Good Morning Starshine

Man, did I call it or what? 3:30 AM, wide awake and nothing to do. Actually, plenty to do.

I woke up almost every hour throughout the night after getting to bed at 9PM (BTW: you've got to love Skype--being able to make a phone call with your computer to your wife and daughter on the other side of the world, for free, really demonstrates that Al Gore knew what he was doing when he invented the internet). After waking up at 3:30, I decided to just climb out of bed and start the day. Surprisingly, the outside was relative bright. As they don't observe Daylight Savings Time here, it was dark at 8PM here and bright at 4 AM--it was odd.

I just puttered around my postage stamp of a room for a bit, checking e-mail and then taking a nice hot shower. I then sat down to work on my talk for tomorrow, which didn't go so well because I found a number of ways to distract myself. However, many of those distractions involved other aspects of work, so I didn't feel so guilty. Also, I got to chat with the wife on gmail for a bit, which I won't call a distraction as it'll get me in trouble. Instead we'll call it "the highlight of my day." ;)

Anyway, I then went downstairs for some Japanese breakfast, which included french fries (those big, thick steak fries), a poached egg, miso soup, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, salmon (with lots of bones), other stuff I don't know what it was, and some much needed coffee.

I then wandered around outside for a bit, taking pictures of the giant lily pads across from my hotel. After a while, I started feeling incredibly sticky due to the incredible humidity here, grabbed my bag from my room and wandered up to the University here for my workshop. That's where I sit now. So far it's interesting, though, I'm exhausted and continue to require coffee to make it through the day. Hopefully tomorrow will be a more rested day...it'd bad to fall asleep during my own talk...