"Arcs & Sparks", Jeeps, "Lost"

I've had my first bit of on-board excitement since I've been flying to Japan; about 20 min before we landed at Narita, an electrical box (not sure what it controls/does) under a seat in the next row, other side of the center section made a loud "pop", and some sparks came from it. I was the only one who thought to push the call buttton for the flight attendant, it didn't seem to be anything major (ie:safety affecting) and we landed at Narita OK.

We bought Noreen a Jeep yesterday - an Unlimited (long) with a hardtop. We wound up saving about $3500 on it, and we used part of the savings to get the extended warranty (7yr/75K mi). We're picking up the Jeep in Las Vegas, since the taxes will be much cheaper - we'll register the car in California after 6 months, since then it won't be considered "new" by the DMV. This is a finesse that they do all the time here. The Jeep won't be ready for pickup until mid-Jan, which is OK, since Noreen returns to the US on Dec 15-ish and I can ride my motorcycle, Noreen can have the Benz.

We drove to Aomori today; it's only about 75KM each way, but it takes damn near 2 hrs to get there - it's all 2 lane country roads, effectively, and the highest speed limit is 60kph. We putzed around Aomori for a while...and then on our drive back, we got a bit turned around. I'd figured out which way we needed to go from a map at the Aomori museum where we'd parked; but for some reason, we started second-guessing ourselves and thought we were going the wrong way on the main road we were on. So, we turned around, went back the other way; about 15 min of this, we'd realized we were totally screwed up. We stopped at a 7-11 knockoff, bought a map and got on our merry way coming back to Misawa.

Tomorrow we're off to Tokyo!