Certification

So I have decided to get TEFL certification for those of you who do not know that is Teach English as a Foreign Language Certification. I am doing this in hopes that it will assist me in getting into the JET program. There is only one drawback... It is a real pain in the ass! I am attempting to finish it with in the next several weeks to meet the application deadline but it is taking longer than I had expected. I hope that I can mussle through it soon and finish ahead of schedule treating it like a band aid that I am ripping off quickly as oppose to pulling it off lowly and painfully.

few questions

School has started back and I have decided to get TEFL Certification in the next month so I can stack my deck a little before I apply for JET in September. has anyone out there done this? is it easy? It sounds to me like a hoop that you have to jump through to get better odds of acceptance. I really hope that I am not just trowing away my cash and I get some insight from it. Oh ya, for those of you who live or have lived in Japan, how long did it take to get use to speaking Japanese or at leaste comfortable with normal every day tasks such as getting food, and how much Japanese training did you have before you went?

experiences, life, learning and relationships.

Other than waiting to apply, or finding something to occupy myself for a year or two before I can accomplish my goal, the most difficult side of the JET program goal is my current relationship. Ashley loves Japan, she has been obsessed with it sense she was a little girl. Her minor in college is Japanese, her art often focuses on Asian cultures, she loves eating Japanese food, etc. She is the one that told me the name of the JET program. I think she regrets this last one. even though she loves Japan and is facinated about it, she dosent know if she wants to apply to it. She wants me to wait another year for her to get out of school so we can apply together, assuming she decides to apply at all. this dosent make any sense to me, even if we applied together we don't want to go to the same place, even if we did want to go to the same place I don't think they would place us there. Also I don't want to do this with some one that I know. If I did then I don't think I would get the same out of the experience. She has become fairly spiteful about any aspect of it. Me learning Japanese makes her upset especially if I learn a word that she dosent know or make a mistake when studying. To her saving my money for the cause seems pointless because I haven't been accepted yet. She thinks I am a fool to leave my Job that I really do love for some thing that I don't know if I will enjoy or not. Heck she doesn't even read this blog even though I talk about it and the other blogs that I read all the time. When I apply in late August or September I assume we will have a huge knock down drag out fight about it and the same if I get an interview or accepted.

Her concerns and emotional qualms have a base to them. She knows that if I am accepted it is probably the end of our relationship. I guess that is a horrible thing to say but it is within all likely hood true. I guess this project is fairly selfish on my part but I think it is to great an opportunity to pass up.

life and experiences

as some of you know, I am an atheist. I believe that when we die all consciousness ceases and that is that. This is one of the main driving forces in my life. People have posed the question "what is the meaning of life?" of course their is no solid anser to that but to me it turns more into a goal than a meaning. so here it is... I was born to procreate eventualy, to learn as much as I can, and to experiance as much as possible.

I have always learned new things in an obsessive manner, my family can atest to that. I will focus in on one or two things untill I think I have learned enough of it and then I drop it. This was more prominate in my life untill around the time that I moved off to college. at that point my goals shifted to atempt to experiance as much as I can. I still love to learn but I look at what I can gain from experiances as a powerful teacher.

I have been contemplating exactly what is drawing me to attempt to move to Japan and I have concluded that the two main reasons are to learn and experiance. It is such a good chance to do those two things that I would be a fool not to try.

Unfortunately Experiances, learning and Japan have become a sore subject in my releationship. Ill explain in the next post...

ok so music is another thing to look in to

OK so I'm am still looking in to all kinds of things now that I am out of college and have decided that I must learn more and more about random things that I don't feel that I have explored enough. So the other day I decided that music was one of those things that I should add to the list. So here is the starter list that I have made over the last two days compiled from several Friends that I think have unique out looks on music.

• The Arcade fire
• At the drive in
• Cattle decapitation
• glass jaw
• Hank snow
• cursive
• holy molar
• negative land
• guapo
• sleepy time gorilla museum
• download
• Mr Bungle
• Tom Waits
• John Coltrane
  
• Nick Cave
• Golelin
• Morphine
• T Bone Burrnett
• Guapo
• Iron and Wine
• Ghost Hand Observatory
• LCD Sound System
• Dandy Warhols
• Silver sun pickups
• Chromeo
• Richard Wagner
• Mike Oldfield
• Muddy Rivers

That is the start of the list if anyone wants to add to that list please feel free to comment and help my musical boarders be broadened.

