March 24 update

Good morning,

After the car was down from the parkade we headed to Kansai and spent the long weekend at JiJi and Baba's and Michan's house. The car was scratched up a bit and dented on the back bumper from shaking up against the car parked behind it. Probably about 500+ dollars damage that is not covered by insurance as it was caused by an earthquake.

Yuki was told to be at work on Tuesday so we headed back to Tokyo Monday night.

In terms of daily life in Tokyo things are still abnormal however one improvement is that Yuki has been able to get gasoline without waiting in line too much. Many food stuffs (rice, yogurt, milk, eggs, etc) are harder to find than usual and when you do find them there are limits on purchases (one liter of milk per person etc). Bottled water is now somewhat impossible to find as there has been a public announcement made that high levels of iodine are present in Tokyo tap water. We have a fair bit on hand and should be OK but it takes a while for the iodine to dissipate so who knows how long this will drag on (the reactor site is still emitting relatively high levels of radiation).

We will keep the gas tank at least half full so if we have to leave again we can.

I am technically on holidays but for the time being I too have been coming in to work just to try and get my daily life somewhat back to normal and to keep me from watching too much of the overly dramatic media reports of the situation.

Thanks for all of your concern.

I will update the blog if there are any major changes.