Day 4 behind the cut. Check it out!

Day 3 behind the cut. You must check it out!

9:30am Saturday here in Tokyo… I just took two photos and melded them together in Photoshop to show a panoramic view from our room window:

More info on Friday in my next post.

Day Two Behind the cut. Check it out!

4am here and my body’s screwed up inner clock jolted me awake… or maybe it was Erik’s snoring. 😛

Day One behind the cut. Check it out.

The journey was nuts, but in the end I made it to Tokyo safe and sound.

– The taxi driver who took me from home to the airport was crazy, driving 130kmph, tailgating people and taking 60km turns at 110. I thought I was going to die.

– I almost missed my connecting flight from Chicago because the electronic billboards at O’Hare didn’t list my flight properly.

– The 12 hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo was mind-numbingly long as I tried to sleep, but just felt hungry and sore instead.

– My clogged sinuses gave me wicked headaches when the plane descended for landing to the point where I thought death would be preferable.

But when Erik and I finally hooked up at the airport and grabbed the bus to head to our hotel, things were good and the anxiety of the day melted away. I’d made it with my luggage and sanity intact.

It’s almost 9am your time (10pm here) and I haven’t really slept yet, so I’ll just post one photo that sums up my first evening in Tokyo quite well:

It must be Tokyo.

Read Erik’s journal for more stuff until I post again.

Cold.

In my sinuses, in my throat. 14 hours until I fly and my body gave up the battle against Autumn Viral Nastiness.

I need to finish packing. I need to finish working. I need to finish functioning.

Damn.

Frank and Meg are down in Toronto. Frank’s got work stuff here but he decided to rent a car instead of flying so Meg could come too and see more of the city. Saturday we drank and partyed with friends. Yesterday we wandered downtown and I showed them around Bloor & Bathurst, Chinatown, Kensington Market and Queen West. It was a good weekend, though a bit exhausting.

More preparations before my trip. It’s starting to feel real and I think I’m getting pre-trip anxiety. I need to make up a list of things to take so I don’t get wigged out and forget anything. I need to keep that anxiety from invading other things going on around me.

I’m feeling extra-sensitive about book-related stuff these past few days as well. Several people saying one thing and doing another making me feel paranoid. That’s the big difference between this and commercial projects – in all ways good and bad, it’s personal.

Hmm, just general heightened anxiety from the looks of it. Not good.

Class went well yesterday. Teaching first semester Character Animation is oddly refreshing. Going back to the basics of motion and really breaking it down for the new students is gratifying so far. I like teaching the new crew coming in each year. Their fresh optimism and excitement for the material is infectious.

Afterwards I headed to Sheridan for my first Digital Painting class. Not knowing how bad traffic would be I ended up getting there about 45 minutes early and wandering around the old campus, awash in 9 year old nostalgia.

It was depressing. Let me rant a bit here…

Rant about Sheridan behind the cut.

Up really late, but for a good reason. Erik asked if I could put together an animated banner for Makeshift to help advertise the book. Looking up ‘animated gif’ in the Photoshop help files, I figured out how to do it in about 20 minutes. Here’s the result:

If anyone wants to place that banner up anywhere, feel free to snag it and point the link towards the main www.makeshiftmiracle.com page.

EDIT: Revised 18.5 kb version instead of the 88kb bloated sucker I had before. 🙂