The airport was a completely different thing from LAX. I’ve seen Vancouver a lot lately on TV because of Winter Olympic Games. Japanese broadcasting treats the Games as if there can’t be anyone who isn’t interested in them. This kind of totalitarianism really annoys me. That’s mainly because the coverage of the Games disrupts my recording of regular TV shows. Air times change without notice because they prioritize the Games. I want a quiet, orderly TV schedule back…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.121

Let me tell you how my driving school days ended up. After a few classes of lectures, the day that I drove a real car finally came. Beside me was an instructor. He taught me how to shift up engaging higher gears, while I was driving on an oval course built in the school site. I had forgotten that I was afraid of speed. Although I was driving slowly, to me, it was a roller coaster ride with the view passing by so fast. I panicked completely, being unable to remember how to brake, thus just accelerating. The tires squealed at the curves and I kept screaming. Eventually, the instructor stopped the car with the auxiliary brake. It was one of the scariest rides in my life. But, the instructor was even more afraid than I was. He was afraid of me. He asked, ‘Are you OK?’ meaning mentally. And he advised me not to drive a car. I sort of agreed with him. Against the school’s policy, they returned all the money I’d paid. I bought an electronic instrument with that money. Things must push me to music in every way…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.120

The news about Toyota’s recall and its Congressional hearing has been everywhere and I remembered my then dream car. It was called Soarer, a Toyota make. It was love at first sight. Back then, I didn’t have a driver’s license, which I still don’t have for that matter, and just in order to be able to drive a Soarer, I went to a driving school. Before actually getting behind the wheel, we needed to take some classes along with 30 or so other students. During a lecture, all of a sudden, the teacher called on me. Instead of giving me a quiz, he reprimanded me for resting my chin on my hand. He said that it was a bad attitude and I was childish. All the class laughed at me. To drive a Soarer, even a proper attitude was required…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.119

My hard disc recorder had been malfunctioning. It had stopped recording, editing, and anything except playing. It seemed necessary to be defragmented. To initialize it, I needed to copy everything to another recorder on which I edited and burned DVDs. My malfunctioning recorder isn’t capable of the high speed copying, so the process took days. It had to be done by the next recording. My time was consumed by it, and as the next recording approached, I spent a few frantic days for real-time copying. I was barely in time for the recording, and the recorder started functioning normally after being initialized. All the fuss and sweat was to record a rerun of ‘Columbo’ and it had already become an incomplete series of my DVD collection to begin with, because I missed the first episode when the typhoon made TV out…