So this evening my wife and I stopped by the local (very large) supermarket to pick up some toilet paper and something for dinner tomorrow night. Turns out, we could get neither because almost everything was sold out. We did get a few snacks and some beer (of which there was plenty) but there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the way of staples and easy to make food. No potatoes. No rice. Few vegetables, few fruits. No meat. Few fish. Really the place was running out of just about everything.

I kind of thought that might be the case; on Friday evening just after the earthquake when I stopped by it looked like they were starting to run out of things. I don’t think they had seen any replenishment since then, and of course a lot of people were trying to stock up on stuff. I anticipate that pretty soon, in the next day or two, they will get deliveries of what they need to continue business, but it really strikes home that in a city of about 16 million people, without consistent and reliable transportation and supply chains, things can dry up very fast.

Also, the Japan Electric is announcing that they might have rolling blackouts in Tokyo starting tomorrow due to the shutdown of two nuclear power plants in the northeast. More than just a shutdown actually, one of the reactors went critical and there was a minor explosion and later intentional venting of mildly radioactive gasses. It sounds like it isn’t a very dangerous situation, but it certainly reduces capacity and it isn’t like Japan was rolling in capacity before this (although I haven’t had blackouts here, like I did a few times in New York.)

Anyway, I’ll be headed to work tomorrow where I expect to spend a lot of time cleaning up, and probably not much time getting quality work done – this situation is just so abnormal that I’m pretty sure the whole city is a bit on edge, and still trying to come to terms with things. Risa and I donated to the Red Cross, but there isn’t much we can do to help those in the North East, which is really in a horrific situation. Still, I’m a happy pessimist; I expect the worst and I’m very happy when things turn out to be not that bad. I mean the worst that we are facing is maybe a lack of tasty food (we’ve got canned and frozen stuff that we can last on for a while) and while we were facing a lack of toilet paper (visiting Alana while she was in Morocco taught me a few ways to deal with that situation, not that Risa is willing to accept them as viable alternatives) we were able to get a bunch from Risa’s family who had stocked up a while back. So things are looking pretty good from where I sit. In a chair that sometimes shakes, and makes me wonder whether it is an earthquake, or just me.

Lately it has just been me. Unlike Saturday, when it was earthquakes. 😉