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It’s taken me ages to persuade Nana to get a new TV, but the moment she’d done that she wanted a custom cabinet made to go with it. We went to the same designer who did the bookcase / folding bed unit and desk for my den. In addition to the new TV cabinet, we wanted to ask for ideas to earthquake-proof the bookcase, which I’m using mostly for CDs.

It didn’t take long for the designer to come up with a cabinet we liked, and he gave us a couple of ideas on the bookcase. We agreed to have a low wooden lip installed on each shelf. Then it was just a matter of agreeing on the price and having a worker visit to verify the measurements, and after that the wait for it all to be ready.

When we visited the showroom they were featuring a grey color scheme that Nana liked, but once we were back home and she saw how well the bookcase matches the flooring and wooden doors in our flat, she agreed it would be better to have the TV cabinet match as well.

It’s magic!

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The designers had measured carefully to fit the cabinet between the blinds and the TV, with cutouts for the wall socket behind and the utility outlet up near the ceiling (intended for an A/C we will never have installed here). We were supposed to have the TV mounted midway between the right edge of the cabinet and the opposite wall, but I was at the office the day it was installed and it somehow ended up smack in the middle of both walls. But no mind — it fits.

The DVR and region-free DVD player are in the bottom of the cabinet. To allow the remote signal to reach these devices, the door is made of glass with a very thin veneer of wood — just 2-3mm. Nana has already tested it and indeed the devices respond to their remotes with the door shut.

Enough of your lip!

On to the bookcase! For some reason I’d imagined the cabinetmaker would use some kind of router to make grooves in the shelves for the lips, but in fact he just screwed them onto each shelf as it was (after carefully measuring, of course). I’m happy with the result, and Nana is breathing easier.

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The final bit of work today (it was the first undertaken, actually, and the one that took the most time) was to level up the two halves of the bottom shelf. In the two years we’ve had the bookcase, one of the shelves has warped and sagged noticeably compared to the other. Now, after the cabinetmaker’s efforts I’m sitting at the desk and can hardly make out the seam. (Seen from above, as in this photo, there’s a darkened edge on one shelf which makes it look uneven, but when I run my finger across it I can hardly tell where the seam is.)

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All my books and CDs will be stacked up in the dining room for the next week. I sincerely hope we don’t have an earthquake during that time!

Nana reminded me recently that the consumption tax rate will increase in October from 8% to 10%. “Is there anything you’ve been waiting to buy? You should get it before then.” Well. Carpe, as they say, diem. We talked about the TV and the vacuum cleaner, and then I mentioned that I’ve been waiting to buy a camera. She has heard me mention this from time to time, and I’ve just been putting it off in recent months because I spent so much on a bike tour of England and Scotland.

That conversation was a couple of weeks ago. Meanwhile, the TV has been on the Fritz, coming and going. Mostly it works OK but occasionally it blanks out. When this happens I remind Nana of the tax increase. Today I seized the bull by the horns and said we’re going to Bic Camera. She agreed, but I overheard her talking on the phone with her mother about it and she has seen right through me.

Anyway, we got to Bic in the late afternoon, after stopping to get shinkansen tickets for next month’s Tour de Tohoko. I was following Nana and didn’t realize we went right by the TVs on our way to the cameras. Bic Camera has scaled back the camera department recently (go figure), and so after a couple of minutes looking around in vain for what I wanted, she asked a worker and he guided us right to the spot.

I already knew what I wanted but I wasn’t seeing it on the display. With a little looking around I found a price tag listing the camera and lens combo, but again, there were none on display. Nana noticed the tag and expressed some astonishment at the price.

A saleswoman came along, a Fujifilm employee, and she pointed out the special offers and rebates available. I could get 10% points (usually 1%), or if I wanted the five-year extended warranty, then I would only receive 5% on points. An easy choice, since there’s no money out of my pocket. There’s also a cash rebate through the end of the month on the camera and lens combo amounting to almost $200. Then she guided me through all the discounts I could get on the add-ons since I was buying everything at once: the memory card and neutral filter, mostly. She came with us to the checkout and when I presented a credit card, she talked the cashier into letting me keep most of the points. (There’s apparently a hit to your points if you pay by credit card. Not a bad way for a retailer to deal with the fact they have to pay a percentage on credit card sales.)

So with the camera in the bag, I guided Nana back to the TV floor. She looked around for a couple of minutes. A 60-inch 4K Japanese brand TV can be had for considerably less than what I had just dropped on the camera. Nonetheless, after a quick look around during which she spent more time looking at wall mounts than at televisions, Nana declared that our current TV was still working. Well, OK. I know by now how to recognize when I’m removing sand from a beach with tweezers. We left the store and went to dinner.

It took a minute to pair the camera with the app on my phone. It took considerably longer to attach the strap to the triangular loops on the camera body, and I ended up using a screwdriver to complete the job. But with that done, I was ready to hit the mean streets of Shinjuku in search of first light — the first images with my new camera.

Sometimes a shot walks right by before you recognize it for what it is. The camera turned on in a second and I was able to capture a fleeting image on the fly.

My goal for the evening was Tocho — the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building. It’s been illuminated the past few weeks in honor of next year’s Olympic Games, but I haven’t been able to get a good picture of it. I shot off several and my new toy was up to the task.

On our way home from visiting my family, we had a two-hour layover in Seattle. We decided to stop in a café since Nana hadn’t had any breakfast. We were working on the Eastern timezone and so wanted some lunch, but in Seattle it was still breakfast time. So we ordered a local IPA and had a seafood omelet and a lox and a schmear.

That turned out to be too much food for us, as Nana only finished half the omelette and didn’t have any of either the sourdough bread or the bagel. But I was eager to sample the lox in Seattle, so I did my best to plough through it all. (As a result, I skipped the meal service on the flight home, but that was no great loss.)

A little early in the morning for that sort of thing?

Anyway, as we were enjoying the food and the IPA, I noticed that one of the waitresses was upselling on the beer. Whenever a patron ordered a beer, she would suggest a shot of bourbon for an additional $5. Where I come from that’s a boilermaker, and I was amused to hear the waitress pushing them at 9 a.m. local time. (I did not verify if everyone having alcohol in the café was, like us, working on a different time zone.)

There are levels of geekdom

The other thing I noticed while we were enjoying the food and drink was that the two waitresses kept talking about a machine that wasn’t working. I didn’t hear what machine they were discussing, but they were agreed that it wasn’t showing any sign of power. “I pulled out the plug and then plugged it in again, and I reset the breaker,” one of them said.

I briefly thought about offering to have a look, but to be honest my geek is more on the software side of things. Give me a couple of hundred thousand pages of content to be repurposed and I’m all over it. Sorting out a shorting bit of commercial kitchen hardware? I didn’t even have a continuity tester on me.

I think the ladies really needed someone like this guy:

(There are hundreds of these videos, and I can sit and watch them for hours.)