Police are stupid

Ok so I am at UAB's ceramic studio with my girlfriend making sure she is not carried off. For those of you that don't know her personally she is 4'11" tall and could literally be carried off. any how there is a person in her class that has a personality/mental disorder and he decides to get drunk. So as the hours go by and he becomes more demented and talks to various invisible people, slams things on the tables, breaks beer bottles on the kilns, breaks old sculptures, writes messages that are illegible all over the boards, and cusses out the other students. I finally had enough. I called the professor and got no answers.... I called him again 20 min later, no answers. 30 more min go by and he starts cussing out Ashley, my girlfriend, because she asked him a simple question. So I called campus police to deal with him. in about 1 min 3 cops were their asking me questions and pulling this guy out of the studio. in 3 minutes their were 12 cops there I guess for back up or because they were bored. some how the man in question, who is in his late 30s, starts telling the cops that me and another person were not students in the class, which was true. I tell the cop that I am there to make sure my girlfriend is safe he told me that it didn't matter and me and the other guy would have to leave.... so I left, the other guy left, and the drunk guy left. All this happened at 11:00 at night in Birmingham AL. Our wonderful city fluctuates from the number 9 to the number 11 most homicides in the United States every year. In the campus news paper they tell how many people are mugged, how many cars are broken in to etc every week, it usually takes up a few pages. I digress I called the cops and I wound up getting thrown out that's kind of messed up. Oh well I will go have breakfast over at the professor over that studios house in the morning and tell him what all happened. Did I mention that I have taken 13 classes with that professor and house sit for him on a regular basis? We will see tomorrow.

home to Tokyo

so my friend Teaki or Takeru is moving back home to Tokyo on Monday. I am going to hang out with him for the last time tonight. I have known teak for about 6 years now he is a very charismatic person who has this crazy ability to make most people want to help him. but he let some paper work laps and all those that wanted to help him could not so he has to go back home for an extended stay for the first time in many years. I must say that I will miss him a lot but hopefully he will get his paper work fixed and will come back in the next year. On the bright side, if it takes him longer then I can go see him if I don't get into the JET program!

As of late

So the semester is over and now I am worrying about how to retain all of the information that I have learned over the last 4 months untill I get to my next class in the fall. I think that I will use lists that I am making from Iknow.jp.co along with videos from a web sight that my sensei told me about that her husband was the host of http://www.gpb.org/irasshai. These videos are really funny in that I cant believe how bad this is funny and they were filmed in the late 80s to early 90s so that just adds to the atmosphere. but there are a nice number of these videos so I will give them a shot in the interest of not loosing what I have learned. more over I will communicate with Ashley as much as I can that does seem to help us both in our studies.

I would like to send out a huge congratulations to Sean from the blog flyingsound. He was accepted into the JET program and is awaiting assignment. The more people I see achieve their goal in getting into JET and the more people I meet that have been in it. The more I feel that it is an achievable goal. All I have to do now is wait for application time and get to it. It is kind of scary, this single goal has become the main focal point of my life as of late. Most things that I have done as of the last 6 or so months has been with the thought "This can or could help me get into the JET program or could help me if I get into the JET program." I hope that it is not all for naught.

new ideas

So I have been swamped with the combination of working at my job, getting ready for Magic city art connection, and getting ready for my Japanese finals(there are two of them). All of this happens in the next 9 days and has limited what I can do or have time to do.

Despite all that, I have been thinking a lot about reading. I am not a very avid reader and that is precisely the problem. I was thinking about ulterior motives that North Korea could have for all of its posturing in the past and how small of a country it is and I kept thinking about the book the mouse that roared. I know what it is about but I have never read it, so I decided to buy it off of amazon. purchasing this old book reminded me that I am lost when it comes to books that well read people consider standard. Though I don't know what this will accomplish but I think I am going to start reading a lot of the "classics" if you can call them that on top of that I have been asking several people the question "If you could recommend 3 or 4 books that you think every one should read what would they be?" some of the stuff that has come up has been fairly expected and then some of it has been surprising. So I think that I am going to add these books into the ones that I read to make the reading list a little more well rounded and modernize it a little.

