this weekend i did something really japanese. really local too. i went with a lady i teach english with to her mother's house. the mission to plant some of Supertown's famous black beans, KUROMAME! people here go nuts over this stuff. its a pretty good bean too. and this place was supposed to be not only the best Kuromame in Supertown, but also in Japan!!

so me, the lady, her daughters (too cute to handle) and grandma put on some golashes and with spades in hand stepped into the muddy mounds of.. well.. mud.

i thought it was going to be there all day, sweating and cringing under the summer sun. but the whole thing took about 10 minutes. 12 budding sprouts were lifted and planted into their new home, a nice moisturey row of mud.

then after that we went and ate food. lots of food. it was nice nice nice. i made some origami with the kids too.

i'll take some pictures sometime (would have been good to have them now). and we can all watch my beans grow up into little bean bushes. and then into the great famous Kuromame!

tonight i will tell you about what i'm holding out on. here's just a short list of what

49 files: on my computer that are either short stories, poems, rants, or some song lyrics - mostly incomplete.
3 files: submissions for wimpkiller that i've sucked at uploading.
14 files: garageband projects ... these are songs that aren't finished. six of which i'd consider decent. i think there are about three or four bootlegs floating around with bad vocals and ample amounts of unfinishedness. (not counting my A VERY MERRY SITAR CHRISTMAS ALBUM (coming in December!))
1 million: scraps of paper on which i've written thoughts and stuff down. could be impossible to compile. reason i bought a $3000 laptop, to prevent myself from scribbling on scraps of paper.

so i guess that's not as bad as i made it out to be.... but that's what's up.

so... here's another amount of idle time spent at the ol' blogstone. take and enjoy.

it was here now its gone.

today was another day where i wanted to delete the blog. a couple more of these and we might have a crisis.

today there was a typhoon that hit mainland japan. where was i? working at school. where were the kids? sent home. apparently kids in mortal danger is more important than public workers in mortal danger. so what did i do today!? practically a day off!

i finished harry potter and the goblet of fire. this may go down as the longest book i've ever read (next to the bible). that's something substantial.

i apologized to a sensei, whom i codename "Professor Snape", because i purposefully skipped some classes last week in my silent protest to not be an "add-in", but rather someone you plan to work with. it was a juvenile, and poorly executed protest. but maybe it said something.

i lived a day in japan during a typhoon, sat in my teachers room and watched rain fall through the windows.

i'm listening to a lot of The Streets... this is all apart of my new plan to master the English accent. the music is quite catchy. my favorite song is "could well be in". i saw this thing on iTV the other week...

i'm making a game for my special ed kids using Flash. it's about ABCs and stars the dAVATRON5000... look forward to a dAVATRON cartoon (?). its going alright, but its also hairpulling frustrating. i don't understand actionscripts, nor do i have the time to learn them. rawr.

and finally, i realized that i retained about 1% of what i studied in college.

a buddha for you, a buddha for me
here's a bonus: yesterday, a guy and i drove around to the next town (the longway) and we saw these HUmONGUS buddhas sitting on the mountain. very weird to see in this town of about 1,000... so we went to investigate. well it turned out that these statues were indeed big. we walked around and saw all the gods and demigods. evil looking war gods. and the 500 buddhas. apparently, as lonely planet legend would have it, one of the five hundred bears a resemblance to you... dunno if that was true.

well... that's that. i'm outta here because the ol' computer is running outta juice

this week i was driving home from my pottery class (i had decided to go straight home and not to the bar, thank God) and i noticed some flashing lights... so sly as i am, i thought i'd take a little short cut on some rice paddy road. then i saw more lights! it was a checkpoint! uh-oh.

so they stopped all cars. waved me and asked for my license. my original plan has always been to feign total ignorance of japanese for the purposes of avoiding the law. but i crumbled because i understood everything.

he asked for my license. so i opened up my wallet and pulled out my Texas license. officially (shhhh!) i need to show my International Driving Permit from AAA... but this little beauty expired in April... so i show my TxDL and he 'hrrmms' and 'hmmms' a bit and lets me go.

i thought i was about to get deported. if not deported, fined a crapload ($2000) for not having a current license. whoops. the moral of this story is: i think i should work a little harder on getting my Japanese Driver's License. yup. i a man on the run.