For Julie <3 Ashley

Only cool people get it.

Bento Pity Party, Ladies' night, and other stuff

Maybe you are not aware - but bento boxes are huge in Japan. Bento is just another word for boxed lunch. But these people go crazy making these awesome lunches. It kind of makes me jealous. Am I boxed lunch making deficient?
I make lunch for Bob every day pretty much. And this - is how it turns out.

His is on the left. You can tell because I actually make some effort at being cute.

That looks pretty good right? But it's not THIS:

I mean, that's two bananas chatting it up. But they're bananas made from katsu (fried cutlet) and how cool is that? I want that...

So I've decided as yet one more thing I'm going to add to the list and maybe maybe not get around to doing should be to be a better bento chef.

I've been visiting blogs of various internet gurus and I figure I have a good chance of at least stealing other people's ideas. You can look here if you want to check out my progress. I guess =p








Enough with the pity party. Let's talk about brownies.



So a few nights ago I spent the night at Erin's house and we had a girls' night with Leslie, Amanda, and May. Here is how it went down:


That's Leslie and Erin and our brownies.

May and Amanda looking excited.


Oh wait.... that doesn't look right. So evidently we doubled the recipe or used a bowl have the size we were supposed to and it ended up exploding in the oven. That's okay though. We scraped off the top (which had cooked) and enjoyed a molten creation which was terrible for my calorie count for the day.

Anything else I can show you today.... the most beautiful sky I think I've seen so far.

Cheers. Now I'm going to go collapse because I'm heavily medicated from my cold.

My new school

Alright, this isn't necessarily going to be a post of rainbows and unicorns but let me introduce my new school. I found a movie which almost perfectly illustrates how I feel when I wake up in the morning and realize that it's Tuesday or Thursday:


http://fourfour.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/ulpathy.gif

Thanks Rich.

It's not that the school itself is located precisely near the mouth of hell... but sometimes I wonder why there isn't a teenage-d vampire hunter prowling around the grounds to help me. I can't even tell if they're just like that because they're like that in all of their classes or if they (rightly so) believe that they'll never use English in their daily lives in the future (even McDonalds employees get to flip over to an English menu so they're saved the embarrassment of speaking the language they've learned for six years) so why should they bother listening to me in class? Paradoxically the students LOVE talking to me outside of class. Many of them haven't appeared to figure out that if they only paid attention in class more then they would be able to converse with me more. Who am I to judge right?

To be honest the only thing that really affects me about the school is the high rate of violence in class. The students don't bother me exactly but if a certain teacher makes a wrong move or (goodness forbid) takes away someone's cell phone when they've been shouting at the top of their lungs into it then all hell breaks loose and I end up wondering if I'm physically safe.

It's not impossible but it's certainly trying.

The one thing that keeps me going back are the friendly students who, despite their classmates yelling and goofing off around them, diligently try to do the work and try to use their English with me. I'll keep you posted but I wanted to just let it out here.

Happy Birthday

Late, I know--Happy 2nd birthday Felicity! (photos compliment of Dad)

Say hello to my new nephew!

Benjamin Cole Alexander born 2:35 pm Sept. 8,2008. 8 lbs 1oz,22in. Mom ,Dad,Baby and Big Sis all doing well !!!!








The name Damien Victor shall be mine! XD