Of babes and packing crates

A lot has been going on the last month.  We’ve just moved into a new place and successfully ejected another small human.  (Yep, another boy…!)

This condo is state of the art – from the kitchen, you can tell the bathtub to fill itself up at a specified height and temperature and it will call you in Japanese when it’s ready.  It’s very star-trek.

Because the manuals are in Japanese I mostly just guess at what the various control panels do.   A wrong button push can summon firetrucks so I should probably stop doing that.

I found the bathroom “burning hot mist” button by mistake.  Do we really need a burning hot mist button is the question.

What’s with the obligatory “minus ion” feature that every Japanese piece of hardware from the air conditioner to the hair dryer just has to have?  Marketing genius I guess, because is sure isn’t science.

Virtual Grandma

Living in Japan can be tough on grandparents.. but Skype to the rescue!

Cosmo reads a book with Grandma.  5000 miles ain’t nothing.

iPhone + Google’s Voice Search = WIN

This morning I was laying in bed listening to Skeptoid, one of my favorite podcasts.  I thought “You know, my mom learned how to snope-checks her spams, I’d bet she’d dig the Skeptoid book too.”

I brought up google voice search and spoke ‘Amazon Skeptoid book‘ and a few seconds later I had securely ordered it and had it happily on its way to her address.  From bed.

It’s a good time to be alive, folks.