Napping while it is raining outside with the windows open is the best.  I caught up on sleep after school yesterday and then went to my shodou class.  Practiced gyousho,  of the three styles ranging from block style to undeadable cursive, gyoshou falls in the middle.  Not so bad I gambaremashita.

Then did some gambareing at Roman City playing Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2.  Currently trying to make an unshaded card on a single palyer machine.  It is my third attempt.  Played about 15 different levels between 4 different cards.  One play is 100 yen. 

Showed my san-nen sei the first half of Ferris Bueller's Day Off.   They seemed to have liked it.  I enjoyed it, a nice summer kind of movie to show on a summer day.  Also showed them my world tour using Google Earth.  I used it to help give them movie a little placement before I showed it to them. I also showed them my house and schools in my area of Chicagoland, Glencoe and Winnetka.

Stayed up late last night.  Shouldn't have, I am dragging pretty hard right now.  Thought I'd be a zombie after lunch, but am pulling through.  Played in the 'Bichi Ba-re' dai-kai today after lunch on the sensei team. It was a little tournament set-up to celebrate the end of 1st-term finals. Not much to 'beach volley', just volleyball but with a big inflatable ball.  My team advancced once but lost 12-14 against team E or something.  I wanted to win, I really did, it is probably a feeling that carried over from the Ultimate tournament this past weekend.   Next time.
    Went to sleep a 4am.  Watched the shuttle Discovery launch live at 3:38am this morning. A nice flawless launch.  The camera on the liquid fuel tank is pretty clutch.  Seeing the different colored plasma around the shuttle was pretty cool.  
   Watched a shuttle launch from Florida via CNN in Miyama on my mountain. 
    Today is a great day to be sleeping.  It's been raining all day.  The nice part about it is that there is thunder and occasionally lightening.   It is pretty rare to hear or see 'kaminari' in these parts.  And then my umbrella just happen to breakapart into to pieces.  $3 piece of shit. 
     

Here is a link to some more recent pictures  that I have uploaded.  I will make this a repository fro all my pictures soon.

http://toyarchive.com/Mac/Japan/

Bunkasai 2005

Last years bunkasai at Hidaka High School. Each class and kumi does something for the festival. 
     A couple different kumis made these banners, which must have taken a long time.



The one on the left of Doraemon is made from Asahi beer cans.  I'm not sure what the one of Vader is made of.

Not feeling so patriotic right now.  Not feeling the 4th for some reason.  Maybe I'll fire off a few mortars tonight in the shougakko's undou-jo....

Found the nuclear missle launch site in North Korea using Google Earth. 

1st term finals are being held today here at Miyama-chuu.  No classes. A half-day. No fucking kyuu-shoku, so here I am eating some kitsune 'don-ba' udon.  It's a half day and the kids are already gone and are probably out fishing or swimming in the river instead of studying for tomorrow's set of tests.  

I was a Shrivelled Ume over this past weekend.  Wakayama ken sent two teams to compete in the Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Tajima, Hyogo-ken.   The other team were the Juicy Mikans.  We played hard and I left with some scraps.  Brad, who was a Juicy Mikan left with a broken collar bone.  We played at Tajima Dome's ginormous grassy field.  A grassy field is pretty rare in Japan, especially one of that size. Other teams came from all over Japan, Tokyo, Osaka, Yamaguchi, Fukui, Ehime, and  so on.  Stayed at a campgroud and camped in my big old blue tent that I bought from Conan.  It rained a throughout the whole weekend, but too hard when we had to play.  
   On the way I up to Hyogo I drove to Kouya-san to pick up David.  Me, David and Eric decided to try to the Double Tamago sandwich at McDonalds and had a disasterous time ordering at the drive-thru.  We also decided to take the scenic route there and took the Wangan in Osaka through to Kobe and almost all the over to Himeji before cataching the Sanya going norht and feeding into the Bantan.  Instead of the going to the yaki-niku party at the lodge near the camp site, I headed up to Kinosaki with Hikaru not to eat kani, but to have some Tajima gyuu.  Couldn't find a place that served that beef, so we ended up having so facy yaki-niku.  That was after we had gone to one of the nicest onsens I have ever been to.  This onsen even had a 'penguin sauna' where the tempreture was a mere 5 degrees celcius.    Am still tired from the weekend and nursing my scraps and a burn on my finger from trying to launch 10 bottle rockets at once in the parking lot. 
   Yesterday was nice though.  Shougakko Monday, went to Kasamatsu-shou and taught some English and went swimming with the students in the pool for an hour.  

Looking for the missle luach site in North Korea using Google Earth.  Found an article in today's Yomiuri that says where the lauch site is.  Needless to say, I cannot find it.