Updating my life

The word on the street is that two big events in my life have been decided recently, but since my streets are several thousand miles from most of yours, I'll write about it all here.

First, I will be visiting Minnesota in July. I will be there starting on July 2, and am definitely planning to attend CONvergence. The Romulan Consulate is returning for our 3rd year now, and will naturally be toting buckets of alcoholic beverages that make you barf blue. We will be gracing cabana room 109 from Thursday through Saturday night, and as always, we will have a better party than the Klingons. Those of you on Facebook should look for an ad for it there sometime soon.

The other big item is that I will not being staying in Japan for another year beyond this one. I've been accepted to the University of Hawaii Shidler College of Business's Japan-focused MBA program, a 21 month program that includes in the latter half a several month internship in Tokyo - here's to hoping that this leads to riches and fame (or at least the former), because the cost of tuition and living in Hawaii will probably make me cry.
I very much doubt that my schedule will allow me to return to Minnesota in between leaving Japan and moving to Hawaii, so I will do my best to see everyone at CON and in the week following.

Aside from those two snippets, there have been a few other current events here and there, so I'll try to hit them all in this post...

I may have mentioned from time to time that while living here, I've been training in the Japanese sword art of iaido under the town dentist here in Kosaka. Along with Mike and Tristen, two other English teaching friends of mine here, I tested for and earned my 1-kyu rank in Akita City this last weekend. For those unfamiliar with martial arts rankings, 1-kyu is the rank that comes before a first degree black belt. I hope to continue with this and take my first degree black belt test sometime around December, but that of course assumes that I'm able to find a good dojo in Hawaii. I hear that there are several, though, so that shouldn't be too much of a worry.
My only concern now is my knee, which has been misbehaving recently under the strain of one particular form that it doesn't care for. I'm working on resting and strengthening it now, so I anticipate being back up to full speed before long.

What else...my parents and sister visited Japan recently, so I got to babysit them for a couple weeks. The big surprise for me, though, was my supervisor's reaction to the whole affair. Now, Kosaka's a small town that doesn't exactly see scads of foreigners (or really, tourists from anywhere). This means that adding 3 to the current count more than doubled the gaijin population here, at least for a bit. I didn't quite expect this to be cause for trumpets and fanfare, but I was apparently wrong. When my supervisor caught word of this, he asked if it'd be OK if we have a "mini-mini-welcome party."　Sounded simple enough, and I was of course happy to give him the opportunity to have a little fun with the foreigners. He went on to arrange a catered dinner that at least 40 people showed up to, including a bunch of my coworkers, the superintendent, the chairperson of the Board of Education, KJH's principal, etc...
Probably the highlight was when my supervisor announced a surprise performance - he had arranged for 4 of my students who play taiko drums to do a brief show for us!
I know all four of them pretty well; they're some of my better current sannensei students. Even being giggly teenage girls, though, they managed to keep this whole thing a secret from me, so it was pretty cool to see them show up and do their thing. The little introduction speech they put together in English was cute, too. I thought I had some better pictures of their show, too, but somehow they just vanished like a fart in the wind...
Isn't technology a joy?

The weather here, after securely orbiting Planet Suck for quite some time, is now awesome and so I am biking every day I can. Lake Towada is my favorite for that so far, so here are a number of pictures from recent visits:

Mmm, nummy blue water...

Can you spot itty-bitty Tristen at the bottom of that cliffside descent?

If you think it says "Watch out for bears," you might be right.

Lake Towada Shrine. Mercifully, the gift shop is too far to the right to show up in this picture.

A tiny shrine on an island that's actually in and not alongside Lake Towada. They haven't put a gift shop here yet, but I'm sure plans are in the works.
Okay, in all fairness, the tourist traps are not as prevalent as I make them sound. And most of the stuff they sell is actually pretty cool - at least, assuming you didn't grow up alongside it.

Why do I have a picture of a dangling bug? I don't know. It was neat, and Japan has big bugs.

This was probably a lot cooler in person than it is in photograph, but I still feel compelled to post it. Underneath (and really, all around) one fountain at Towada Shrine, there was a great cacophony of very mysterious noises that we eventually realized was the croaking of an entire civilization of frogs and such. What you're seeing here is a direct shot underneath the fountain, as well as a few piles of frog eggs that appeared to be...quivering. I would have liked to get a better picture, but I couldn't see too well under there and didn't know if there was something waiting to eat my camera (or hand).