I wonder how this experiment of becoming well read will turn out and what I will take away from it? I guess Ill have a better idea after the first 50 or so books. I will post a list of books that I have compiled both new and old, suggested and off reading lists, when I have compiled it a little better in about a week until that happens. I think I am going to post a blurb about each book I read and what I take from it also so I hope I don't bore you all to death with that. Finally I want to know what you all think about this and hear your ideas. If you could recommend 3 or 4 books that you think every one should read what would they be?

Bad day

So today was a pretty bad day. I was in a car accident. My truck is possibly totaled. It is amazing how much damage can occur at 25 mph. No one was hurt. More over I just had the clutch replaced on it and that cost me $775.00 so lets hope that it is not completely gone. Other things that made this a fun day were. . . I went to the doctor and was poked, prodded, given a shot, had my blood stolen for god knows what dastardly uses. The vending machine at school took my money. sigh... Oh well! on the plus side my sister let me borrow her scion TC until my truck is fixed or until I find another vehicle assuming it is totaled. ooh and I went back to the house that I was house sitting and had a nice long nap! man I needed that.
Oh yeah and my sensei told the class about her travel agent that she booked a flight through from here to Tokyo and it was only $700.00 round trip．I was so excited about this that I blurted out in class 本とですか！！どこ!？!?At which point every one turned and looked at me.　It seemed that most of them had no idea how much these tickets are through travel sites but Cook sensei helped out by playing a game that had the normal price through continental airlines and then the price of first class just for fun. prices $2100.00 and $11,000.00 these shell shocking prices made me look like I wasn't crazy and the best part was that my excitement was rewarded when she hooked me up with the travel agents name :)
So I guess that the day wasn't a total bust after all.

Lacking

I have hit a blogging dry spot so here is a cute picture to keep you all occupied.

Cramming my brain

So I have been using Smart.fm, the site that contains the IKnow study program. But I have run into an impasse. The program gives me like 12 words a day to learn and I have been having a really hard time trying to keep up. 12 words doesn't sound like a lot but that is 84 a week, 336 words a month. Now this is a little bit of an exaggeration because there are only 200 words in each unit and I only work on one unit at a time. More over after I finish going through all the 200 words the program will continue requiring me to learn and relearn these 200 words until I have gone over each one several times over a recommended month. so really its like learning 6.7 words a day but not really. Ok back on track... My problem is that I am not that great at straight up memorization so does any one have some suggestions on study methods (other than flash cards, I use them constantly) that may help me out? Thanks a lot!

Dream

Last night I had an odd dream. I get rejected from the JET program. So I decide to take the money that I have been saving and go to Japan any ways. I buy my ticket, which costs a measly 50 bucks (I am budgeting for a $2000.oo ticket), hop on the plane, and fly over there. The flight only takes a hour in the dream. Once the plane lands, I decide to walk around Japan. In my through the city that I landed in, I some how manage to get to an old country road that is totally abandoned. After walking a little while I come upon two individuals who talk to me in Japanese, Which I some how understand clearly. Next a third person walks up to us and tells me that I need to speak to him in English because my Japanese is terrible. While speaking to him I learn that he is my real life friend Toby. At this point he shows me around the city and explains what he has been doing for the past year in Japan and talks about how he has fallen in love with the culture and has decided to never come back. After that I decide that it is time for me to come back to the USA and I tell him that I will come see him on the weekends because it is so cheap and easy to get there. When I arrive at the airport I run in to my professor, Cook Sensei. She asks me if I enjoyed visiting, to which I respond, "that I love this place. It just makes me sad that I cannot stay." At which point Ashley wakes me up by turning on the lights to find some cloths that she needed. When I woke up I was filled with disappointment. I wonder what Sigmund Freud would say about that.

sexy pictures

I was thinking of some ways to get more hits on my blog when this thought hit me... If I saved all of my images to photobucket and named the files using sexual names, then embedded them in to the blog instead of uploading them would that boost my hits? wouldn't browsers like Google's image search pull these up when they searched for scandalous pictures? hmmm have to try that some time.

Adventures in Mississippi

I went to Mississippi a few weeks ago and I just remembered that I have not written about it. So, after work I drove five hours to my mothers house in Mosspoint Mississippi on the coast. Upon arriving I crashed out until morning. Upon waking up I had to make my way out to the largest store (Walmart) in that tiny ass town to purchase jeans because all of my cloths were dirty before I left and Ashley had kindly taken all of our dirty clothes to her parents house. It was like walking in to the Twilight zone. All of the men and some of the women seemed to look like Limmy from the band Motorhead.

