I finished reading Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The villain went to jail, did his time, and married the woman who waited for him.
Did Raskolnikov think he had a Napoleon complex?
Next up: Real Estate Investing for Dummies.
On deck: Don Quixote
I keep mentioning ‘firsts,’ since this is my first time living in Japan, it just seems to be the thing to do. That, and being in my mid-30s doesn’t leave a whole lot of new experiences, so perhaps I cherish them a bit more than normal. Today my wife and I got an Internet connection. It’s a fiber-optic line (hence the title). I’ve never had fiber-optic anything before.
I can’t tell whether FO is a whole lot faster than normal DSL, but then, the real test will occur when I try to download lectures from school!
For right now, I’m just happy to be connected to the rest of the world. My next feat of skill and daring will be to figure out how to re-install my LinkSys wireless router without the installation CD-ROM. My guess is that the CD is in a storage facility on the East Coast, and I won’t see it for another three years.
A blur. Yes, that’s a good word to describe the past week. It’s been a lot of non-stop helter-skelter, hurry-scurry, running to-and-fro trying to tie up the little bits and pieces of life that underpin it and allow us to do the big things.
Although I could eat fast-food all the time, I’d rather make a couple trips to the grocery store to buy some salads, soups, and sandwiches and get the refrigerator stocked. Getting the essentials into stock at the house is, well, essential. But there’s more to it, of course. The salad wouldn’t taste good without croutons and some sort of dressing, and since I couldn’t ship any of that from my last household, I had to buy replacements for all the things that were in my refrigerator in Germany.
Yesterday I had the satellite dish installed. Yet another first for me! I’ve never had to have satellite-related equipment installed before. I’m not sure anyone else in my family has ever had satellite TV before.
I’m told that in Germany, the satellite dishes are more prevalent in poorer areas than in more well-to-do areas. Most of the genteels have cable TV. Satellite is apparently for immigrants who want to get a broadcast from back home, wherever that might have been–Russia, Turkey, Romania, etc. I pointed out that the little American enclaves we tend to live in all have satellite dishes, too. Why criticize poorer immigrants, we Americans don’t bother trying to assimilate into the local culture, either. I guess the difference is a DEROS!
In what little spare time I have, I’ve been trying to read Crime and Punishment. It’s pretty lengthy, and I haven’t quite figured out what’s going to eventually happen to the anti-hero. If one of my literary friends wants to e-mail me and converse regarding the deeper meaning of this book, by all means, get in touch!
I need to wrap up Don Quixote as well. It was too big to carry from Germany to Japan, and I was only halfway finished reading it when I departed Europe. I like it a lot, maybe because I feel like I sympathize with the good Don?
I should have Internet access within the next week or so. Until then, blogging will be somewhere between ‘virtually nonexistent’ and ‘I won’t be doing it.’
Oh, did I mention I tried a mini-Triathlon last weekend? It was a 400m swim, a 10k bike race, and a 5k run. I finished in 1:07:02. It was something like 21 minutes slower than the guy who won. I did alright on the swim, I was in the end of the middle of the pack. But the bike race killed me. Now, I had to use my wife’s steel-frame mountain bike (I don’t own a 12-speed or a racing bike or anything, and my aluminum-frame mountain bike was down for repairs that I couldn’t perform). I did okay going uphill, which constituted the first 1 km of the bike race, but once we got to the level, quite a few people went racing on by me.
I said "participants" because since I’ve never tried a Triathlon before, my goal was to finish. Most of the rest of the folks were "competing." One of the folks told me I ought to try competing next year, and an easy way to start would be to get a racing bike!
Tomorrow I’ll be moving into my new house. It’s a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom, single garage, single story house. Aside from the single story, it’ll be a lot like the house in Germany I just vacated.
I’ll have to wait over a week for the phone and Internet to get hooked up. I wouldn’t anticipate seeing many new posts until after 18 Aug.
I’ll have plenty to write about. I wonder if I’ll have the time to write?
