Because it is dangerous you may not enter

There are dangers

We're back in Japan after another two-week, four-state, five-bed tour. We were mostly lucky with the weather while we were there. Maryland was bizarrely balmy and New York, while ear-bitingly cold, was not covered in thick ice and slush this time. We left dogged by storms, though. The six-a.m. road to the airport had already had a few inches of sleet plowed off it. The freezing rain didn't stop us from taking off, but thunderstorms in Atlanta sent us into a holding pattern and finally to a refueling stop in Columbus, Georgia. After waiting in line and then on the phone and then in line again for a few hours, we slipped out between thunderstorms on a flight to LA with reports of tornadoes behind us. Jim's dad picked us up at John Wayne International and took us out for fish tacos and fries. We paused for a digital refueling in a Starbucks parking lot, sipping a little free WiFi to send emails explaining our half-day delay, and then he dropped us off for a midnight flight out of LAX. From LA it was smooth sailing. Behind us, though, we again left a trail of rain, as the City of Angels was soon hit with unusual downpours. We arrived at five a.m. to clear skies in Tokyo. By afternoon it was raining, and that night the city got a few record-breaking inches of snow and commute-ruining ice. Frozen sidewalks and streets are no joke. There were almost three thousand car accidents and hundreds of people went to the hospital with injuries. On my walk to work, I saw a few old men scraping the sidewalk with coal shovels. Friends reported shop owners pouring hot water over the ice to melt it. Er. I didn't see any salt or sand. The picture above is my favorite strategy for keeping people from slipping: roping off the dangerous area and putting up a wonderfully generic danger sign.