Josh Turns 4

Joshua celebrated a birthday in August, though I've been my typical slow self about posting the pictures from his big birthday week. In lieu of a party, we took Josh to Fuji-Q Highland, which is an amusement park located along the base of Japan's favorite active volcano, Mt. Fuji.

At some time or another, Fuji-Q earned a spot or two in the Guinness Book of World Records for the speed, height, and overall craziness of its roller coasters. But, we went to Fuji-Q for a very different reason. In one corner of the amusement park resides Josh's favorite locomotive friends, Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends from the Island of Sodor.

Josh was absolutely hysterical with his enthusiasm for all the Thomas Land trains and vehicles - and of course everyone's favorite conductor, Sir Topham Hatt. There were toys, rides, and shops all decorated in Sodor Island themes. Josh had an absolutely wonderful fourth birthday.

Pics are up in the Gallery, dated 09/24/2007.

Home Again

Before I begin....a side note that the spider that Mike saw in the backyard is known as a Huntsman Spider.

Yes, Josh and I are back in Yokosuka. Although I was happy to come home, it was hard to leave home/America this time. Despite the wonderful friendships and experiences I have here in Japan, I really miss the familiarity of home sometimes.

Our return marks the end of the Summer season as well. I've always really looked forward to Autumn although this year it's been difficult because of the short Summer that we've had. Summer in our neighborhood is really the time when people come out to play. However, soon there will be yummy Yaki-imo.

Tomorrow will be Josh's first day at school. I was planning on taking him on Wednesday but I think the jet lag would have just been too much for him to get over in one night. This way, we had a couple days to rest up and then meet the teacher and come into the classroom and look around before I just dropped him off. The preschool will be much more organized than the hourly program I sometimes take him to. In the morning, they will line up outside of the school with their class and walk in with the teacher. Each classroom is designated a theme & color (Red Teddy Bears for Josh's class). Josh is assigned a specific table and chair along with a cubby to put his backpack and lunch. I am required to pack a lunch for him. No peanut butter or other nuts allowed as some children have allergies. Apparently, nut allergies have gone up drastically since we were young children (who would have known??). The preschool is a Co-op organization which means the Mike and I have to put in a lot of volunteer hours during the school year. It excites me though. This way we'll really be "in the know" when it comes to his curriculum. All and all, the teachers in his classroom and his school in general seems great. Mike and I are both planning on being there tomorrow to take pictures, so stay tuned on that one. This has definitely been a time in my motherhood where I've become a weepy woman. After all, "My little boy is starting to grow up!"

One thing I didn't expect to come home to was more visitors in our backyard! I looked out the window at one of our backyard trees to see 200-400 fuzzy caterpillars just munching away. In the meantime, I glare at several of our orb weaving friends in the branches thinking 'Hello do your job!' If our eight legged friends only realized that there was an all you can eat buffet just inches away. The small homemade birdbath wasn't attracting any predators either. I only recently found out, however, that some caterpillars don't taste so good to the birds. I decided it was time to take action before our tree bit the dust. I had no idea what kind of spray to buy in the store nor did I know what was legal to spray in our area so I ended up going the natural route... Chili spray. It consists of water, lots of chili powder and a few drops of liquid soap. It worked beautifully. Several of the furry vermin fell in to the webs on their way down and were quickly wrapped up and devoured by the joro-gumo. I was able to get rid of most of them. Some of them (about 100 more) survived the caterpillar genocide and I'm sure are laying more eggs as I type this. Click on the pictures to see some shots Mike took of the little hedge trimmers.

One of the purchases that I made in the states was Josh's Halloween costume. He's going to be Peter Pan this year, complete with a sword for fighting Captain Hook. He thinks I should be the crocodile and Daddy should be Hook. A tip for newbies living on base... stock up on your candy! Halloween is very popular with Japanese children as well and many of them come in large groups to trick or treat on base. Many residence on base flew through 7 bags of candy before 6:30PM last year. Again, stock up and be stingy! Especially if you're in a townhouse.

Still Running...

Quick note to let everyone know that Nicki and Josh made it back to Japan safely. Also, I am shamelessly plugging my new side-blog, which is more of a running journal for me and my adventure of training for the half marathon. I tried to keep the blog title easy for me to remember. Check it out if you're interested or if you're currently watching paint dry and you want an alternative source of entertainment:

http://japanyearsrunning.blogspot.com

Thanks everyone for the kind words of encouragement and support.

It's Back!!!

Last year, Nicki and I saw perhaps the biggest spider in the history of the world. Okay, not really, but the thing did have it's own license plate and a racing stripe. Anyway, I can't remember if we posted about that spider sighting or not, but I'll try to summarize here:

Nicki picked me up from work one time and told me that she left the door to the house unlocked because there was a huge spider standing outside the house and she was too scared to take the time to lock the door. I didn't believe that a spider could be big enough to scare someone away from their own house, so I made fun of her - until we got home again. Sure enough, it was still there, and I'm man enough to say that it scared the willies outta me. It had to have been about 8-9 inches across and was faster than lightning. I tried to throw a rubber ball at it to scare it off... it caught the ball and threw it back at me. No kidding; it was huge and scary.

