gurdymonkey | The good, the bad and the Wednesday

"Jisshin," "tsunami" and place names. That's about all I can pick up from the Japanese language news broadcasts on TV Japan, which my cable provider has unscrambled at no extra charge during the emergency in Japan. Who needs Immersion Japanese? I know how to say "Kesennuma" and "Fukushima Dai-ichi" and "Iwate" like a Kanto native now.

The last several days have been mentally and emotionally exhausting. If I could lift it, I'd heave the TV out the window. Yes, the situation in Japan is not good, but the fear mongering on most of the news channels is worse. To hear the local CBS affiliate tell it, every brick-and-mortar store in the area is sold out of potassium iodide, Alameda will be the new Atlantis if we get an earthquake in exactly the right spot in Alaska (never mind the fact that we've got lots of pre-1906 Earthquake homes intact on My Island), and, oh, BTW, the metering lights are on at the approach to the Bay Bridge. Thank you to

crimsongriffin for sane and sensible posts from her location near Tokyo.

I did almost die today, actually. Had I been a second earlier on the accelerator, the semi who blew through the red light would've turned 'Tite Blanche into the sort of conceptual art usually produced by the Mythbusters and I would be a smear on whatever might be left of the passenger-side door. Was survival my karmic reward for finding the donate-to-the-Red-Cross-clicky on the ATM screen of the Wells Fargo branch I was leaving, thinking, "Awesome!" and deciding not to wait until tomorrow morning when my paycheck hit my account? Darned if I know. Is being drowned or crushed under a building any worse than pulling onto I-880 and being rammed by some speeding moron?

We did not play "Jisshin" last night. It didn't come up and I can't honestly say whether it would have or not. We worked on the taiko-robics drills, the first line of "Yodon", which our four junior members haven't done before, and a bit of polishing on "Shinkyoku," which is sounding like a runaway train on a steep downgrade in all the right ways. (Shannon-sensei did tell me that all their friends and family in Japan are safe, though the son of one friend is a member of the Japanese equivalent of the National Guard and is deployed at an unknown location retrieving bodies from the beach and there are concerns about his mental state and whether said unknown location is in a high risk area.)

Crown is this weekend. I'm on court, but trying to decide whether to day trip or camp as we've been getting rain and more is predicted. I told Aurora I would let her know by tomorrow afternoon based on what the NOAA report for Woodland says as forecasts can change a lot in 24 hours.