Another gift card rendered useless by current trends.

The main problem with knitting somewhat obsessively: you can't really buy any generic knitted goods.

It's not just that you fear being asked by every Shrewd Observer if you made your hat, or your boots, or your sweater. It's that, once you reach a certain point, and knitting stops being a mere vehicle to churn out more scarves, and frankly, you don't even want to hear about scarves anymore, anyway; once you reach that point, at least for me, buying a sweater at Macy's becomes... a Waste.

You still see things, sure; and you still think, perhaps, how interesting a particular style might be, and how attractive it might look should you put it on. The difference, however, is that you aren't actually seeing a consumer product, oh, no; you're seeing a yarn, and a stitch, and a cut of sleeve and joins and seams that you could easily avoid by working in the round, and I wonder how it's set under this oversized collar, and wouldn't it look nicer with that three-inch trim you saw on the sweater by the entrance?

And no, you don't actually have time to make every sweater you own yourself. In fact, you very well may never get past the dreaming stage, or at the very most, you may continue relying on actual patterns from magazines and books and the net, copied more or less to the letter with minor variations to suit your preferences.

But you still can't bring yourself to buy that sweater, unless you plan to unravel it and make, say, slippers.

You can see the slippers when I finish them.

Oh, forgot one.

So do I write about the yarn that I need for my current project, and tossed who-knows-where-not-me? (After a two hour hunt peppered by deep breathing sessions?)

Do I write about comics, which I've yet to read this week because the comic shop is out of my way?

Or...

"And jogging blog! Cooking-knitting-comics-jogging blog!"

So said my mother, and, oh, yeah. I'm doing the Couch-to-5K.

The Couch-to-5K Running Plan is... you know what? Quotation marks make everything easier:

"You should ease into your running program gradually. In fact, the beginners' program we outline here is less of a running regimen than a walking and jogging program. The idea is to transform you from couch potato to runner, getting you running three miles (or 5K) on a regular basis in just two months."

I'm in the middle of week 7 now - that's three days of 2.5 miles with no walking - and I have to say, this plan is certainly working out. I particularly like it compared to my plan from when I tried running two years ago, which consisted of... oh, that's right, no plan at all. My father and I walked together, and he would tell me to run ahead and come back. As soon as I got back, he'd do so again. I wound up jogging up and down hills, wearing the first pair of shoes I found, barely stretching, and a bit less than a month after starting I was running every other day without walking breaks.

A bit more than a month after starting, my Achilles' tendons began to ache and tear so badly that I limped for weeks. Oops! Dad blamed my lack of a thirty-second warm up stretch. I blamed him.

Turns out we were both... well, I was probably premature in my analysis, and he was only about a third right. This time around, I'm spending five-to-ten minutes stretching before and after each jog; I'm running mostly on a level treadmill; and, in sharp contrast to some well argued theories, I'm trusting my ankles to sneakers designed to ameliorate pronation. I'm also only going three days a week, and repeating days of the program that I couldn't finish the first time. If my initial attempts were foiled by running too far, too fast, too soon, too often over too difficult terrain, then maybe - just maybe - my natural tendency to favor doomsday will at last be trumped by logic. After all, I've made it almost two months so far.

By the way - when my brother got married three weeks ago, I wore high heels to the wedding for one of the first times in my life. Gorgeous shoes; sore calves. I limped for a week, and worried profusely about how my regimen would be affected. Wonder of wonders - after an extra long stretch, I succeeded in jogging the full session without a twinge. The walking intervals were torture, but it appears that jogging really does rely on different muscles. See, kids? Physiology actually has real-world parallels!

Milk for the bread!

My parents joined a CSA this year, and since coming home from Japan, I've been rediscovering vegetation outside of the sparse pickings at a Nagoya corner grocery.

Carrots? Check. Spinach? Naturally. Little white hakurei turnips, heads of napa cabbage, and curiously itty-bitty daikon radishes? Inexplicably, yes. There's synchronicity for you.

Carrots are great for munching (I haven't turned orange, yet), and both the daikon and hakurei were victims to my culinary adventures - the former, boiled into a newly nostalgic miso soup; the latter, victim to a slapdash adaptation of a savory steamed custard that only I could really finish. Mom tends to lay claim to any greens other than lettuce, which is probably for the best, as my cooking reputation isn't exactly built upon being adept at washing and preparing, and these come to us straight from the mud. (We've been forced to offer lukewarm hospitality to a number of hitchhikers, notably a merry little slug from some lettuce the other day. I was entirely ready to name him Stu and be jolly friends forevermore, but mom insisted that he be evicted immediately. Yet, I'm supposed to make eye contact and listen and everything when HER friends visit. Pfft.) Mom has a knack for cooking leaves, anyways - she's come up with some pretty ridiculously good salads, like spinach wilted by sauteed onions and mushrooms, or braised cabbage with apple cider vinegar, or good ol' fashioned grilled radicchio.

