Man, great trip. Talk about back to basics. You know how certain batteries have “memory” and if you charge them too much or too often, after a while it seems like they can’t hold a charge at all, and you have to completely discharge them to get them back to normal? That’s pretty much my life for the last couple of years. Blog, mailing lists, user groups, conferences, Twitter, books, articles, coursed, IM, email. For what? To learn stuff and get inspired. But at the end of the day, I didn’t have the energy to even try anything interesting. I guess I’ve been feeling a little burnt out.
But this past week was a total discharge. Outside of a couple of trips to the library to check email – just scanning to see if there were any emergencies, didn’t even answer anything – I was completely off line. And other than copying photos from my camera to my pc, I really hardly even used the computer.
Days were spent doing pretty mundane things for the most part – book stores, supermarkets, 100 Yen Mall (dollar store), post office, bank, town hall, lots of Japanese restaurants, and just driving around the countryside. But it was all an adventure for me. On Wednesday, we took a day trip out to Hikone for some site-seeing. Went to Hikone castle, and a Zen temple, the name of which escapes me at the moment. Nights were spent reading, practicing kanji, and mostly going to bed very early (damn jet lag), though one night I got dragged out by some relatives to an onsen (hot spring).
So now I get back and wee 921 emails, unknown hundreds of unread RSS items, 10 gazillion twitter pages scrolled by, two episodes of Lost to watch, crap – Apollo was released when I was gone! It’s actually a bit scary to see the onslaught of attention grabbing items swarming in on me. I’m uber-chilled out right now, and I don’t know where that’s going to lead me, but I know I don’t want to be back in the same burnt out condition a month from now.
Anyway, I’ll be posting photos on flickr and talking more details about the trip soon. Despite everything, good to be back!
Welcome back 🙂
“Days were spent doing pretty mundane things for the most part – book stores, supermarkets, 100 Yen Mall (dollar store), post office, bank, town hall, lots of Japanese restaurants, and just driving around the countryside. But it was all an adventure for me. On Wednesday, we took a day trip out to Hikone for some site-seeing. Went to Hikone castle, and a Zen temple, the name of which escapes me at the moment. Nights were spent reading, practicing kanji, and mostly going to bed very early (damn jet lag), though one night I got dragged out by some relatives to an onsen (hot spring).”
Just so you know, it’s refreshing even to read that, too. 🙂
jd
“crap – Apollo was released when I was gone” …
You know sometimes just a week can feel like a whole year! 😉