logs

Context for the week: last days in Hawaii, the flight back on the 30th, and then straight into the move-out. The shape of the week is the handoff from planning the trip to physically dismantling a life in New York.

Day 22: Wednesday, July 29, 2026

  • Thin day on record: pay Lucky Field, work through more logistics. Second-to-last day in Hawaii.

Day 23: Thursday, July 30, 2026

  • Flight back from Hawaii. Wrote a long letter to myself to open at the end of the noncompete — about two thousand words, written on the plane.
  • Flights locked on the Japan side too: SFO→Tokyo on Aug 24, Tokyo→Sapporo on Aug 29. Four nights in Tokyo, then a buffer day in Sapporo before the first guided day.

Day 24: Friday, July 31, 2026

  • Landed back in NYC around midday. Eight days until the flight west, and the apartment has to be empty before it.
  • Booked Stuf for Aug 3 move-in.
  • Made the move-out real: leaving the LIC apartment, and everything goes into an NYC storage unit rather than getting shipped to my parents.
  • Killed the valet-storage idea, which had been the appealing one. My building wants a certificate of insurance from any moving company plus a reserved freight elevator, filed in advance, and there’s no lead time for that. So every box gets hand-carried to the storage unit by me.
  • Decided not to renew the California license before the trip. An international permit is a translation of one specific license and goes invalid the moment that license is renewed — and AAA only issues them inside the US, so it would be unfixable from Hokkaido.
  • Money plan for Japan: Wise for paying guides in yen, Schwab checking for rural cash.
  • Found out REI SoHo closed permanently on the 23rd. There’s no REI left in the metro area, so every pack try-on moves to the Bay Area.
  • Replied to Yoshi, Dylan and Kevin.

Day 25: Saturday, August 1, 2026

  • A correspondence day wedged into the middle of a move-out. Dylan came back into contact, and at this point he isn’t really a guide relationship — more someone who lives there.
  • He volunteered himemasu, landlocked sockeye, unprompted: peaks mid-September into October, males go humped and vivid red. Kussharo peaks around mid-October, which is exactly when my eastern block runs. It’s the first fish I’ve named as a personal goal instead of accepting a guide’s recommendation.
  • Shin’s block firmed up — free from Oct 8, offered to arrange lodging Oct 8–18. Asked him for seven or eight fishing days with rest woven between them.
  • Decided to skip Schwab. It’s a brokerage application rather than a bank one, the timing is tight against Aug 24, and the entire prize is $50–90 of ATM fees across three months.

Day 26: Sunday, August 2, 2026

No real AI record of this day. I probably ended up playing video games most of the day.

Day 27: Monday, August 3, 2026

  • Storage move-in day. Turned up at the unit with boxes and found somebody else’s belongings already in it. Support had no answer.
  • Backfilled noncompete logs 2 from memory — wrote the day 13 entry two weeks after the day it describes, which is its own small lesson.
  • I forget if this was the day, but I bought a new backpack after much research from this specialist backpack store. The backpack I got was the Aer Travel Pack 4, honestly I’m really excited.
  • Delivered the ceramic grill. Dinner with Tiff and Ellie.

Day 28: Tuesday, August 4, 2026

  • The frame of the move changed. California stops being a waypoint and becomes a real home base — somewhere I return to between trips and come back to from Japan in late October. That splits my belongings three ways instead of one, and turns the sort question from “is this worth storing” into “will I want this before September 2027?”
  • Storage still unresolved. Two phone calls went unanswered, so a support ticket got filed instead — phone was never the right channel for a company with no one at the building. Set a cutoff: a specific replacement unit number in writing by end of day, or book somewhere else Wednesday morning.

I ended up checking out the unit in the morning and found the stuff was cleared. Stuf staff convinced me that it was the manager that cleared it, so I began moving stuff in.