On the advice of my anime teacher, I rushed to the library after class before anyone else could get there and checked out all of the Nausicaa manga. And it is not even close to the same as the movie. For one thing, Miyazaki-sama didn't finish writing the manga for at least another ten years after the movie was released, so the ending had to be constructed hastily and remains one of his biggest regrets. Also, in 1984 he had no idea what direction the story would take, so the whole production was kinda cut-and-paste. The real story definitely shows his background as someone from a family that built WWII fighter planes, and I get the feeling that much of Kazan, my first and still favorite manga, derived most of its inspiration from Nausicaa. Reading it is more like a study than just enjoyment.
Tonight I went for a walk that wound up taking almost two hours. It wasn't that I got lost and incapable of finding my way back, I just had no clue how to get from the house to the supermarket I wanted to get to. Since Japanese roads existed all over before the idea came around to base them on a grid system, the old roads were just paved over, and so getting from one place to another is largely a matter of patience, and hopefully a car as well.

Observations:
Whoever said that the Japanese are small must have been a math major, because that is just a statistic. The U.S. just happens to have a higher tall-to-average ratio then Japan. Sure, I've seen short old ladies, but the majority of Japanese seem to be slightly taller than our average. And the guys on the baseball team tower over me; they're taller that the monster football players my high school had!
Light-up shoes are a thing of the past. Introducing the new Noise-maker Shoe! Squeaks when you walk! Squeaks when you step on them! And 100% guaranteed usable by the family dog once they get worn out! (now for sale with the oh-so-popular Skirt that Plays Music When You Move in It :)