This semester has been hectic. My colleague has been reassigned and most of the work the we had divided between the two of us has been placed in my lap. It's the end of the 4th week, and I can't wait 'til Christmas. But then, I always say that around the 4th week.

Anyway, this weekend was Alumni Weekend at our school. I started this Friday ( Read more... )

As I grow older, I can no longer do what I used to do. DUH!

There was a time when I would fast for a day and drop a few pounds. I would run a bit and work out a bit and lose another pound. But no more. Not after the big Five-Oh. I swear it is all downhill after that. You young whipper-snappers should make sure you stay fit now. Or if you're not, get ( Read more... )

I don't really remember the dream except for that I was running away and I began to stumble. The next thing I knew, I was falling and bumped my knee on the floor next to my bed. It was early morning and M, who was already awake and brushing her teeth, was surprised by the sound and ran in from the bathroom.


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Have you ever encountered someone you haven't seen in a while at the most unexpected place? When M came home from Japan last month, she ran into the grandmother of one of students/clients at Narita airport. Actually, she didn't really run into her. M had forgotten to fill out some kind of form for the ANA and they had been paging her throughout the ( Read more... )

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Living in Northern Virginia, in a suburb of Washington DC, has it good side and it's bad. It is, to be a sure, beautiful country. When I first visited DC, I came on a business trip from Japan. I had imagined Virginia as a rural land of tobacco, plantations and a bunch of hayseeds. Boy, was I ever wrong. The taxi ride from Dulles International to ( Read more... )

The other day, I wrote about my my eye surgery when I was in Japan. The Greatest_Pip left a comment that suggested that he thought my English was pretty good for a guy who had been in the US for 12 years--since 1996. Haha, I'd like to take a bow, but I had to tell him that basically my English is as good as anyone who was born, raised and educated ( Read more... )

Paul, David, Dennis, Steven, Kevin, Bill, Richard. These are nice All-American names. Indeed, these are the names of my classmates as I was growing up in LA in the 1960s at a Japanese missionary school where all the students had an ethnic make up of at least one-quarter Japanese. While illegal--and immoral--by today's standards, up until the 70s, ( Read more... )

In the previous post, I had a little fun at the expense of an innocent passerby--I do not assign any ulterior motive to his actions. Well, in the interest of fairness and openness, I should reveal that I too have had my own embarrassing moments when I did not realize with whom I was speaking.

A few years ago, I wrote about bathing at onsen, ( Read more... )

I just read a post by California Gal about her son. She posted a photo of her son and asked if he looked like a girl. He's a cute looking kid but still looks like a boy to me. But then, maybe non-Asians can't readily see the gender difference in Asians? They need other cues like clothing, cosmetics, or voice. This reminded me of an embarrassed look ( Read more... )