Kasdan's Unplugged (Until Thursday)

Hello all. Well, the good news is that we're moved out of the hotel and into our apartment. It took almost all of yesterday and it was quite a busy day. Our leased furniture and the boxes we shipped by air all arrived for delivery and unpacking at the exact same time. We are now set up very comfortably in our apartment. We also got super thin cellphones (from Softbank, which uses Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt to hawk their wares), a DVD rental card (almost all rentals have an English option), and scheduled our set-up for cable TV (apparently, a decent amount of English channels including FOX) and internet access (fiber!). Unfortunately the bad news is that our internet connection will not be hooked up until Thursday, so no blogging from home until then (and no calls to or from our Vonage phone). In the meantime, Mike will be figuring out the commute and Ilena will have first crack at figuring out how to use some of our new appliances (including one machine that supposedly both washes and dries your clothes and another that is a combination microwave, toaster, oven) and how to turn off the light in our Tatami room (no switch seems to turn it off!).

This morning, Mike had his first real commute to work. Pretty smooth. While crowded on one train (standing room only), the rest of the ride was easy and he even got a seat (which have seat-warmers on them) so he could relax and recede into the vocal stylings of none other than Lisa Kasdan on my ridiculously small iPod Shuffle. (Check out the link to Lisa's MySpace page). The train is pin-drop silent the whole way and always on time, which really is nice. Especially when your point of reference is New Jersey Transit. The door-to-door commute is under an hour.

Oh and we almost forgot. GO GIANTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! While we were able to follow the game through three quarters, we missed the end (since we had to unplug and leave the hotel). Meanwhile, all we could divine from CNN (the one English station we have until Thursday) was that the Colts lost to the Chargers. It wasn't until late last night that we saw the Giants score. Woo hoo. What an improbable and awesome playoff run. As Ilena said, it figures that they pick this year to finally win in the playoffs. But if us being in Japan is what it takes to get the Giants back to the SuperBowl, we'll take it. Beating the Cowboys is so sweet.