Changing Times

It has been months since my last post, way back in New Zealand. We spent April back in the US - about half of it in Midland and half visiting relatives elsewhere in the US. May and June were spent in England and Scotland, and July was mostly in Colorado. We are now in Los Angeles for just a one-day layover before we fly to Japan to visit our son. He graduated with dual degrees in Japanese and Journalism and has been living and working in the Tokyo greater metropolitan area teaching English for the past three years. This is our first chance to visit him in Japan. It will be nice to have our own captive tour guide and translator -- I think of it as finally getting a return on our investment in his education!

As we prepare to visit yet another time zone, I realized that every time we change time zones we need to adjust the appropriate setting on 8 electronic devices. Paula and I each have an iPod. We share a laptop computer. I have a new Apple iPad now. We each have a digital camera, and we each have a digital watch. In order to keep the photographs, videos, and emails all correctly time-stamped we must adjust the time zone setting on each of these devices. The iPods, iPad, and laptop each have two different places to adjust, since the calendar application has it's own time zone specification to control how individual appointments or events are displayed. And that's not even counting our two cell phones, which mercifully fix their own time when they are in contact with a local cell tower!

I don't know how readily we will be able to access the Internet while we're in Japan, so don't hold your breath waiting for further blog posts.