A real blog post, for once

I've had family visiting for the past couple weeks so I haven't had a chance to even think much about posting anything new. But I figured I'd take a few minutes and just talk about a few things I've been up to and a few things I've got coming up. I guess that's what most people use their blogs for anyway.

So shortly after finishing my last post, we embarked on a massive fix-up of our house to prepare for my mother-in-law's arrival from Japan. We had about a hundred unfinished projects around, and we got to as many as we could. As you may or may not know, we own a 1923 "Colonial Revival" house that has never really been upgraded, so we've got quite a lot still left to do. But we finally finished painting the first floor, got some curtains up to cover our patio windows, got some pictures up on the walls both in the living room and the guest bedroom, and replaced the sagging curtain "rods" in the guest bedroom. We have bay windows and I didn't know how to cover them originally, so I tried these tension wire rods because they were small and could get around corners... big mistake. You can't keep these things tight, and the wire sags... which just looks ugly. So I put up some real rods, which meant spackling and repainting the walls. Then I painted the ugly radiator for good measure.

Over the past week, we've been trying not to use our computers as much for my mother-in-law's sake. Been watching way too much TV instead. We got TV Japan, which is mostly just NHK, and my m-i-l's been watching mostly that. We got it just in time, actually, to watch a show my wife happened to be on that week - Cool Japan. (They found her through her blog.) I'm not sure yet if we'll keep TV Japan after my m-i-l leaves - it's kind of expensive. Makes me feel like I'm in Japan when I watch it, though.

Tonight, we're going out to eat at Sakagura, which is one of our favorite restaurants and a cool place that still feels a little bit like a secret. It's down in the basement of an otherwise non-descript office building, and there's only a small floor-standing sign near the front door to let you know it's there. They got a writeup in the NY Times several years ago, though, and ever since then the number of western clientele has increased quite a bit. Good for them, though - if there's one thing I hate more than crowded restaurants, it's good restaurants going out of business. And Sakagura is a really good restaurant - though they're known more for their sake selection, which is the best in the city.

Tomorrow, we're taking one of those July 4th cruises on the East River to watch the fireworks. I've gone to the fireworks before, but never on the water, so I'm looking forward to it. Usually it's so crowded you can barely even move, so it'll be cool to be in a more controlled environment where the number of tickets are limited.

This weekend, we'll have the house back to ourselves, and I'll probably start writing some new posts. I'm planning to do a July 4th post about the fireworks both in NYC and my neighborhood, then I've got a "retroview" of PUFFY's "Spike Daisakusen" DVD in the works. After that, who knows.