Yum!

Nozomi baked homemade butter rolls this afternoon. I ate one with some of the last quince (karin) jam that we made last fall. YUM!
(If anyone knows where we can pick some quince this year, please tell me!)

BIG moth at UICS family camp

The insects here definitely get MUCH bigger than they do in Oregon. Later in the day I saw a very large mantis too.
Actually, this isn't the biggest moth I've seen here; last year at one of the schools where I teach I saw one that might have been almost twice as big, but it was sitting on a window high in the wall, so the perspective made it hard to see exactly how big it was.

Nozomi, my cousin Elaine, and me at my uncle & aunt's house

We returned to our long tradition of taking a crazy "jumping shot picture" this year during our visit to America. Friends who have never seen any of the pictures from the past, if you really want to see others, let me know...

Pictures from my father's birthday party/family reunion

This post is mostly for my family to download pictures, but friends who want to see them are welcome to look!

Update: these pictures were originally posted as a gallery on my other blog, but this blog doesn't seem to have a way to make a gallery, so this is going to be a BIG post... you'll have to do a lot of scrolling...

Nozomi & I made pickles!

During our vacation in Oregon, I copied my mother's dill pickle recipe. The recipe came from her mother (or maybe even her grandmother; she's not sure). I remember eating these pickles on hamburgers when I was growing up, so I'm excited to see how they taste. We'll try them in a few weeks and see...

Roller skating!

Monday evening, my cousins, sister, aunt, and Nozomi & I all went to the roller skating rink together. I hadn't been skating inside since we all went together about five years ago. Very fun, and very nostalgic for us. It was Nozomi's first time on roller skates, but since she had ice skated several times before, she learned very fast and had no problems.

Friday we took an all-day trip to Crater Lake

Crater Lake is a very beautiful place, and all Oregonians, if you haven't visited yet, you should! The water is one of the most amazing colors of blue I have ever seen. We also stopped in the Cascade Mountains closer to Eugene on the way (that's the picture of me with the mountains in the background.)
It seems like this is the "animal tour"--we saw turkeys and a buzzard at my sister's house, a horse and a mule while we were walking, and a chipmunk took food out of Nozomi's hand while we were at Crater Lake.
Shortly before we left, some clouds moved in and made amazing shadows on the surface of the lake. The picture gives you an idea of what it looked like, but the light was much more interesting in person.
It was a busy day and a lot of driving, but it was worth it: a great trip!

Today was my father's 80th birthday party

We had a fantastic dinner and birthday party with family to celebrate my father's 80th birthday. My sister-in-law arranged to have surprise guests: two musicans playing bagpipes and Scottish drums (my father loves bagpipe music). A wonderful time!

My sister's chinchilla, and mule and WILD TURKEYS!

My sister's condominium is on the edge of town, up in the hills. As we were driving, we saw five wild turkeys crossing the street-it was the first time I'd ever seen turkeys in my life (other than cooked on a plate)-amazing!
She has two chinchillas, which are very interesting animals and fun to play with and feed.
Yesterday, on a walk near my parents' house, we saw a horse and a mule. I guess this is going to be the America animal tour!
More later...
P.S. Sorry-bad picture quality-the settings on the camera were wrong, but now they're back to normal.

here we go!

LightHouse Concert

We had a great time playing at a youth event this afternoon. The concert lasted about two hours, and the small (well, very small) concert hall (club) was very full. It was fun to be able to experiment with my keyboards a bit and just have fun making crazy sounds (noises?)...

We took Gale to Oya

Oya is a very interesting place with very characteristic and famous stone that is quarried there (Frank Lloyd Wright used it to build a famous hotel in Tokyo, but that's another story...) People that have read my blog for a while might remember I posted about it before-you can go into the enormous, underground quarry, which is quite amazing. The area above ground has some cool sights too.
Sometimes the literalness of the translations on some signs is kind of fun: "Unusual Shaped Stones Viewing Spot" struck me as an odd combination of words... Some of the unusual shapes were natural, and some of them were giant, carved art.
Gale is standing in front of the huge Kannon statue carved out of the hillside as a peace memorial. It was SO hot that day that we looked at it for a couple of minutes, took the picture and jumped back into the air-conditioned car. We went to the quarry after that; it's a constant, cool temperature all year, so it was a good way to end the trip.

Four o'clock at the temple in Nikko

I had never heard a temple bell ring so close-they are LOUD!!!

P.S. Update: this video is temporarily offline.

My friend Gale from my church in Oregon is visiting this weekend

Today Nozomi & I took her to Chuzenji Lake and the temple at Nikko. Very fun time! The next couple of days we'll see how many other sights we can see here around the area before she has to leave.

My newest KitKat discovery: cola & lemon soda combo pack!

They got a little bit melted (it's still rainy season here, which means hot and humid-we usually keep chocolate in the fridge during this season). The lemon one tasted pretty good-very similar to the taste of lemon soda. The cola one was, well, so-so. It tasted a lot like that fizzy cola candy we all used to eat when we were kids...

The little green frog has moved from the lettuce to the eggplant

I am amazed at how big the tomatoes, cucumbers and eggplant are getting. We only planted the garden about a month ago, but vegetables seem to grow faster here than in Oregon.

Very silly birthday card my cousin sent (thanks Elaine & Tim!)

Like Elaine wrote inside the card, "better late than never"-this card was definitely worth the wait-very funny! I laugh every time I open it... (and I'm happy that K.C. keeps getting little royalty payments for such a fun song, even from birthday cards)

P.S. Update: this video is offline, hopefully temporarily.

Happy anniversary to us! We went to "Apple Restaurant" for dinner-yummy tacos!

This is at a restaurant where Nozomi & I went a couple of times when we were dating, so we thought it would be fun to go back for our anniversary (and like I said, the tacos are great-better than anything I've found anywhere else in Japan, including in Tokyo!)

There's a frog in my lettuce!

This afternoon, I was looking in the garden boxes on our veranda (patio, deck, balcony...whichever word you prefer) and noticed the little green frog that I had seen a couple of days earlier was still there, and today he was sitting on a lettuce leaf. It's not surprising at all that there are a lot of frogs around here because there's a rice field RIGHT next to our apartment. What DOES surprise me is that this very small frog got all the way up to our second-floor apartment balcony and crawled over the tall plastic wall to get into our garden boxes. If he eats some of the ugly little caterpillars and bugs that killed my bok choy, he's welcome to stay.

More strange sodas

I thought the Pepsi was so-so, but Nozomi liked it. The label says there's no baobab flavor in it. Hmm...
The green cola was "green" as in "natural"-no artificial flavors or colors. It tasted like...generic cola.