Tomorrow morning, the three of us are leaving for a week-long trip to Japan. We will first spend three days in Tokyo, staying at the guest room of our old apartment (which is, in fact, still our apartment, it is just that someone else is living there now), then travel to a hot spring hotel in Gunma prefecture (land-locked, so the traditional Japanese-style dinner is hopefully not as strongly based on sea food as usual) for two nights, and finally visit (and stay at) a friend's house in Funabashi.

For the first time in a long time I will not be taking my laptop computer along. Not that I had intended to (or would have been able to) get any work done during the vacation, but a year ago I would have brought the laptop in order to check email and get my daily fix of news. Today I do these things mostly on my iPod, so that all that goes into my backpack from the computer department will be this wonderful little device (along with its charger, of course, and just in case, also an AirPort Express and an ethernet cable).