So I start looking for paints in my size and I start to notice another trend. All of the pants sizes seem bigger around than they are long. I wear a 33X34 pants size and all the pants were marked things like 38X28. After looking for about 15 minutes I find a pair that will work and start up to the counter. On my way I see some neat fedoras and decide that I didn't know which I wanted so I bought them both.

The last time I was in Mississippi I went to this great PoBoy restaurant that use to be a Chinese restaurant, that was run by Koreans. At this restaurant you can order PoBoys of various sizes from 6" - 36" and they have all the good Asian condiments such as my favorite, Saracha sauce. I tell my mother and step father that I would really like to go find that place again and my mother declines going but my step father says that he would go with me. It took about an hour but we eventually found it again (it had been about 2 years since I had been there last). I walk in and start talking to the lady at the counter, who seems to have some difficulty understanding my questions, when a man walks out at starts(in broken English) impatiently asking what I want. I tell him that I want a 12" shrimp PoBoy only lettuce at which point the lady starts to write down my order and the man turns to her and screams what I said into her ear. "12 INCH SHRIMP POBOY! ONLY LETTUCE!!! she finishes writing it down, ignoring the man and takes it to the back. I get my sandwich a few minutes later, put some saracha sauce on it and head out.

Unfortunately, I only was able to stay for 2 days, but on the second day fulfilled the last objective that I had come to do, other than seeing my mother, walking on the beach, and shrimp PoBoys. I went out to find an alligator. Mississippi has 3 major natural resources: Mosquito's, Spanish moss, and alligators. None of these things are very hard to find but I had forgotten that I was still technicaly winter time and Alligators were fairly dormant at that time. The first place we went to find them was a place called Sou Bayu. We went here for several reasons: It is the home of one of my step fathers best friends, it has a bar on the property (so we can drink while looking for the alligators), and this is the last place that I saw alligators in the wild... about 10 of them last time. oh and did i mention that this place is a mobile home park too? oh yah classy! So we get there and grab some beer (bud or miller are the only choices... sigh) and walk out of the bar to talk to the locals and find some gators! to no avail unfortunately, all of them were sleeping where ever alligators sleep in the winter. So we left. On the way home my stepfather had the idea to go to an alligator ranch to at least get some pictures so we did. Not quite as much fun as finding wild ones but at least I was able to get my pictures.


After that I headed back to Birmingham so I could get back to the grind of studying and working. It is always lots of fun to go to odd little towns and see the local color, take in the local cuisine, and find the local wild life. I hope to be able to do it again soon.

exam results!

Yay I passed my first Japanese exam with flying colors! five pages and a Hiragana chart in 50 minutes and I received a 93.25% woot Ill take what I can get! so now it is time to start the next half of my semester with a bang and work with the Iknow.co.jp site. I would like to finish one section of the Japanese 2000 series by the end of the semester. It is only learning 200 words oh and I would like to finish the Katakana section on it as well because I think I have my Hiragana down fairly well. But just to be sure I will finish the Hiragana practice on the site. I'm about 50% done with that and should be finished by next week.

Blog PR

I want my numbers to go up on my blog so I think I need to do some PR for it. What am I doing about it currently? Well I am attempting to post at least once every 3 or 4 days. I am reading other blogs and posting on them including blog sights other than blogger.com, such as Live journal.com, thoughts.com, wordpress.com, etc. I have added an updater to my blog on my face book page. So I am thinking about ways of getting my numbers up. I have come up with a few ideas but my favorite one is to take out a personal ad for my blog. Though this could bring in the wrong kind of attention so I need to be careful about how I word it. we will see...

Japanese Midterm

yesterday I had my Japanese midterm and I am not really sure how well I did on it. I thought that I would blow the test away the night before but when I started to do it I began to have second opinions. The answers seemed to come easy enough. I hope that my second guessing is just lack of confidence. I guess we will have to wait and see. On the bright side at least I now know what the lay out of my sensei's exams are so I will be better prepared for the next one.

Thinking in Japanese

It is really surprising how much you can say with only a few words in your repertoire. I have been attempting to make sentences with the words that I currently know and in doing so I not only found out what words I need to learn next but I get a great boost of confidance that I may be able to comunicate enough to eat or communicate on the most basic levels if I make it to Japan.