What really excites me, however, are the roots, squashes, and cruciferous veggies. While the carrots never seem to last long enough to actually cook, we've pulled dozens of cookie sheets from the oven laden with beets, turnips, parsnips, and rutabega, not to mention cauliflower, broccoli, and (as of tonight, we hope) Brussels sprouts; and both my mother and I have found ourselves stuffing sweet dumpling squash with cous cous, frying spaghetti squash into fritters, and pureeing butternut squash and acorn squash into soups accented by onions and garlic, apples and ginger, or a couple of sweet potatoes.

Yes. The sweet potatoes.

We got a lot of those. I've been playing with them almost every day, and the pile has barely been breached.

A brief tangent: a few weeks ago, I picked up Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, a sequel to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. I don't own the original, but that's for the best, because the book I do own has taken over my life. I've found wild success in the master recipe, inundating my household with whole wheat in free-form, bread loaves, crackers, and croutons. With a basement full of sweet potatoes, it was natural that I try the "Sweet Potato and Spelt Bread" next. I grated tubers until my arm ached, searched high and low for spelt flour, and left a bubbling concoction perfumed by yeast to rise all night long, with dreams of nuanced sweetness and light, chewy textures. As it developed in the fridge, I babbled about making more for Thanksgiving, sharing it at an office where I volunteer, working out the best price to sell it. There's a strong possibility that I was introducing myself to strangers by describing my highly anticipated sweet potato bread.

My hopes might have been a touch high.

Yeah, well, I probably should've drained the sweet potatoes, because that's not what I got. The free-form boule was a total failure; the muffins and the loaf were somewhat better, but still far too dense, pretty much raw in the middle. This is what happens when you decide at 9 PM that you MUST start combining ingredients NOW, and never mind that this is going to wind up way too wet, because thinking is for daylight hours. It's why I'm a day person.

So, last night, I decided to go in another direction, the "Pumpkin Pie Brioche." This one relied on canned pumpkins and white whole wheat, and was insured by eggs, honey, and oil; it seemed a safe bet. And the result had a far more promising texture, still wetter than average (as the book assures is desirable) but stiffer than the un-enriched versions, slightly pliant. The cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves didn't hurt, either. I left it to rise with high hopes.

Ten minutes went by with nothing - no bubbles, no yeasty aroma. Since physics has yet to back up the theory that the progressed time until completion is inversely proportional to the time spent observing a physical or chemical reaction (read: a watched pot never boils), and since I have far too much free time, I knew from past loaves that SOMETHING should have happened by now. Were the additions of fat and sugar affecting things?, I wondered. Or...

Oh, crud. I forgot the yeast.

Yep. A big bowl fulla sweet-smelling dough, DOA. Maybe the chefs of the Night Kitchen can rely on little boys in suits of bread to pilot wonder-enhanced propeller planes into jugs milk to magically enhance their wares with moments to spare; but it was pretty apparent that the time for yeast had long since passed, and so, down the drain it went, and mope I did.

Though, I stopped moping just long enough to adapt this recipe from Smitten Kitchen with sweet potatoes, wonton skins, and plenty of garlic. An hour or so of sauteeing, mashing, folding, and boiling later, I had a sweet plate of dumplings and a freezer full of more.

And a sink full of dishes. But today, I'm not writing about doing the dishes.

...on a rock.

I made a new friend last night.

We met in my favorite South Street yarn/miscellania shop. I was knitting; she was crocheting. We chatted about the effect of internet misinformation on the versimilitude of information, and about how low standards benefit self esteem.

We also talked about blogs. She has a blog, she says, because one cannot always rant about ideals through an oral medium if one plans to maintain certain social ties.

Me - I have a different problem. I just want somewhere to rant about my interests, to showcase my writing, and possibly to, perhaps, <i>forge> a social life. Earlier entries attest that I found the perfect title; apparently, though, that wasn't enough to delve out an angle. My interests remain myriad and subjective.

"If I write about my interests," I said, "I'd be writing the 'Knitting-Cooking-Comics Blog.'"

"Well, just write about all of them, then," said my new friend.

Yeah, sure. I was leaning that way, anyway. I'll even throw in "Japan stuff," for good measure.

