So we made a quickie trip to Japan this past weekend. I met my… well, my wife’s biological mother, which I guess makes her my biological-mother-in-law. How lucky I am- I have TWO mothers-in-law! LOL

Considering that the one in Tokyo doesn’t speak any English, though, and I don’t speak any Korean or Japanese, it’s kind of like only having the one. And I actually AM pretty lucky because I like both of them- they’re both neat ladies who, of course, raised a wonderful gal that I got to marry.

I’ve got a couple of pictures- not a lot- and some reflections on visiting there. I’ll say this much for now- it’s certainly different than the US, as you might expect.

Seattle has been under a heck of a cold spell in the past several days. Check out this chart:

You can see that the highs (the red zig-zaggy line is the actual temp) for the past several days are actually lower than our average lows (the blue line) for this time of year.

Along with that, we got a major amount of snow over a few days. It was over a foot in much of the Puget Sound area, and I’d say that we had a total snowfall of about a foot in my neighborhood (Pioneer Square) which is quite unusual.

Seattle basically shuts down when we get any decent (more than, say, 2 or 3 inches) of snow. The schools are closed, the roads don’t get plowed nearly as quickly as other major cities, and it’s actually quite socially acceptable to simply not go to work for many (if not most) jobs in Seattle.

This is for a number of reasons. The city only has something like 20 or 30 snowplows. Seriously. Half a million people, but 27 plows. We’ve also got a ton of hills.

For example, G and I walked up to the county buildings last month to get our marriage license. We live on 1st Ave; the county courthouse sits between 3rd and 4th Avenues and across the street, between 4th and 5th, is the county admin building.

When you enter the King County Courthouse from 3rd Ave, you’re actually in a sub-basement. You walk in, there’s security, and then a bank of elevators. Walk past the elevators through the building, and you come to a tunnel that takes you underneath 4th Ave to the County Admin building.

You go up to the 4th floor to the licensing department (cars, marriage, pets, you name it). If you want to exit the building onto 5th Avenue… you don’t have to go down at all. The 4th floor is about a half-story above 5th; you just walk out of the little lobby area, go down seven or eight steps, and you exit onto 5th.

So basically, between 3rd and 5th Avenue, there’s 5 stories worth of hill.

And that’s not even the steepest street in downtown Seattle!

Here’s another example. The lowest elevation in Seattle is basically sea level- Puget Sound. The highest elevation in the city is over 500 feet, and that’s only a little over a mile away.

There are many streets that are around a 20% grade, and heaven only knows how many are over a 10% grade.

The point of all this is that in Seattle, we just don’t do snow well at all. Even the main arterials aren’t cleared of snow and ice for several days after a storm, unless the temperature rises significantly. So let that be a warning to you if you’re coming here to live or visit- if it snows, be ready for things to be veeerrrrryyy slow in Seattle for at least a couple, if not several, days afterwards.

Oh, from a Seattle Times story, something that makes it worse:

To hear the city’s spin, Seattle’s road crews are making “great progress” in clearing the ice-caked streets.

But it turns out “plowed streets” in Seattle actually means “snow-packed,” as in there’s snow and ice left on major arterials by design.

“We’re trying to create a hard-packed surface,” said Alex Wiggins, chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Transportation. “It doesn’t look like anything you’d find in Chicago or New York.”

The city’s approach means crews clear the roads enough for all-wheel and four-wheel-drive vehicles, or those with front-wheel drive cars as long as they are using chains, Wiggins said.

The icy streets are the result of Seattle’s refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.

“If we were using salt, you’d see patches of bare road because salt is very effective,” Wiggins said. “We decided not to utilize salt because it’s not a healthy addition to Puget Sound.”

When I said we don’t do snow… I wasn’t kidding. We really truly don’t do snow well here at ALL.

Now, I don’t know if this is good or bad. On the one hand, it costs millions of dollars in losses to businesses, but on the other hand there’s something a little bit charming about a city that seems to have collectively decided “when it snows, we’re all little kids again- snow day for everyone!”

I guess in the end, if we’re going to move on and become a real “big city”, we are going to have to change how we think and how we act in terms of the snow days.

But we’re having a good time with snowball fights and lots of sledding (remember all those hills!) in the meantime!

So I was thinking about this… a month ago.

It’s been four years since I was exposed to (and wound up joining up with) the Soka Gakkai International, my Buddhist group.

I got into Buddhism kind of at the suggestion of someone else. There’s a counselor I see… well, pretty rarely now- it’s been at least a couple of years. I started going to Lory Misel (an excellent counselor, by the way, for anyone in the Seattle/Tacoma area) back after my girlfriend died in a car accident.

