Tools and Bills

Whoa! Yike! It's been that long since I last posted? Eep.

I received my first bill yesterday! This one is for my internet line. The next one coming should be my internet service and the one after that should be . . . nothing. The cool and convenient thing about paying bills here in Japan is that you can pay all of your bills at the convenience store. WHAT!?

That's right: convenience stores that are actually really convenient. If I had an electric bill, a water bill, cell phone bill, landline phone bill, and gas bill in one pile, I could take them all down to the local convenience store and pay them all right there. Does that rock or what?

I'll be taking advantage of that with my cell phone bill as well. Thursday I finally bought a pre-paid cell phone. One cool thing about cell phones over here is that texting is unlimited with a nominal charge. None of this $10-15 crap in the US. ¥300/month gets me cell phone email and unlimited texting. Eat that, USA!

Of course, there is the difficulty of adapting to a new system of texting. My phone menu and all are in English, but the user interface for texting is vastly different from what I've been used to. No longer will I be ripping out text messages with fully-spelled words at lightning speed. It forces me to slow down, which is very frustrating because as my thoughts are three sentences ahead, I'm busy correcting the typo on the third word of the text message and trying to get correct upper and lower case in my words. I feel slow-brained and inept because of having to slow down. I hope to learn the ins and outs and find out that I can once again work at my normal pace instead of being weighed down like Harrison Bergeron.

Oh! And I finally caught up on uploading photos to my Flickr page!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/misterparks/