Anime

The Japanese will make an anime about anything. Case in point Yakitate!! Japan (fresh baked Japan) which is about making bread. Yes 69 episodes of bread baking battles. By the way, this is actually a fairly funny anime even with the ridiculous subject matter. But I digress, as the Japanese mesh together new ideas to make original anime they some times hit on a really odd but neat concept that is not embarrassing to tell your friends that you spent 2 hours watching it. Which leads me to my next selection.

A friend of mine told me about this series that he enjoyed Toshokan Sensō (Library wars) and it is really neat. Basic plot, in the future the government begins destroying books (I know what you are thinking this plot has been done a million times and it has but some incarnations are better than others) and librarians take it upon themselves to fight back by basically becoming elite military forces complete with fatigues and fully automatic weapons. This concept hits home because my mother was a librarian and my ex-girlfriend was one as well. I can see my mother supporting the idea but I can see my ex picking up a gun and saying that no government bastard is going to take the Kage Baker series from me! any ways it is a good series that I would recommend watching.

Away from computer

Sorry about not posting lately My truck is having a new clutch put in so I am stuck at my girlfriends house, so I cant use my desk top. I left my power supply for my laptop in Mississippi so I cant use it (more on my adventure in Mississippi to come). My girlfriends laptop has a nasty key logger that I haven't had time to remove, so I wont use that computer. and I have not had time to go to the library to use their internet. ah well Ill make sure to get some of my posts up today because I am off.

better than Anki

There is a seemingly better flash card generator based on the same principles of Anki, but it has made the cards for you. The web sight Iknow is really cool it has a lot of lessons not only for Japanese but for several other languages as well. In the lessons are the words, an audio pronunciation, pictures, scentances and other stuff. It is also based on memorization curve like Anki but in a nicer package. Oh and the best part is that it is free.

Most cultures have a food that we find difficult to fathom eating: haggis, Tripe, fish eyes, etc. I wonder what Americans eat that the Japanese find odd or unpalatable?

randomness

This little girl is the essence of American randomness.

Anki

I have been reading many blogs to learn about studying Japanese as well as JET and other things that interest me. While reading the blog Hopeless romantic The blogger suggests several study methods that I think will be really useful one of these is a method of learning kanji, when I get it and use it for a while I will write a small review on it to tell you all what I think about it. But for now I am going to talk about a really cool program that he suggested, Anki. This program is great! it is used to make flash cards that adhere to research concerning memory studys and the amount of time that you should wait between reviewing older material. Basicaly if you know some information on a flash card well, then the next time the program uses that specific card will be in the more distant futre than the cards that you have more difficulty with. The best part is that it is free! but there is a place to donate and I would recomend that everyone does because this is made by an individual and not a corporation and the product will surely become a valuable tool in your self study regiment. So go out and try Anki! It is a great program.

sub-piphonie 2

here is the next sub-piphonie in the series: Never let anything as common and easily obtained as money get in the way of something as important as a good friendship.

A Friend of mine owes me a nice amount of money and unfortunately he is so embarrassed about it that he has stopped talking to me. it has been a few months now and I have finally caught up with him and told him that he owes me nothing. Unfortunately he still feels that he does and I think it is going to take a lot more persuasion to get him to hang out with me again and that is a shame because we have been Friends for over six years... so to all you out there: Money is everywhere, all you have to do is go get it, but good friends are hard to come by. So unless it is a huge amount of money that they owe you like $5000 (why would you lend a friend that much money?). Don't let it tarnish your friendship. that goes for the other way around too if you owe some one money don't just disappear, it makes people think you don't care about them.

Sub-piphonies

This year I have had several small Epiphanies that have happened to a million people a million times but I feel they need to be said in case some have not experienced (or realized that they experienced) them. I will start a new label called "Sub-piphonies" and hopefully they will help some people out as I deliver them or at least make people think or reflect. The first thought in this series is: Human emotion is the most urological thing that I have ever encountered. One might think that this is common sense but I never knew how true it was until I had some experiences recently and after thinking back this statement proves its self many many times in what I have seen and experienced over the years. And it can be any emotion: anger, greed, happiness, sorrow, elation. Absolutely any of them. More over any combination of emotion seems to be compatible with any other at some time or another. Emotions are very odd things :)

Snow?