"Three Years on a Rock" has a new direction, then. Same title. ("Knitting-Cooking-Comics Blog" is probably already taken.) My mini-goal: I'll be posting every day until Thanksgiving. Honestly, if A.J. Jacobs can read the encyclopedia, I can talk daily about the hobbies that pervade my consciousness every time the TV goes off.

Taking the time to enjoy life, involuntarily.

This year, at the beginning of June, I slept in a bed for the first time in a year and a half. I began eating three square meals a day, prepared to include sufficient protein, vitamins, and calories. After months stuck in a job that revolved around speaking nothing but English, I was given the chance to speak nothing but Japanese from morning till night, while I could read a book of Japanese essays to my heart's content. I was cared for.

I would have given anything to be anywhere else.

See, a week before that, fatigue had me set to blow up at work. Shortly thereafter, stomach pains forced me to actually blow off work, at least to the extent of repeatedly pleading for time off. My appetite steadily decreased, until I was eating only my meager portions at meal times, with all snacking phased out. My weight was going down. I didn't want to move. When horrific heartburn had me up in the middle of the night, I gave up and went to see a doctor.

The doctor didn't speak English, and frankly, I didn't care. It couldn't have been more than a bad bug. (Or swine flu, but I'd be far too unconscious for communication to matter if that were the case.) I gladly let him poke my belly and prod my chest, and made no complaints when he ordered a blood test. (Having a fully protruding vein in the middle of my right arm, blood tests have always been short and relatively painless, so long as the nurse is capable hitting the broad side of a barn with a tractor, a skill claimed by a good eighty percent of the nursing workforce.) I even waited patiently for an hour, a full hour, while nifty little machines shook my blood with multi-colored chemicals until weird reactions garnered a string of numbers written next to three-letter codes for proteins, hormones, and acids. The doctor finally called my name, and presented me with a sheet listing those numbers.

Those numbers, as it turned out, were higher than they should have been. Much higher. Around 200 times higher. And the computer conveniently added a little "H" right smack dab next to them, just like how Skype sticks a little moon icon next to your name when you go idle.

"H" for "Hepatitis."

I spent about three full days in the hospital, followed by about three weeks of total rest and frequent blood tests. I've been eating more and moving less, and amazed to see that my weight has stayed the same. I'm finally starting to feel better again, gradually returning to work, thinking about what comes next. Because, to tell the truth, I've had enough.

Congratulations, Japan. You've given me enough material to last me well into my late twenties. Of course, I'll still be here another two months, so at your current rate, there's no guarantee I'll even last that long.

Just so you know.

Just so you know - I plan to keep this blog going.

Just so you know - there have been some significant changes to my hastily laid plans. But I still plan to keep this blog going.

I just really, really need a direction.

I'll type out a full update on my status in work and health, very soon, ideally this weekend. I have an idea for a series to keep things active for a little while, and will try to implement that (it involves food!).

But right now.... just so you know... plans are truly overrated.

Medium popcorn in a tub the size of your head. Like home.

What to write about. It has to happen.

Let's see. It's Golden Week, which should be fodder for adventure, but - prepare to feign surprise - I'm not so great at planning, meaning that five solid, consecutive days without work are essentially going to waste. I tend to compensate by riding my bicycle all over the city and watching a lot of movies, though. Window shopping and theater hopping are, indeed, something.

So, well, movies. Hm. Not including that time I saw "WALL-E" a few months ago with the Japanese dub, which wasn't much of anything - face it, the main character mostly communicates in beeps and pops - most of the films I see here are in English to begin with. It's so easy to forget that you're even in Japan once you step in that theater.

There are hints, of course: a pervasive buttery, sweet smell from the omnipresent caramel popcorn; sales of overpriced brochures for every major feature; an employee behind the counter asking where you wish to sit, so that he can print your reserved seat on the ticket; patrons waiting for the last credit to scroll and the lights to flicker on before vacating their seats; Japanese subtitles cluttering the bottom of the screen; beer. Oh, and lots of Japanese language films.

But once you step in the theater - actually find your seat and sit down and take a sip of the diet cola you snuck in because the theaters here don't actually sell any, though regular cola and melon soda grace most menus - once the lights go out, and the previews end and your old friends from Hollywood begin reading their cue cards - it goes quiet. And you're sitting in the same reclining seat, cradling the same old bag in your lap to save it from the sticky floor... and, for an hour and a half or so, you're escaping the unfamiliar.

And, at 1800 yen a ticket, you probably won't be escaping all that often. But, anyway, there are enough theaters at a stone's throw from my apartment, if that stone were dislocated with a cannon, that it's a pretty solid way to compensate for another national holiday that isn't going to be all that different. Hey, I can always talk about food next time.