November 2007 Archives

One of the things I always wanted to do as a child was fly some RC airplanes. They were so cool and exciting. But back in 'my day' they were way too expensive and complicated for a boy to own. Much to my surprise the RC Plane scene has changed quite a lot since then. Thanks to cheap electronics and high powered batteries the market has been flooded with planes that the casual hobbyist can enjoy. I'd been eyeing several of them at a local store but couldn't bring myself to drop some cash randomly on them. Until about a week ago. The store had a rather simple RC airplane for about $15 and I figured it would be worth a try.

So I went to the park behind my apartment and tried to fly it. Except it wouldn't fly. At all. So I kept throwing it and it kept nose diving. Oh well. That was until I learned that the model had a defect that was easily fixed by bending the wings. So I did some bending, and taping, and sure enough it flew. Except I had broken off most of the nose at that point which caused some small flight issues. I couldn't resist such a cheap price for boyish fun, so I bought another one. This one also required some bending to fly right. But all went well and I've been having fun flying them around local parks and school yards over my three day weekend. I even managed to strap on some wheels to the model with a broken nose, and while it doesn't have enough thrust to take off it does land much better.

In case tales of me flying is dull, heres a rather fun story. So I was flying my broken nose model outside after work and a gust of wind came along and blew it up onto a neighbors roof. So I knocked on a door and had to explain to an old, and a bit angry, Japanese man that my plane was on his roof. Much hand motioning and broken sentences were involved. As he crawled out onto his roof I couldn't help but think to myself "If he falls and dies, I'm going to totally lose my job." Luckily neither of those things happened and all he did was just yell at me to go fly my plane elsewhere. (I later left him a thank you card and some little cakes.)

Without a proper oven to bake a turkey we ALTs have to resort to rather unusual methods to celebrate Thanksgiving in Japan. The easiest way to do this is just to go to KFC and have some chicken. Some horrible, greasy, killer chicken. Eating there reminded me once again why I never eat there. Its so wrong.

The Thanksgiving fun wasn't just for Americans. We invited some other fun willed people along to take part in this traditional American holiday done in such an untraditional way. The more the merrier. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

When my parents visited me in Japan they fell in love with the big Japanese radish known as a daikon. This popular, and very large, radish is quite tasty but tough to find back in Wisconsin. So my parent bought some seeds and started their own crop. I was quite surprised they turned out as well as they did.

They did end up growing in weird shapes as opposed to the more traditional long cylinder daikon. My parents think that this is because they grew really far down and hit a layer of clay, and thus had to grow outward instead of downward. Either way they ended up with quite a decent crop. If it was me I would have left one or two in even longer and seen what kind of giant mutant freakish radish I could grow! Oh well, my parents always have next year's crop to fool around with.

If only they could grow some super giant ones for the county fair.... oh yes... giant ones...

With the weather turning cold, and very few nice nice days left in this year, I decided the best thing to do was have a little BBQ! So I invited the ALTs who were around and did a bit of parking lot BBQing. We even got some marsh-mellows going over the hot coals, though we had to use chop sticks.

We had plenty of company as well. A steady stream of random, and confused, Japanese neighbors came by. As well as quite a few neighborhood cats. Who felt the urge to eat Stacy's fired rice.

I'm at your BBQ eaten your rice.

I had thought all the mantids were dead after the recent cold spell we've been experiencing in town, but I was surprisingly wrong. In the past week I've found 3 mantids around my apartment, two of which were kind enough to stand still for photos. One even crawled around my arm for a bit and seemed extremely curious about my camera. Though it saddens me to think that these little guys are probably dead by now, it also brings me great joy to think that next spring I'll be finding little mantids crawling around the bushes and leaves in my garden.

I think next year I'll try and capture and raise a couple little ones, or just buy some mantid eggs and release them in my area. You can never have enough mantids.

I'm always one for a photo op down at the station. I was quite surprised when I had two such opportunities in one day. The first was with a badly dressed pokemon, who was more than happy to get his photo taken with me. Though it did weird out several passing children who did not know what to make of a large foreigner talking up a pokemon. The other was a samurai that was part of a petition drive to get the front of the station changed. As I wrote about before the front of the Fukuyama station is being redone, but a group of people want the designed changed to a recreation of the old castle walls. Complete with moat and ramparts. A design I was very happy to apply my name next to.

I really enjoy these photo ops way too much for my own good.

The new Simpsons game for the PS3 (a game I will never ever play) looks full of fun stuff. I especially liked this mock Japanese commercial they made, which shows an entertaining Mr. Sparkle Japanese level.

Gotta love Mr. Sparkle. He fights dirt.

Looks like my friend Nate may still have a job after all. Seems NOVA is in talks with three other companies to see if one of them will buy up NOVA's crap. On one side I would very much like for my friend to have a job. On the other hand I don't really like NOVA. So there you go.

The other day I way flying my plane outside when a neighbor walked by on his was to his car. He started talking to me, for the first time ever, and wondered if I was in NOVA or not. He was surprised to find I was just your average Junior High School teacher. I was touched with his concern about my job, and tried to act as happy as possible as he gave me a big bag of rice crackers. I hate rice crackers with an unholy passion.