I’ve been trying to get settled in a new country, state, city, base. I haven’t been ignoring Weltanschauung intentionally, I promise.
I should have a place to live within a week or so. Hopefully I’ll also have Internet access, that way I can blog in whatever little free time I can scare up for myself!
I’m pretty close to a number of Germans. They’re very good friends (and family), and I really love them all.
Occassionally we’ll discuss world events, and since the Middle East is nearly always in turmoil, it tends to come up as a good topic. I tend to talk at length about the unsettled Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how and why it is often central to the problems that occur there.
Typically, my German counterparts will dance around the issue a little. If they do offer an opinion, I generally forcefully advance and defend my opinions (often too bluntly, I’m told). Most often, they will eventually offer that they don’t understand why their opinions about Israel don’t carry weight in discussions, from the personal level all the way to the United Nations.
I’ll leave that question open to the floor. I may share my opinion later.
Here’s some additional reading on modern European anti-Semitism. Please be aware this is from the Center for Jewish Community Studies, just so you know where the biases lie.
Of course, it’s not really fair to analyze one side only without pointing out that there’s been at least some attempt to do something about the recognized problem.
For even more information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I recommend reading Fawaz Turki’s The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile, and Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel.
I am by no means a professional investor. I’m not just a hobby investor, either. Call me a serious amateur, perhaps with a serious lack of time to really get good at being a part-time pro on the side.
In any case, here are some things I know that I thought I’d share:
With all of this in mind, especially the last item, my object is always to try to figure out where everyone is going to start putting their money before they all figure out where they’re going to put their money.
In mid-2000 at the start of the big market slide, where did everyone put their money that they pulled out of the stock market that made the market go down? I haven’t done any serious analysis, but I would offer that real estate was booming around that time. It kept going while the stock market started recovering in 2003, though. So, where was the money coming from that was floating both real estate and the stock market?
We know that real estate is now cooling off, and interest rates are probably about to peak. I suspect a lot of people are doing what I’m doing. Lately I’ve found some pretty attractive CDs and bonds. Perhaps everyone else is taking money from stocks and locking in these higher-than-recent average and less risky places?
Maybe everyone’s gone speculating in oil and gold futures? Note that gold also went up over the last few years, from the $330 range in 2003 (don’t quote me on that year), up to around $730 early this year. It fell back when the market rallied earlier this year, but has recovered back to $620 or so this summer.
Then what next? What is everyone else going to start doing next week?
The past few days have been somewhat relaxing. I’m on the island of Okinawa. I wish I could say I was relaxing and enjoying myself. I brought plenty of work with me, so I’m working and enjoying myself, as it were.
The other great thing is my old deputy "Tank" is stationed over here. He and I have managed to get together and have dinner twice thus far.
Hopefully my compatriots and I will be able to blast off out of here and get back to my new home.
I’m happy to report that Avis made good on the problem of the parking attendant who tried to make me park anywhere else but where I was because she thought she could. Management actually got in touch with me and asked some questions, and offered a discount on my next rental.
I’m happy now. I wonder if the parking attendant is, too?
As so often happens during a permanent change of station, life has been filled with unexpected twists and turns that drinks up free time as fast as a thirsty man in a desert that ran across his first oasis in a hundred miles. There are the randomly (often inconveniently) placed meetings, changes of command ceremonies, tests, training events, paperwork lost by some office; the list goes on and on. I haven’t even started flying yet.
The silver lining to all of this is that at least we don’t live in the early industrial revolution period, where factory workers were often expected to work 12-16 hour shifts six days a week.
Of course, I work with a bunch of people who love their work (me included, but not quite to the extent some of my compatriots do). Over the past several years I’ve become used to twelve hour days, I just keep working until I have to quit to go to sleep. Somehow I manage to find tons of things to do. But then, my job doesn’t involve much manual or hard labor. Perhaps it should, I’d certainly be in better physical shape!
Luckily I have a loving and understanding wife who puts up with my work habits. But then, she works as much as I do, too!
