My favorite things

grasshoppers

2006-08-17T04:42:00.000-07:00

It's 8:00 p.m. now. Although during the day time is really hot here in Fukushima, luckily enough, we have cool air in the mornings and evenings almost every day.

Now I can hear grasshoppers are chirping outside. These sounds make me cooler, and feel Autumn is approaching. I am not sure they are grasshoppers or there is another name you can call it, but in Japanese, we call them "キリギリス科ウマオイ". They sing like "すいーっちょん".

blueberry-picking

2006-08-11T17:36:00.000-07:00

I wrote this writing about two weeks ago, on July 30th, and applied it to The Linguist writing assignment. Here is after the correction by my tutor.

My mom, my husband and I went to a blueberry farm this morning. The farm opens at 6:00AM every day, from early July until the middle of August. When we arrived there at 7:10AM, after a 30 minute drive, we heard cheerful voices here and there from blueberry bushes. While you are there, you can eat blueberries as much as you like, with no time limit. If you bring berries back home, they charge you 1100 yen per kilogram. Three of us picked 2.3 kg of berries in total, and paid 2500 yen, and probably we ate about the same amount while we were there.

robust cicadas

2006-08-04T04:30:00.000-07:00

The rainy season was finally over the end of the last week, or early in this week here in Fukushima.
It's getting really hot last couple of days. Today, we probably had over 35 celcius degrees. I can here robust cicadas (Oncotympana maculaticollis) are chirping, and those sounds make me feel so hot.

sounds of evening cicadas

2006-07-16T02:46:00.000-07:00

It's 6:40pm now. I have listing beautiful chirping of evening cicadas from the backyard. I love these sounds very much.

in the middle of June gloom

2006-06-23T14:55:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since the last time I posted here.
Meanwhile, the rainy season has began here in Fukushima, and we've been having muggy days past a couple of weeks.

Instead of gloomy weather however, I can see very beautiful blue sky outside this morning. I took a picture from the window in my room. Birds are singing; most of them are long-tailed cocks, starling, and sparrows. Air is crispy clear and cool. What a wonderful day!

I woke up before 4 am!! lol (I went to bed early last night, because of migraine.) It's already at dawn, so I could read a book, 'Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban' until 5 am, and I got up 6 after one extra hour sleep.

I love early summer, and summer morning especially. After 7 or so every morning, commuting hour starts. Because of our house locates by the road, it's getting noisy, which is annoying. So the best time I can enjoy the beautiful morning, is about 5 am to 7.

beading... one of my hobbies

2006-05-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

To Leena,
Here're some of my bead works. A neckless and a pair of earrings.

'Beading' is making accessories using beads. 'Bead' refers to one of a set of small, usually round, pieces of glass, wood, plastic etc., that you can put on a string and wear as jewelry.

Since last March, I haven't made any beading stuff.
Hm, I still have three more days off (yay!), maybe I'll make something until next Monday.

Wonderful springtime

2006-05-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

We took this picture last week, on Apr 22th.

Though, we still enjoy seeing cherry blossoms here and there.

So lovely and gorgeous color of trees. We took this picture on the way to Miharu-machi on May 1st.

My husband took this picture just yesterday, when he came back from skiing at Deco ski resort.

Skiing in Yamagata

2006-05-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

Today is May 5th, it's the middle (or almost the end??) of my 9 days holiday from Apr 29th. During this holiday, I went skiing twice at Mt.Tengendai in Yamagata prefecture. Yamagata is the upper left next to Fukushima where I live on a map.
Here's a picture we took on Apr 29th.

There's still plenty of snow on the mountain. This is another pic on May 3rd.

Mt.Adatara and cherry blossoms

2006-04-29T20:41:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted a last contribution (I don't know this word is correct or not in this case). I haven't written anything for a quite long time here. It's been almost five month, actually. Um, time really flies.

Here in Fukushima, Japan we are having a wonderful Spring time. You can enjoy beautiful cherry blossoms here and there.
This is a picture I took last week. Mt.Adatara with full blooming cherry trees.

Englishtown

2005-11-25T21:00:00.000-08:00

It's sunny day today.
I took an English lesson at ET from 10:00am A topic was about "after job interview." I know it is difficult to proveide good topics for everyone but for me business relating subject is one of the dull topics to talk about.
A teacher wasn't good too, unfortunately. I took his lesson at a same time last Saturday, so I knew his lesson style
doesn't get along with me, I should have avoid Mr.B in Bali...

One of my favorite things these days is voice chatting at ET. They offers vc for school members but since the day before yesterday, I can't find vc on the front page of ET. They delited a link from their front page without any noticeｓ for the members. It's not fair. They have to inform before there system has rearanged. What do you think?

