New Year's Resolutions Test List

- Win more lotteries

- Move all holidays to workdays

- Catch all missed trains, planes etc.

- Maximize paid vacation

- Find all lost things

- Remain in love

- Abandon possessiveness

- Practice free will

- Honor habits

- Maximize portions

A New Year

Happy New Year!

2014

The Year of the Horse

Holiday, Schmoliday

Science has informed us officially, just in time for Christmas, that sometime in the next few hours or later the universe will collapse and everyone will die. That's the tabloid version. In hypothetical reality, everything in the universe will become heavier than it is now, as already evidenced in the tons of fad diets that are as everywhere as articles on cellulite, to say nothing of what we personally are actually seeing even now at our very waistlines.

To be more hypothetically specific, and to give you all a heads-up on this, everything in the universe will become billions and billions of times heavier than it is now (so there's really no point in letting out those pants) and everything will be compressed into superheavy and superhot balls (as presciently sung of by Jerry Lee Lewis, back in the fifties) that roll around heaven all day, and the universe will cease to exist-- at least in the form familiar to our world. Which, if you look at what we're doing to the place, may not turn out to be all that much of a change. 

Those scientists' humongous guesses may be just as right as the next guy's, but the labcoat denizens seem to have no sense of propriety as to this actual moment in the time and space continuum. 

At least they could have waited until after the holidays.

BRIDGING THE YEARS

Last night we went south a ways to what once was a lively old entertainment district for travelers from old Kyoto along the West Lake road to the Japan Sea and elsewhere. Traditionally 'discreet' for 1500 years or so, it has changed a lot even since we first came here, and is a bit bedraggled and threadbare, but coming back in new ways.

We went there to enjoy the traditional year-end soba noodle meal known as toshikoshi (lit.: “year getting-over”). Eaten at midnight, the long noodles 'bridge the gap' between one year and the next. For that purpose we visited the big new sprawling hot spring ryokan that has everything for everyone and is always crowded with families and folks who come for the restaurants, baths (no tattoos allowed), saunas, hotel rooms, hot sweet potatoes, haircuts, massages, lounges, games, bars, karaoke, with narrow flows of warm water here and there inside and outside where you can stop and sit and dip your feet to be serviced by the tiny feet-nibbling fish. The restaurant has big creative menus, chairs and tables all over up down, sunken tables, big tvs, sushi bar, scrambling waitresses dressed in yesterday mode...

All around is the neighborhood of the old red-light district that has been so since way before Edo, when it was a two-day trip from Kyoto over the mountains, through Otsu and along the lake to Omimaiko for a summer or other distant sojourn; this was the first stopover on that way, sort of a pleasure side trip from the Nakasendo. Here were the big old rambly ryokans where everything happened and more...

Crowds still visit in the steamy, fragrant winter nights-- Happy New Year, from here atop all those old times...

Happy 2008!

From Kaya, Mitsuki and Miasa

Merry Geol!