After three months here, Cissy's parents went back home to Shanghai last week. During their stay they have taken over running the household, doing all the cooking, dish-washing, shopping, laundry, cleaning and also helped to keep Kai happy during the day (and especially from six to ten in the morning so that we could get some extra hours of sleep). As a result, while Cissy was still reasonably busy, the first two months of my paternity leave have been almost a holiday.

From this week on, the daily chores fall back to us, and after another month my leave is up and I have to return to work, so Cissy will have to cope by herself from Monday to Friday.

Last week, Google completed canvassing Tokyo so that you can now see the entrance hall of my house. Many people (and not only those being captured entering love hotels or urinating in the street) are not at all comfortable with this level of privacy invasion. Google may be taking things too far and risk their favourable reputation of doing no evil.

If someone has recommendations for a free charting application that is as easy to use as Google Docs Spreadsheets but has more options how to scale and stack the data, please let me know.

I have been rather lucky at the dentist so far: Even though I have always been eating a lot of sweets (which did not make me fat, either) and am not very dedicated or proficient with the tooth brush, I was spared cavities until my early twenties. I believe I can thank the daily fluoride tablets that I had as a child for that. Before coming to Japan I had minor cavities on three adjacent teeth on the lower right, the kind that the dentist would find during the annual inspection and immediately take care of. And three years ago there was a painful wisdom tooth that the dentist decided to extract rather than try to repair.

But now I am in the middle of root canal treatment. Two weeks ago at the regular check-up the dentist made the shocking discovery of advanced dental caries on the second upper left molar. He was surprised that I was not in pain already. I was surprised that the problem was not detected at the last check half a year ago. The damage is supposedly also clearly visible on the x-ray that was taken, although I have to take the dentist's word for that, I cannot make sense of it at all.

At least in Japan, a root canal treatment takes five or six sessions, with about a week in between. I just had the first one, in which the tooth was drilled open to remove the dental pulp, filled up with some medicine/disinfectant/anti-biotic and temporarily closed. The procedure was done anaesthetised and completely painless (thanks!). I am assuming that the scariest part of the operation is behind me now. The drugs have worn off, I had meals, and the tooth feels only a little uncomfortable. The next three sessions will be opening the tooth again to renew the medicine filling and check on its effectiveness (for which anaesthetics are not necessary). After that the tooth will be filled with (according to Wikipedia) gutta-percha, a natural latex, and capped with a crown, which apparently is rather critical/complex/costly procedure in itself.

凯 [kai]

triumphant; victorious ...

爱德华

Edward ...

爱 [ai]

love; affection; to treasure ...

德 [de]

virtue; kindness; heart; mind ...

德国 [de guo]

Germany ...

华 [hua]

China; magnificent ...

It's a boy!

Now, there is an uninspiring chart. Maybe I need to tweak the scales a little. Strictly speaking, though, I am at my fattest in recorded history.

Cissy's parents arrived from Shanghai last weekend, and are going to stay with us for three months. And I still don't speak a word of Chinese ...

Part thirteen: Cissy's new sunglasses.

Part Seven: Delicate like a panda, the Golden Bear can only truly shine with European voltage.

I was reading up about time zones on Wikipedia, when I came upon this chart showing the difference between UTC and the real time (mean solar time) over the last few years, and how leap seconds are introduced to keep UTC from diverging too far.

Apparently, there hase been a leap second about once a year until 1999, when the divergence rate slowed down and did not require adjustment until 2005. So I thought that they maybe tweaked the formula a little, but as it turns out for unknown reasons, Earth has sped up after year 2000, so the mean solar day has become 1 ms shorter and fewer leap seconds have been since then.

Should I be worried?

Part Six: Finally, a dish washer!

• Micro Mutants: Evolution
• Tannhäuser
• Wings of War - Famous Aces

Part twelve: Protective goggles in the hardware store.

42.195 km, 05:48:32 (gross time). Ran for 20, walked for 20, limped along for the rest.

Point	Split	Lap	Time
5km	00:50:20		10:00:20
10km	01:23:03	0:32:43	10:33:03
15km	02:00:39	0:37:36	11:10:39
20km	02:33:37	0:32:58	11:43:37
25km	03:10:54	0:37:17	12:20:54
30km	03:52:46	0:41:52	13:02:46
35km	04:38:34	0:45:48	13:48:34
40km	05:28:20	0:49:46	14:38:20
Finish	05:48:32	0:20:12	14:58:32

Now those are the official gross times, counted from the starting signal (starting gunfire). I'd also like to point out that my net time is about 15 minutes less, because my block (the last one) was started about 15 minutes later. That would be about 05:35.

• Darjeeling
• Oregon
• Ach, du Mauseschreck
• Hamburgum

The recently reunited Police are currently stopping by in Tokyo and I went to see their concert at Tokyo Dome tonight. They played all their greatest hits, from Message in a Bottle to Every Breath You Take. Opening act: Fiction Plane, fronted by Sting's son. Now, the problem with huge venues like Tokyo Dome is that you end up sitting (or standing) a hundred metres away from the stage, so that without those big video walls you could not really say what was going on there. In effect, you have 25,000 people watching a music video together, which of course still makes for a nice event.

Trivia tidbit for the day: Tokyo Dome is an air-supported structure, the roof being held up by constantly keeping the inside of the stadium pressurised, which is very noticeable when going in or out.

I am getting closer to the point of having enough data to draw a chart.

	June 30	July 29	Sept 02	Sept 30	Oct 28	Dec 02	Dec 23	Feb 03	Ideal
Weight	69.7	70.7	70.6	71.1	72.6	73.3	72.7	72.9	77.1
Muscle	56.7	59.2	58.7	58.9	59.4	59.8	60/2	60.8	62.1
Fat	9.8	8.1	8.6	8.9	9.9	10.2	9.2	8.5	11.6
BMI	20.6	20.9	20.9	21.0	21.4	21.7	21.5	21.5	18.5 to 24.8
Body Fat Pct	14	11.5	12.2	12.5	13.6	14	12.7	11.7	10 to 20
Tipness Score	76	80	80	80	81	81	82	80

Part eleven: Zhang Jiwang, whose desk is opposite mine, and who came back from China with new glasses, becomes the first one to be featured here twice. Also, one of the first pictures taken with the new phone.

Kitty was always very shy with or afraid of strangers and would run off to hide in the furthest corner of the house, nervously eyeing the intruder, ready to scurry off to someplace else if approached. Well, this is how she treats us now.

We went to Kitty's new family's house in Chiba today, and after just two months she seems to have completely forgotten who we are. Or were.

:-(

Did I mention we brought a video camera to capture the joyous reunion?

Give food to a cat, and she knows you her slave

PS: Patai, the household's other cat, was not any friendlier, either. Impressive hair, impressive hiss.