Tomatoes / talking over the phone with A-san

2005-08-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

Today is a last day of my 10 days Summer holiday.
In the morning, I picked a lot of tomatoes from a back garden.

And then peeled them in hot water.

Packed them into plastic bags to keep them into a freezer.

Around 5:00pm, I made an international call to one of my friends A-san in Belgium. Her voice was cheerful and sounded really fine, and we talked about 30min over the phone.
Thank you very much for progress of technology, even it's an international call, it wasn't so expensive about 20yen per one minute on IP phone.

hot and humid

2005-08-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

It's so hot and humid, here in Fukushima. Now it's 9:00pm but still muggy.
During day time, we had 36.7 degrees centigrade...
From tomorrow until August 15, I have 10days off. Even I have a pretty long day off, I'm not happy because of this weather.

beer restaurant

2005-07-15T18:34:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, after taking English lesson, some of my friends and I went to Asahi Beer Garden (beer restaurant).
It took about 20min drive there from a place I took English lesson.
I live in near the restaurant, it took about 5min drive from my house there. So I went back home alone, and I left my car and my spouse brought me by his car there.
Except me, seven of them went together by car, so unfortunately two of them, N-san and J-chan had to be DDs.
DD means designated driver for short.

In Asahi Beer Garden, we can chose variety of BBQs or shabu shabus and needless to say beers.
Our table had two gas cookers, so four of us chose all you can eat style shabu shabu and left four members chose BBQ.
. I was at BBQ side, even though I wanted to eat shabu shabu. Because if one of us chose shabu shabu, all of us had to have shabu shabu, so did BBQ.
Each dishes were different price, so we couldn't switch our foods with other one. Maybe next time, I'll have shabu shabu there.
We ate a lot , drunk a lot, talk a lot. We had a wonderful time there.

hennaed hair

2005-07-08T20:44:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things is coloring my hair by henna.
I have some spare time this morning, so I was going to dye my hair but unfotunatelly there's no stock of henna powder. Ugh, that's too bad. I really wanted to do that today.

Even though I can't dye my hair today, I have to prepare henna for using the next time, so I've orderd some henna(1kg, precisely) at Arnan アーナン right away.
I've used some other henna products from other makers but Arnan's is the best. It's really good quality. My hair becomes shine and very beautiful reddish brown, after I colored it by Arnan's henna. I also like smell of their henna, it's like hay or dried herb.

There's only one bad thing that Arnan doesn't have real shops, they only have a net shop. So I can't get their products from anywere at any time.
Net shopping is very convenience but if I really need what I want right now, then it's a bit pain to wait for a few days arriving.

conversation

2005-06-26T16:56:00.000-07:00

Some of my friends and I went to an Asian restaurant in the neighbor town yesterday. The atmosphire of there was like mixed with Thailand and Indnesia tastes. Well, I've never been both countries, so I'm not sure the shop is truly created those feelings though.
The restaurant has lunch hour during 11:00 to 2:00 every day including Saturday and Sunday. There're two choices for lunch, curry (680yen) or nasi goreng (which is Indonatian fried rice: 580yen) with soft drink both.
JW and I orderded chicken currey and K, S, J took nasi goreng. We enjoyed foods very much.

JW and J are American and came to Japan just recently and both can't use any Japanese so far. And left of three of us are not so good English speakers as well. So sometimes we couldn't find something in common to talk about and there there're blank...while we spent time together, unfortunately.
If all of us or any of us were interested something each others, I think we could had lively conversation even we couldn't speak languages well enough.
Hmm, that's just the way of it...

Oh no! The spell check system has disapper on Blogger??? That was very usuful function to me.

Nakatsugawa ravine

2005-05-27T20:24:00.000-07:00

Here is Nakatsugawa ravine in Ura-Bandai, Fukushima.
It's a beautiful piece of scenery. I like seeing this view from an observatory on a small hill near the ravine.

Mystery Net.com

2005-05-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

Mystery Net.com: Online mysteries, mystery games, mystery books

I love mystery books.
Usually, I read a book a week, written in Japanese. Sometimes I try to read books in English, but it's a bit hard for me and taking a lots of time to finish a book.
Since last fall, I've reading The Da Vinci Code... which I haven't finished reading yet. Meanwhile, I read so many Japanese mystery books though.

