Environmental issues in your backyard

After my recent trip to Chicago, I was reading up a bit more on the new Chicago Spire that is to be constructed in the near future in the vicinity of Navy Pier. There are actually two plots of land there, apparently; the other being old DuSable Park. Unfortunately quite a lot of land contamination was discovered at the park site, so - from my understanding - it seems that they switched the locations for the Spire and the park. Apparently a thick layer of concrete will protect from the radioactive substance that contaminates the soil, although I'm not so sure I'd want to buy a condominium built there nor let my kids play at the park next door.
In any case, this is a rather uninformed opinion, although I'm keen to look into it a bit more in my free time. Nonetheless, this did lead me to find an interesting collection of Chicago environmental issues from the Reader, which you can find here: http://www.chicagoreader.com/greenchicago/

Another site I frequent recently had a feature on various people's opinion on just what the heck we should actually do about global warming: HERE

Origami - Masu Box

Prepare a square piece of paper.
Then click the link and follow the instructions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masu_%28Japanese%29

Back from America

After being away for about a month, I'm now back in Japan. During that time, my company moved much closer to my apartment so we are downtown, near restaurants, banks and shops - instead of factories and a prison. The new location is closer for me (30 min door-to-door) but further for others. One co-worker opted to find a new job rather than make the 50 minute commute. Another coworker laughs that his commute is 10 minutes longer now, up to 1 hour 55 minutes now!

Last month was also my first overseas business trip with this company. I went to Thailand and worked for 20 days. While there, I started playing tennis with my coworkers on the weekends. I really came to enjoy tennis and even managed to play once in America a few weeks later. Now I'm hoping to find a place where I can get court time in Tokyo about once a week, if that's possible without breaking the bank.

Anyway, that's the little update for now.

p.s. despite the shorter commute, the above post was still written using my cellphone.

p.p.s. details on "bigger" news to come later.