Fast forward to tonight. I went outside just after sunset to play guitar on our back porch and enjoy the coolness of the evening. In the shadows near our eggplant garden box, I unmistakably saw the same type of spider that gave us the fright last year. Tonight's was a little smaller, but only by a little bit. Needless to say, I jumped back into the house, put down my guitar, and ran up to get my camera. Now, it was nighttime, my aim wasn't good, and my focus was even worse, but here's the clearest shot I took of the thing.



Anyone looking to adopt a pet?

The Long Ride from Tokyo... Day 4

This post is the grand finale in our David Does Japan series. Our final morning in Tokyo, we woke up early because we were scheduled to catch an early Shinkansen (bullet train) ride from Shinagawa Station in Tokyo to Odawara Station in the western part of Kanagawa Prefecture. And let me just tell you, sometimes the clueless gaijin in Japan get very lucky.

It's not very often that I get to travel by bullet train. Since it was Obon week, we booked the tickets several weeks in advance to insure we'd get tickets before they sold out. Because of that, I kinda forgot what time we were supposed to leave Shinagawa. So I quickly glanced at the ticket at the hotel and it said 9:40am... great, we had plenty of time. Long story short, we got to Shinagawa Station around 9:00am and made our way to the bullet train platform. There we read the sign indicating upcoming trains and their departure times, and low and behold, our train was at the platform and getting ready to leave. As it turns out, our train wasn't departing Shinagawa at 9:40am like we thought... it was arriving in Odawara at 9:40am. Lucky us for getting there early... though it didn't stop Nicki and David from teasing me about reading the ticket wrong.

When we got to Odawara, it took us a bit to figure out which train would get us to Hakone, our ultimate destination. Hakone is a resort area that is a familiar long-weekend vacation spot for Tokyoites, which was expected to be crowded during Obon week, but we wanted David to get the bullet train experience so we figured we could deal with the crowds once we got there.

What we didn't expect was the tremendous crowds being paired with tremendous heat. Don't get me wrong, Hakone is beautiful and I definitely want to go back soon, perhaps later in the fall when the hazy days of summer are over and we might have a great view of Mt Fuji. But on this trip, we took the scenic loop around Hakone and then got the heck out of there. In fact, we did our tour so quickly that we had to request an earlier Shinkansen ride back to Tokyo.

On our scenic loop, however, we got to ride a cable car, an overhanging ropeway line, an old wooden ship, and a Japanese bus. So we covered quite a few forms of public transportation along the way!

Anyway, in summary, if you have the chance to visit Hakone, it's well worth a day trip from Tokyo provided you've done all you wanted to do up that way first. Just don't travel during Japanese holidays or during a major heatwave.

Pics are up in our Gallery, dated 09/13/2007.

Tokyo, Day 2 and 3

It's been a while since we shared info from during the trip Nicki's brother, David, was here. So I'll continue where we left off. Basically, he was here for about 10 days and we spent three nights for his trip at a hotel up in Tokyo, so that we would be near all of the action. On the second day of his Tokyo excursion, we took him east of Tokyo to Chiba to see Tokyo Disneyland.

It was the perfect day to see Disneyland, too, smack dab in the middle of Obon Week - which is a holiday week here in Japan also known as "everyone go to all the nearby tourist attractions" week. It also happened to be "How hot can Mother Nature let today get" day. Let's just say that we didn't get to ride many rides because of the crowds and it was rather unenjoyable, if that's even a word. But we made the best of it and Josh seemed to have an incredible time. We made it in Disneyland until the early afternoon and then hit the road.

That night, we went back to Shibuya to show David what downtown Tokyo looks like in the dark. Even though it wasn't very dark. David quickly decided that Shibuya must be where all the attractive girls go at night because the streets were crowded and well, David had a good point. Anyway, Nicki was kind enough to put up with our testosterone-based conversation and we had a pretty fun time just walking around acting goofy.

On Day 3 in Tokyo, we took David to Odaiba to see the cool science stuff at the Panasonic building. If you have never been there and get the chance (and are a closet science geek), that place is a lot of fun. They have a great exhibition on the third floor that they call "RiSuPia", for reasons that I can neither explain nor understand. Regardless, we did the science stuff for a while and then took David to Akihabara, the electronics capital of Japan. We showed him around the area and ended up at Yodobashi Camera, where we managed to spend about 3.5 hours before getting tired of looking at cool gadgets.

I didn't take my camera with us on Day 3, but I got some fun shots on Day 2 in Tokyo. Also, we sat in a family-friendly photo booth at RiSuPia, so we did get two pictures from there on Day 3. They're all in our Gallery, dated 09/03/2007.