That episode naturally kicked off a pretty monster bout of dealing with grief, and also kicked me down into depression, but between Lory’s counseling, some drugs, and exercise (which has been shown to be fairly effective) I wound up coming out of the haze. I still occasionally go to a session with Lory- like once every year or two or three- just for a little mental health checkup. (Hey, we do annual physicals with the regular doctor- why not with our state of mind?)

Anyway, Lory told me that he thought Buddhism might be a good fit for me. (Lory’s very open to whatever spiritual approach works for people; he grew up Catholic/Mormon himself and counsels everyone and anyone from atheists to Catholic priests.) I called up a gal that I’d gone on about three or four dates with, my friend Rumi, and asked her… since she was literally the only Buddhist that I knew!

I met Rumi and a couple of great guys- David and Takashi and Ashish- up at the SGI’s culture center by the Sea-Tac airport on Election Day, 2004. Of course we chatted about the election; they’d noticed my Kerry/Edwards sticker on the car.

So now I have a built-in anniversary of reminding me the first time I heard the phrase “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo”, which we chant as our primary method of worship/meditation. (It’s not exactly “worship”, since we don’t worship an outside entity and ask it/God/whatever for salvation… but that gets into a bigger discussion than I want to have right now.)

I was reminded of this on Election Day 2008. It’s been four years and while I’m not as strong with my faith as I’d like to be, it’s still a moderately big part of my life. GG and I got married by a friend who’s a leader in the SGI, and we did the “formal” paperwork in the culture center the afternoon before our big party.

As it turns out, in the state of Washington, pretty much anyone can marry anyone else. Officially, you’re supposed to be married by someone who is authorized by your religious organization… but the state and county doesn’t actually DO anything or license anyone to perform marriages. They don’t check on who signs the certificate as the officiant; basically, if you say you’re starting your own church or religion or whatever and that you’re authorizing yourself to perform marriages, you can go out and perform marriages.

The SGI is a lay organization. We don’t have priests, so it’s not like it’s traditionally someone’s job to do them. Only a few people actually even get paid by the SGI; folks (like my friend Zoye, who did the marriage) who have leadership positions volunteer for them.

What the SGI does is say that to do a marriage “on behalf” of the SGI, you have to be at a certain position in the organization or higher. The smallest unit of organization is the group, then the district, then the chapter. Zoye is a chapter leader (I think- I don’t always keep up with who’s doing what job) but you gotta be at least whatever is the next notch up in the food chain to do a marriage, so she called Eric and he did it for us.

It’s one thing that I’ve noticed in the time I’ve been in SGI- we don’t really do marriages, and I think we should. It’s because the Japanese version is more culturally based than religious based, so there’s not really a standard “ceremony” that an SGI leader or person would do for a marriage.

Anyway, it’s been four years of Buddhism for me, no signs of it really going away permanently, and I’m happy about that. I never (prior to this) imagined this being a part of my life, but over the years I found that it just FITS.

As I’ve said here before, while I love and believe in this religious/spiritual choice and think it’d fit everyone, I think the most important thing for everyone is that they find their OWN accomodation and form of religious/spiritual belief (or non-belief, if that’s what works) and be as happy as possible that way. I’d much rather my friends be happy Christians than try and force them into Buddhism!

And I think it’s a damn shame that more people don’t see it that way. After all, a large part of the problems in the world today stem from religious fanaticism- primarily among the radical Muslim part of the world, but there’s other problems with other religions as well.

After four years, I realize that I’ve only barely scraped the surface of what I have to learn about Buddhism (and life in general!) and look forward to continuing on with this journey.

Factoid: your height above sea level is “altitude” if you are in the air, and “elevation” if you are on the ground.

But it’s still called “altitude sickness” if you are feeling the effects. Go figure.

I am just finishing up several days in Colorado, at the ski resort of Copper Mountain. Copper’s base elevation is over 9,200 feet high, which means it usually open early in the season, but for folks like me who live at sea level, the lack of oxygen can be brutal.

The problem, though, isn’t exactly that the air here has less oxygen… well here’s the deal. The air has the same percentage of oxygen as at sea level, but in a given volume, there are fewer molecules. This leads to less pressure, so it is harder for the oxygen to go through the membranes of your lungs, and as a result you feel like shit. Basically.

We flew in to DEN on Monday and got a shuttle van ride up here. Along the way we went through the Eisenhower Tunnel, which is like 11,000 feet up in the Rockies. I was actually short of breath just sitting in the van!

By Monday at dinner time, both G and I had killer headaches. Fortunately that was the extent of our symptoms; people have been known to actually die from pulmonary edema here. We slept poorly bit by Tuesday morning at class time we were feeling better, mostly normal, so we were able to ski.

Today it is time to leave. By now we are almost completely adjusted to the lower air pressure- just in time to go home!

Interesting tidbit- we saw ski race teams from Canada and Japan training here this week.

Time to get ready for the van ride…