7.3

Looking down from the balcony of my apartment.

We had a 7.3M earthquake last night.  It was enough to wake me up (at 2am), but mostly because it felt like it went on for longer than usual.  I do get concerned during earthquakes here, but it is possible to tell very quickly that the quakes are not near the magnitude of the 9.0M Tohoku earthquake I experienced on March 11, 2011.

(My apartment is just six stories high and underneath another 15 or 16 floors.  My thoughts during an earthquake usually include hoping I will not die sandwiched between all that concrete.)

Looking up from the core of my apartment building,
right outside my front door.

Otherwise, the weather is cooling down--right now it's 57F--but the apartment's heating system is not yet available.  They set a specific date each year when the cooling system is turned off and the heat is turned on.  Until then I'm wearing a couple of sweaters when I'm at home in my apartment (older Japanese construction is famous for being poorly insulated--but in my apartment I think it's mainly the big glass sliding doors out to the balcony that are letting all the warmth out).

We're getting close to the end of the project I've been working on and things are in good order, which means that I've now had a few nights of rest.  This has been such a relief from the three (or more?) straight weeks of leaving work between 2-4am and wrapping up work remotely at 4-5am only only to get started again at 9am.  As you can imagine, I got to a point where I was completely out of clean laundry and had no food in my refrigerator.

In any event, I survived.  I missed my college reunion, which was severely disappointing because all the other members of the five-person dance team I was on were able to make it.  We haven't all been in the same place since 2002.

Pretty typical, actually.  This is what it's like here when a deal is on.

(It's time for a vacation--I've accrued the firm maximum six weeks and am planning to take some of that time to go home in November.)