If you ever come to Birmingham and talk to people, about snow, who are above the age of twenty, that have lived here their entire life, about eighty percent of them will begin recounting the "Winter Storm of 1993" where 13 inches accumulated for about five days and brought this city to a stand still. Needless to say we do not get much snow here, but when we do every one freaks out. For the last few days I have heard of this cold front that is bringing snow to Birmingham. I am usually skeptical of winter weather advisory but apparently they were right this time. I woke up this morning to my boss calling me ... unfortunately I can only assume that he had the phone in his pocket and accidentally called me an hour before my alarm went off. Any how, in my groggy daze I looked out of the window and was blinded by the reflection off of snow that had covered every where. It really is a beautiful sight if you are not use to it. Still sleepy I went back to bed until my alarm went off. After explaining why I could not stay home just because it was snowing to my girlfriend, I got ready for work and walked on out side to my truck. By that time the snow was melted off of the roads so I had no difficulty going in to work. It continued snowing for hours until about noon when it stopped. The sun came out, the temperature increased, and by 1:30 you could not even tell that it had snowed. Yesterday we had probably 1700 visitors to our mu seam, and that has been standard for the last few weekends, but today due to the snow, I bet we only had 150 visitors all day. People here are so afraid of the snow that they postponed all plans for some thing that was gone by 1:30 and we don't close until 6:00. It really is amusing to watch people react to life. I really do hope that I get to go to Sapporo and experience snow enough to get tired of it.

This is the snow at around 10:30

And this is a picture at 1:30... man I wish it had stayed longer.

25 things

I have had many Friends do this 25 things about them page and I found it so fun to read about them and their randomness that I did it as well. So I thought I would share it with you all.
1. I was raised Mormon.
2. I have the lowest IQ in my family except for my mother.
3. I started my first real job when I was 13 years old.
4. I was the only male in my graduating class.
5. I was a Veterinary Technician when I was 17.
6. I started teaching high school when I was 19 and stopped when I was 23.
7. The FBI has my finger prints.
8. I have been to Australia and New Zealand.
9. I am learning Japanese To teach English in Japan.
10. I make sculptural furniture.
11. I have 2 tattoos and 1 brand on my back.
12. I have very crooked pinky's that I inherited from my mother.
13. I have part of a pencil lodged in my right knee.
14. I spent my last day "off" buying beer and lotto tickets.
15. I have had 16 different room mates over 7 years in one house. 2 of which lived in the kitchen.
16. I was an intern at sloss furnace.
17. It took me 7 years to graduate from college.
18. I am dyslexic.
19. I become obsessed and consumed by what ever I want to learn at the time.
20. My girl Friend is 15 inches shorter than I am.
21. John Watters once stared at me for 45 minutes.
22. My favorite color is red.
23. I have been bestowed the priest hood from two different religions but I am an atheist.
24. my eyes are the same color scheme as my brothers only backwards.
25. when I was a kid I was some times called the Kissing Bandit.

Hulu Halarious!

curry soup

Yay I made curry soup and it was great! though it was my rendition of curry soup and probably tastes nothing like the curry soup that I have been reading about tastes. Perhaps next time I will look up a recipe and attempt it that way. oh by the way, in case you didnt figure it out already, it was an American bastardization and was flavored surf and turf curry flavor mmmmmm. sorry about the odd colorization of the image. I didnt have my camera with me and had to use my girlfrends and I dont know where the white balance is on it.

american cooking

I have been racking my brain to decide what American food is and I have decided that America doesn't have any cuisine of its own. Most of Americas food is derived from bastardizations of other countries food. On one had this is great, we have some really delicious food that makes us a culinary adventure anytime that you want to try something new. On the other hand it is really difficult to pin down a recipe that I would take to Japan to describe American cuisine. Sure I live in the south and I could technically make grits, collard greens, cornbread, black eyed peas and other stereotypes but I don't think that is a good representation of who we really are. Please put in your vote on what American cuisine really is and Ill keep working on it. I leave you with a recipe that I designed and that I currently am eating.
noodles in butter sauce:
1 large package of egg noodles (I prefer the spiral kind)
24 oz chicken stock
1 stick of butter
1/2 cup of green olives
1 can artichoke hearts
1 can cream of mushroom soup
12 oz mushrooms of your preference
mix together butter and chicken stock boil until it has reduced by half volume. next add olives, artichoke hearts, cream of mushroom soup, and mushrooms. simmer for 5 minutes. combine with very well drained prepared noodles then serve.
I have found that pork goes very well with this so feel free to add diced ham, bacon, or prosciutto.
I can not stop thinking about curry soup I think I am going to attempt a rendition of that tonight. Ill be sure to post the results.

dark beer....