While I was exploring the net today, I found an interesting page for mystery fans. They have some 2-5 minute mini-mysteries
, I can enjoy with. They also have some short stories, and most of all seem free. That's great! I should have bookmark this webpage. :->

text chat over Skype

2005-05-04T21:57:00.000-07:00

I installed Skype into my PC for a while ago but haven't used it until yesterday. So yesterday I started Skype up and showed "Skype Me" mode and waited somebody gave me a message... but after awhile no one did.
So, I showed I'm "female" on my profile, then soon, I got messages and callings one after another, even though I selected showing "I was born in 1960," means I'm 45 years old, which is not my true age, still I got a lots of messages from guys. It was so funny.

It was my first day to used Skype, so I wanted to chose my company, someone who showed their pictures and where they live in. I finally did having text chat with a person from Ontario for about 10 minutes. It was interesting experience to me that I could communicate with someone from far from here and I've never met.

While later when he said good night and left from the net, I made mistake to chose another guy from India who didn't show his picture and where he lives, I just made mistakenly clicked 'okay' from his contact message. He just wrote "hi" "ohh" "hello?" and then asked me "how old am I?" I thought it was a bit rude asking my age, he even didn't show any information on his profile. Anyway, we didn't have any mutual topics, so I sent message "it was difficult to keep chatting because we don't have common topics" and then we ended up our short conversation.

It was pretty interesting experience to me. I don't have confidence to use a mic yet, but I'll try to voice chat sometime soon.

test frm cell

2005-03-18T14:33:00.000-08:00

こんにちは！

Minero, again

2005-03-04T21:47:00.000-08:00

Minero on March 5

We have had a lot of snow falling whole day yesterday here in Fukushima since the night before yesterday. So my husband and I decided to stay home.In this morning, we still had a bit snow falling but not much, so we left home around 7:30am headed to Minero again. We arrived there at 8:15, and while my spouse enjoy skiing, I just stayed at a lodge (we call it a rest-house in Japan) at the base of the mountain.

Minero ski area is facing to south, and at the foot of this mountain, there's Lake Inawashiro. When it's a fine weather and getting warm, snow become watery heavy snow in this time of the year.

Aka

2005-03-03T20:44:00.000-08:00

Posted by: chubby

Aka
test post frm my keitai(mobile phone) via Buzznet

Inawashiro Minero ski area

2005-03-01T21:06:00.000-08:00

Minero Ski Resort

I went to Inawashiro Minero, a ski area where's located near Lake Inawashiro. You can see a beautiful scnery from the mountain, a huge lake surrounded by mountains and rice paddies.
It was my sixteen times skiing on this winter, twenty ninth to my spouse.

Because of my laziness...

2005-01-17T05:47:00.000-08:00

Keep a diary in English is a little bit pain, because of my laziness and my poor English.
I wonder what should I write here today. Umm...??
Yesterday and the day before yesterday, we had a lots of snow here in Fukushima. On Saturday, I went skiing to Inawashiro Minero (oh, I've already wrote it, haven't I?) but yesterday was too much snow we had, so I stayed at home all day.

Inawashiro Minero

2005-01-15T05:26:00.000-08:00

I haven't been here for more than 10 days! Wow, time really flies.
Today, I went skiing to Inawashiro Minero ski resort with my spouse. There wasn't many people there.
I think not so many people there is pretty nice, I can ski freely and enjoy long turn without crows. But on the other hand, I'm worry if the place going to close down because of financial difficulties.

only one day

2005-01-03T03:46:00.000-08:00

There's only one day, my left of osyogatsu holiday. Oh no. I don't want to go back to work. Aw... sigh.

Mom's birthday

2005-01-02T04:15:00.000-08:00

It was nice weather today, but I stayed at home until around 4:00pm. My spouse and I went to my mom's home and had supper. Today is my mom's birthday, but sorry for her, she's caught a cold...
If my memory is correct, she had a cold last year around her birthday. sob sob.
She lives alone very frugally. She is my only parent and dearest person, I really would like to take care of her.

Happy New Year 2005!

2004-12-31T18:00:00.000-08:00

It's really fine weather here in Fukushima today. I can feel this year will be wonderful year.
In the morning, around 9:00am, I received some new year cards (nenga jo) from friends and acquaintances. 'Nenga jo' means a seasonal greeting card we exchange with family members, friends, relatives, coworkers and any acquaintances.
Yesterday, I sent some emails to some of my friends living in outside of Japan, say hello and happy new year.When I checked my email box, I found replies some of them and those made me so happy. This is the one reason that I've feeling this year would be wonderful year.

This is my first day of posting to blogger, and I found that it is pretty easy to make my blog page.
However, adding pictures is pretty tough for me. I've trying to do this but it can't work. Umm, what should I do?
I already downloaded picasa and using this software, when I send my picture, it puts on new post.