Party!

A few shots from the R family's goodbye party. Not great as I forgot to get the camera out until late, and most of the delicious food had disappeared!
Great party, R-team.

The traditional shot of Lorna eating.

Pernilla's yummy cheese "brain"!

Pre-party Sleepover

Too many bugs for real camping, but we improvised with an indoor camp in our tatami room.
G drew this great picture, and Mummy thinks it deserves a mention!

Long lost masterpieces

Humans by Weechan circa 2005

These came out of a little used book recently.

On race, Morgan Freeman

I love it!

Mummy by Weechan

MIchael

So I'm kind of sad. Whatever you can say of him, he's the icon of my generation I suppose. Like Elvis was for my Mum's.
But I have to say I was genuinely surprised today at work. I teach 12 1nd 13 year olds on Fridays, and was expecting them all to give me the "So what?" look when I mentioned him dying.They have often not even heard of huge Western stars. Some of them did. Then at lunchtime, a 13 year old girl came running up screaming "Jackie!!" (I get this a lot).

"Jackie, you told 2-5 that Michael Jackson is dead"

"Yes, I'm really sad."

" NOOOO!"

And then she burst into tears in my arms. In all seriousness.

Who cares about all the rest of it?

If you can make a 13 year old girl in Japan cry when you die, that's the mark of a true superstar. And there has to be a reason for that.

Call me sad, but I'll drink to him.

Hope he's at peace now.

Birdmen

OK, so I don't have time to tell the full story right now, but thought I better share my husband's bravery (or something!) with the world first.

Last weekend we had an adventurous day at Kijima Korakuen in Beppu. There was much upping and downing and round abouting, but by far the craziest thing anyone did was this. N and DrY tested their and our nerves by being dropped from a great height. Horizontal bungee jumping- not for the faint hearted!

Family Friends Food and Fish and Tokan-san 09

Some shots and a couple of videos if you scroll down, of Hiroshima's
Yukata (summer kimono) festival a couple of weeks ago.

Bon-odori dancing in Shintenchi

Hiroshima's Elvis?
And it seems the Slosh crosses all cultural barriers!

The Curse

OK, so I tempted fate and Weechan and I replanted her morning glory seedlings and her sunflower seed project a week or so ago.
Everyone says, oh you can't go wrong with these ones, they're practically impossible to kill.
But "everyone" doesn't know about the curse.
I have quite obviously been hexed in a previous life, to the effect that every even vaguely green life form that I come within 3 feet of, shall wither and die before my very eyes.

And usually inside 3 weeks.

In the week since we planted them, the sunflower has already perished, despite my best efforts.
The morning glories and the tomato seeds we planted are still gripping fiercely on to life, but then, we haven't reached the 3 week mark yet.

NO, really, you have no idea the crushing sense of responsibility and doom that comes over me when people give me a simple plant gift.

And now Lorna has given me a rhubarb seedling with the final fatal verbal accompaniment:

NO-ONE CAN KILL RHUBARB.

No-one who's not cursed, I say...

Shakespeare Revisited

A flashback to the Shakespeare production of Romeo and Juliet at Jogakuin the other week.

Do these faces give you any idea how worried I was at the beginning, that I'd made a huge mistake even thinking about taking two 6 year-olds and a 7 year-old to their first play.
After a dodgy start though, they all got really into it, and were trying to guess what was going to happen at the end.
Thanks to the players of the International Theatre Company and the British Council for organizing the tour.