In response to a comment from my last post. as my Friend Keelie pointed out, Sapporo beer is a light beer and lightighter beer is on the other end of the spectrum from where the beer that I like it so... out of curiosity has anyone found a dark Japanese beer? If so I need to try it out... please post any that you all have heard of!!!

places to live

When applying for the JET program, every one gets to name a place that they would like to be sent to. Not that it is a guarantee that you would be put there but it is still nice to be able to have a say in it. I have done a little research into interesting cities and have found a ton of them. In the next few posts I would like to introduce them starting with my first choice Sapporo. I like living in a city with the population density of Birmingham, it seems to be a nice balance. Birmingham and its metro area contain about 1,100,000 people and the city is about 150 sq miles. Sapporo on the other hand has about 1,800,000 people and is about 3X’s the size of Birmingham. Though it is larger than Birmingham its population density is still probably higher in reality because the cities size includes mountains that are not often inhabited by large numbers of people. Also, I like the cold and the average annual temperature in Sapporo is about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. More over Sapporo gets 190 inches of snow a year. I have only experienced “real” snow (more than a 2 or 3 inches) 3 times in my life that I can remember. I have been told that it doesn’t take long to get tired of snow but I am willing to give it a shot. Speaking of snow Sapporo has an annual snow festival every year which includes ice sculptures! Sounds like a blast to me.
Good food is a huge necessity for me and Sapporo is known for Curry soup and miso ramen both sound super tasty to me. It also doesn’t hurt that they have a famous brewery there that makes Sapporo beer and that they have an annual festival that includes beer gardens and food during the summer. All and all this place sounds ideal for me. Next post Ill get off the north island and talk about a place that is a little warmer.

New furnature

I have a show coming up in a little more than a month and I have made nothing for it so far.... So I guess I need to get cracking on it. I need to make about six pieces two of which need to be lounge chairs because they sell really well. I have been thinking a whole lot about Japan, its culture and its language so I think it would be fun to draw from that to make a few of the pieces. For some reason I am attracted to the idea of making furnature from the shapes of Hiragana I assume because that is all that I have been studying for the last week. So what is the most comfortable Hiragana symbol to you all? please leave a comment with your opinion! Dont worry if the symbol has parts that are not connected it will be part of the fun to design to get around those problems! For those of you who do not know what it looks like see the image below.

What would I bring

So I was reading another JET hopefuls blog Flying sound. He has just finished the interview process of the application and recounted some of the questions that they asked him. This has given me a ton to think about. The most worry some question was "what would you bring to Japan to teach people about America?" After a few days of thinking about what I would do I decided that I would bring my cooking skills. Several great advantages of this; first is that taking a skill instead of an item takes up much less space in my luggage, second is that every one like food! Thinking about it food is one of the biggest defining factors of any and all culture,s so it seems like one of the easiest ways to teach about America.

Japanese progress

It has been a month sense I have started going back to college to learn Japanese and I must say that I love it! It is such a logical language. So far I think I am keeping up fairly well with the curriculum and i have been studying other aspects of Japanese in my free time so hopefully one day my several ways of learning it will converge and I will jump ahead of my current standing as a Japanese 101 student. I have employed several methods to study outside of class. I have been using Rosetta stone software to learn straight up expressions and sentences. I spent some time reading the Japanese for Dummies book and though it was fun and it helped a little. More over I bought a Nintendo DS and the Japanese Coach game. It is really great to learn tons of vocabulary and I can use it anywhere which is a huge plus. I watch anime with no subtitles just to listen to them talk and then I re watch it with sub Oh yah and I make note cards ... hundreds and hundreds of them :( I think at the rate that I am going, if I can keep up the pace, I will be ready to apply for the JET program next December. Often times I think about the large amount of money, effort, and time that I am putting into this and I wonder if I am foolish for doing so just on a bet that I may get in to the program. Its very discouraging to think about it so I usually put it out of my mind and think about alternatives if I don't get in. oh well here are some pictures of my study material as well as a look at how some of my hiragana is going. I personally think it has improved and looks much less like a 5 year old's hand writing and more like a 13 year old's hand writing. I am getting better at recognizing the writing but I still have a long way to go be for I stop sounding like a hooked on phonics commercial.

mmmm soooo good!

