Then there’s the ofuro. An ofuro is basically a deep bathtub, and one that had me skeptical at first, but now I’m convinced every home and dorm should have one—with the possible exception of the one at MSU that already has hot tubs. Water’s expensive, so the basic idea is you wash yourself outside the tub and get all clean. Then you soak in the ofuro for as long as you can stand.

The ofuro at this house is kept at a tightly controlled 42 degrees C (108 F) by a fancy-looking digital thermostat, which has more buttons and a display showing little stem coming out of the ofuro or a little flame underneath when the heater’s preparing to scald the person inside. The ofuro is deep enough that I can sink in all the way to my neck; back when they kept it at 40 C I could almost fall asleep in it. But the water is kept covered to preserve the precious (and expensive) heat for the next person to use it, so changing the temperature isn’t really fair.

Of course, there’s the ever-present peril I’m sure we’ve all considered that you might be cold stepping out of such a hot tub dripping wet into the rest of the bathroom, so some homeowners even put heat lamps in their bathrooms to help air dry themselves before leaving.

Last Friday we took a trip to the Panasonic “museum”, which was more a showcase for their new products than a museum really. For someone with unlimited pockets, there’s so much cool stuff there. Huge flat plasma screens. Tiny SD card-based MP3 players the size of a pack of Nerds. DVD burners for any of four DVD formats. DVD audio and an “acoustically perfect” room where you can listen to music in surround sound. (How having music surround you could ever be more real than standing in front of someone playing a violin I’ll never know.) Tiny (albeit underpowered) notebook computers to put even my sexy new notebook to shame. Washers that can wash and dry a load in 45 minutes with bubbles instead of heat. Hard-drive-based carnav systems that can show you individual buildings around you in 3D, real-time traffic, the positions of your friends and family, and real-time video feeds (surely the device’s safest feature) from your friends’ cars. Lots of stuff to drool over and hope would someday soon drop out of the stratosphere so I could afford it.