Snow, Malt Vinegar & Kendo, Oh My!

Hello One and Everyone.

Sorry its been a while. Ive been busy shoveling. As you can clearly see we have snow and lots of it. I play in it sometimes. Sometimes it plays in me. Here's a picture of the garage next to mine. Everyone has a garage and I am no exception. Except, they arent really garages...more like big places to put stuff. Cars wont fit in them but bikes do, as well as huge card board boxes that I don't know what to do with except build a huge awesome fort. Which I may or may not have done already. As you can see the snow is like some frozen Adam, reaching his strechy fingers across the void of space to touch the powerful fingers of God, so rooted and strong. At least that's what I thought of, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, when I saw this. Is that weird? You'd think this thing would break under its own weight, like Tokyo or New York or the Internet. But nope. Its still there, still hanging on. Snow continues to fall and form amazing "fantasy Disney ride at the north pole" type of shapes and structures. You know what I mean. Everything looks like it was made for the set of the movie Elf, or perhaps this movie .

Another given when living in town is the blizzards. Like this one. The flash makes it look a lot worse than it actually is. Ahhh!!! Raging storm! Better take off my gloves and take a picture. The only time the snow really gets to me is when I get caught in a stupid white out and I cant even see my own hands in front of my face. I had to cross my street once in the middle of one of those. After waiting for about 3 or 4 minutes for it to "die down", I decided just to cross because I was almost home and I was freezing cold. I think I actually had ice on my face. I figured too that cars would probably be going slower than I was walking, so THEY should watch out for ME. Luckily I didn't have to test me dumb theory. After I got back inside I resolved not to do that again.

Speaking of being inside, I thought you might like to see a picture of my fireplace ooops I mean stove. Its quite nice and right now I am using to thaw meat. Its too cold to thaw anything anywhere else in the house, so I made it a little pillow and told it to sit quietly. It did its job quite nicely and I had an excellent dinner of meat. I think I might have eaten noodles too or something. Its hard to say. I get asked quite often if I make my own meals at home. When I respond with a hearty "Hai!" I get strange looks as people refuse to believe that I can cook anything. They are actually probably right, because often times my idea of "cooking" is pushing buttons on a device that emits light in a spectrum that I cant really see. Then the light causes some molecules to get all excited. When that happens its means its ok to eat whatever it was that went in. I then take it out of said machine and put it in my stomach. People have told me this means I am getting calories, nutriants and vitamins that are otherwise absent in things like pocky, which I regularly consume. I do however cook sometimes and in this case I made a yummy creation of meat, noodles, soy sauce, onions, gyoza and beer. The beer though I didn't mix together with everything else until after I drank it.







moving on....

Kendo has been going very very well. I tested for the rank of "ikyu" and passed my test, so I now have an ikyu rank. Ikyu is the rank right before "black-belt". In kendo you obviously don't wear belts. Actually you don't wear any sign of rank at all, which I really like. Everyone treats everyone the same: bash with bamboo weapon. Repeat. The picture below is my ikyu rank "shyojou" (certificate). Just yesterday I got a smaller certificate that said my rank was sanctioned with the Kendo Federation of Hokkaido, which is a prefectual chapter of the National Kendo Federation of Japan. So that's cools. The test itself was stressful, mostly because it was in a format of practice I had never done before. Always in practice and using the shorthand (or completely different) names for things. For example in class they might call for a "men" (head) strike whereas in the test its "oshyomennioitte" (head). In class they say "ashinipponoshiro" (two steps back) whereas in the test its "aiyumiashigopponsagatenioiite" (two steps back)....So yeah. That was ridiculously incomprehensible. I got told on Monday I was testing on Saturday. Luckily we had practice on Thursday and Friday, so I had ample time to get ready. Memorizing all the new Japanese though was difficult. I didn't want to mess up for the test.

On Saturday we all got changed. There was about 30 kendo students there for the test. The whole highschool team came to cheer us on, which was really cool. My sensei came around and wrote huge chalk numbers on our "tare" (lower-body armor) denoting our place in line. I got lucky 13. Yay. We then went up in groups of three in front of the judges. We did the strikes which one of the instructors called out in the order he chose. It wasn't really random but it might have well as been because I was paying attention so hard. After drilling we had one session of trading strikes with the full armor on and then two sessions of sparing. Everything was scored. I have no idea how I did, other than "not failing". I was really exhausted from my test as I am sure you can see I am about to fall over. However, standing up in front of my class, receiving my diploma was one of the greatest feelings of accomplishment I've ever had. I will never forget it.

And now, more pictures.

Karen and I at the end of a long ski day. She's the JET in Rumoi, the town an hour south of me. She rocks on the snowboard, and goes faster than I do most times.

Sunset at the mountain.

In Japan, Ski school is even more embarrassing.

We are up to our necks in snow. Ha ha, get it?
(poor little ororon!)

I wrote this poem using magnets that my mom and dad gave me for Christmas. I was contemplating the essence of humanity as well as pining after unrequited love. This is all I could come up with. I particularly like the adjective "saucy". This kit of magnets by the way is the Shakespeare version. Its not every day you see "Methinks".

Yummy!

We had a food eating contest for prizes. I am trying to swallow crackers. I was already trying as hard as I could. This was after I had drank a whole glass of malt vinegar, which was the single worst thing I have ever tasted. I drank the whole glass in one chug. They asked me later how I did that, and simply said "college". I don't think they got the joke though, and now I am sure everyone at my board of education office thinks I drank bottles of vinegar in college. The malt vinegar (malt!) went strait into my stomach and instantly caused pain and turmoil. As Ulysses of old was beset on either side of his craft by Scylla and Charybdis, so was my stomach in the midst of the maelstrom. The malt vinegar (malt I say!) was quickly rejected by my poising-phobic self and began to re-surface. I refused to vomit, which of course made it worse. The smell and taste of it invaded my senses until it was all but unbearable. I then ate everything I could see, to stifle the urge to die. Then I had to go eat crackers, and that's when that picture was taken.




And with that pleasant though, I retire.
Peace.