I want to announce to the world that their are some things that America Bastardized from other countries (including Japan) that turn out bad... BUT I have found one of the things that turned out great! and it is pure gold baby! I was in Walmart spending the last of my cash on food for the coming week when I walked past the ethnic food section much to my suprise I found Golden brand curry mix making me jump for joy in the middle of the isle. Upon closer inspection I noticed that there were some very dirty bottles that looked like they had been on the shelf for half of an eternity. I was shocked at what I saw, Tabasco Soy Sauce. I snatched up one of the sticky and dust covered bottles and tossed it in the buggy with partal glee and partal horror. So when I made it back to my girlfrends house I took it to the sink and gave it a nice scrubbing befor opening it up. After that I ripped of the seal, poured some into the palm of my hand, and tasted it woah moma is it good! I should have guessed that spicy soy sauce would be good due to my love to Wisabi and soy sauce mixed to gether for sushi. I was just suprised at how well tabasco did it. so to all the people out there who like spicy food and soy sauce you should try it out. you wont be sorry!

I know I know I should post more often but I have an excuse!

So I have not added a post in a very long time. Life has been very hectic and I have been with out a sure form of internet for more than a day at a time as of late. Things are starting to get back to normal now... Thankfully! I just moved from my home of seven years and relocated back to my fathers house in order to save money in the event that I am accepted into the JET program. I would really like to save enough to pay for my plane ticket and have enough left over to auto pay my Student loans for at least two years. There are other benefits that come with this move the fist is that I don't have to worry about covering others rent which I have had to do numerous times with the 17 room mates that I have had at various times in that house over the years. It gives me a great quiet place to go to study Japanese a few days a week. More over my direct family members are my most trusted friends so it is nice to live with one of them again, they are always good company! I only stay at my fathers about 2 days out of the week because he lives 15 miles away from my job so the rest of the time I spend at my girlfriend's new apartment that is about 2 miles away from my work and 3 blocks from the school that I am taking Japanese from. hopefully everything will continue smoothing out and life will get back to or become less busy than it was before :)

Japanese 101

So at the end of last week I started taking my first Japanese class. So far it is easy, not that I thought the first day would be super hard. We talked about what Japanese words everyone knew and the professor asked that we learn seven words all of which are very easy: iie, hai, Sayoonara, Knonnichiwa, doomo, doozo, and desu. Lucky for me I already know all of those so I decided to learn most of the Japanese sounds and started learning some Katagana. So here it is A,I,U,E,O:

I hope that at the end of the semester I can look back at this and feel embarised about how poorly I wrote it. Ahh well my next class is tomorrow I hope that I learn lots! well everyone take it easy!

Gender specific food

So I went to the Asian food store today to get some fun food. Here is what I got :) Hot curry mix (my favorite), Noodle soup base and Soba noodles (for a delicious treat), and Men's Pocky? what? Now don't get me wrong the pocky is delicious but I don't understand. There is no women's pocky that I know of. It's dark chocolate so is that a literal translation of what dark chocolate is in Japanese? Anyone know what this is all about?

The new year

ok so I have reviewed what all has happened this year like so many crappy end of the year shows and I have discovered that it has been a great year! here is what has happened and I have learned in a nut shell:

1. So at the beginning of the year I started going out with my current girlfriend. she is a trip and then some. Lots - O - Fun!

2. I was able to have my Bachelor of fine arts senior show. its a nice addition to my artists resume.

3. I got my first "real" good pay, benefits, insurance, job at the McWane Science Center.

4. I graduated from college. Finally after 7 years.

5. I learned that Taco Bell Fire sauce is good on almost anything. Hot dogs and cup of noodles to name a few.

6. Finally I have a goal that I really really really want to accomplish. Having something that I really want to do is a great thing to happen to me. I find that in these scenarios the best comes out of me and it always seems to change my life for the better. which brings me to my goals for the year.

This will be the first year for me to do new years resolutions, and I want them bad enough that I think it will be easy to keep to them.

1. Learn to speak Japanese well enough to talk to a five year old with only a little difficulty.

2. practice singing so I don't completely embarrass my self at karaoke.

3. save up enough money to pay for my plane ticket to Japan and save enough money to pay my student loans for a year assuming I get the position.

4. and I guess I'll throw in some exercise for the year so I can have a little more energy.

finally I found this great quote. I think my last resolution for the year is to attempt to live by it.

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
-Pablo Picasso