Really, Toyama?  In the middle of March?  Really??

One of the other teachers at my school drew my portrait!  Pretty damn good.

I dressed up as Santa-san for my students this week.

Merry Christmas!

This past weekend Shino and I went to Nagoya, about a 4-hour train ride away from Kurobe, to see the winter illumination at なばなの里 (“Nabana no Sato,” or “The Town of Nabana (which is some flower that I don’t know the name of in English)”).  It’s one of the biggest and most famous displays of Christmas lights in the country and it’s really quite impressive.  There were some spectacular displays, but the mainstay of the place is their “Aurora Borealis,” an effect created by colored light shining upon sprays of mist at the end of a huge field of lights.  You can see the “Aurora” in some of the pictures above, But those are just a sample of what we saw there, and you can see more in this flickrset.  You can also get the full hi-res images there if you want.

It was a great trip.  My only real complaint is that it was incredibly crowded, but for good reason, I suppose.  I especially liked that they didn’t bombard us with Christmas music there, as such places are often wont to do.  Instead it was nice, subtle, somewhat wintry ambient music.

I have some nice videos, too, but I still need to compile them, so that will come later (hopefully tomorrow).

I’m about to go to town on this bag of kim chi flavored Cheetos.

Cleaning out my computer today I found this old cell phone camera pic from almost 4 years ago.  Meeting and talking to Cheech was so awesome.  He was far more intelligent and impassioned than I ever expected him to be.

Good morning, internets!

Shino and me at our big Halloween party.  My costume is 幼稚園服, the Japanese kindergarten school uniform.  Click here for comparison.

There’s no real simple way to explain this picture except yesterday I went to a park in the mountains that is notorious for being haunted and I bounced around in the rain on this big white trampoline-like mound that emerges from the ground like the back of a whale poking above the surface of the ocean.

It was fun.

This is pretty much what I wear to work most days lately.  Mask included.