Archive for December 2010

home!


Merry Christmas from Oakland! We are home, too briefly, having left Japan on Japan's Christmas afternoon to arrive on San Francisco's Christmas morning, which meant a great portion of our 39 hour long Christmas was actually spent with my family! 

Real blog posts to come, about fake tattoos and all the food we're eating, but in the meantime, rather than writing anything new, I have figured out how to add my old blog entries from the previous blog to this one, so that you can find all (well, most) of my photos, incoherence and abuse of the word 'awesome' in a single convenient place! Because the formatting is slightly different, I'm doing it entry by entry, and because I have the attention span of a goldfish, they are not, sadly, being added in chronological order (though they will appear as such, once they're added). But for now, at least, you can read my favorite blog entry, about the vastly underrated Segovia Witchcraft Museum, as well as pretty much everything else I wrote during my Fall 2007 backpacking trip, which was when this whole blogging thing started. You can also see Iain's first (uncredited) appearance in this blog, as one of the shadowy motorbike drivers in the second to last photo of this post.

dad in numazu! (not a real post)


above: my dad objected to the peace signs at first, but, when in asia...

A very brief hello from insanely busy Numazu, where - in the midst of our end of the year reports and Christmas shopping and leaving-the-country travel plans - my dad dropped by for a 48 hour visit! Even Mt. Fuji decided to show its face to mark the occasion. Anyway, more photos to come later...

haqqr year or ther abbit


Last weekend, Yuka came over and we started a new years card assembly line of rubber stamps, glitter and craft tape. New Years postcards are huge here, and I like that they're for the new year, rather than for any particular religious holiday; while I probably won't make 75 personalized cards, as I did last year for my Westgate students - I did want to make some for friends and family back home. 


Fortunately, Yuka is very craft-y, and so brought along an amazing array of stamps and ink, amongst which was a very cool alphabet thing that allowed you to make your own personalized stamp by placing teeny tiny little magnetized letters on a bigger stamp. As I'm not sure how well-aquainted everyone back home is with the eastern astrological signs, I wanted to make something to clarify why all my cards are peppered with bunnies. (Though, anyone who knew me back when Sophy the bunny was terrorizing my family probably wouldn't have been too surprised to get a bunny card from me anyway.) As you can see, mastering the alphabet stamps took some work: 


Anyway, I plan to send cards out in the next few days or so! If you want one, just drop me a line :-) 

too pretty to eat


One of my students brought these back from Kyoto the other week. I kept trying not to eat them till I could take a photo to preserve their prettiness, but as you can see, I wasn't totally successful... 

lucky monkey


Just on the off-chance that any of you were following the saga of the Attack Monkey as closely as Iain and I were: the contest is over, and a name has been announced! Alas, neither Mikka Junior nor my personal favorite front-runner, Kami-chan ("Bitey") won the day*, but in any case, meet Lucky! And so closes the saga of Lucky the Attack Monkey of Mishima and Susono. At least until Lucky goes all Jurassic Park on us and learns how to open doors...

* I may be suffering from ESL-teaching induced idiomatic amnesia (that's like, a thing, right? Other former-and-current ESL teachers, did this happen to you too? Where after a day of teaching you just start to forget English?) but Iain swears this is a phrase for victory, though he can only quote Independence Day as proof**, which to me casts some seriously doubt on the validity of such a phrase.

** Actually, to be specific, he quoted the entire speech in Bill Pullman's voice; and he wants me to tell you that fireworks went off in the background when this happened. 

Powered by Blogger.
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...