• Your Ad Here?

    To try to justify the amount of time I spend writing here and to help fund future adventures, I’m going to put some ads up here. My first preference is to have ads from readers, but I guess I’ll get Google ads if I don’t get enough interest. The ads will be 125×125 and will…

  • I Guess I’m a Writer

    In a plane, one of my favorite places to be, I filled in the form on the tray table. If I designed customs forms, I would make them with a crease in the middle so that they could easily fit into a pocket. As is it’s a bit of a predicament. I don’t want to…

  • Yakushima Island Part II

    Yakushima Island Part II

    When you’re in a foreign country, you don’t question signs as much as you might have if you were at home. You’re just so happy to see a sign that makes sense, that you follow it. I don’t know if there was anything that should have made us second guess our course, but if there…

  • Golf Darts

    Our dorm building had a square footprint. In the very middle were three elevators serving the dorm rooms which were all positioned along the edges of the building. In between the elevators and the rooms was a square hallway that ran in a loop. This was to be our arena for Golf Darts, a sport…

  • Survey Results

    Wow. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I got a ton of awesome feedback from you guys. Some people literally wrote a page or two. So first of all… thanks a ton. I read every single reply (over one hundred total) and got a ton of good info. I’ll share some of the…

  • Yakushima Island Part I

    Yakushima Island Part I

    I’ve always hated anime. I never really gave it much of a chance as it combined two things that I didn’t care for: cartoons and words I couldn’t understand. One night I was at my friend Charlie’s house, hanging out in the living room. Someone in his family put on Hayao Miyazaki’s anime mastepiece, “Spirited…

  • A Cute True Story

    More than fifty years ago, my mother’s father went to a dance. Back then that was how you met people. The room was divided into two sides. The guys were standing near one wall, and the girls were at the other. In the middle were a few couples dancing, but more prominent was the wide…

  • Survey Says

    It’s about that time of the year for me to ask for your feedback to make BTYB even more better than it already is. What’s very curious to me is that my readership grows VERY slowly. Given how awesome these posts are, I would expect it to grow by 100% every hour or so. Anyway,…

  • How To Pack Everything You Own in a 28L Bag

    People keep asking for it and I keep meaning to do it, but then we always seem to be in a rush before leaving a country and we don’t have time to video me packing my bag. Japan was a little different, so we finally got it done. Unfortunately Todd’s real video camera is broken…

  • Why Don’t You Do It?

    This is something I’ve been wondering about recently, and I’m very interested in people’s (in depth?) responses. I have a billion things to work on, and a billion things that other people do better than me, so this isn’t meant to be a “look how great I am” post (like every other post on this…