I recently purchased a new cell phone; one that I had had my eye on for a while but had held off on because of price. However, with the arrival of the new spring models over the past couple weeks resulted in a huge price slash on the “older” winter models. This particular phone is part of the AU Design Project, which brings in famous designers and design teams to create a new concept for a phone which they then put out; releasing a new one about once a year. The man behind my model is the renowned designer Naoto Fukusawa, someone who I’ve been following for a while now. When I first saw his design concept for this new cell phone, I was incredibly intrigued, especially with this particular color scheme. Knowing that my old phone was getting a bit worn out, I decided to patiently bide my time with the hope that the price would eventually come down without completely selling out. As luck would have it though, I spotted it again a couple weeks ago at about a third of the original price, and again when I finally went in to inquire they were able to knock the new price again in HALF! Sweet.

While perhaps not as flashy as a new iPhone, I have been enjoying some of it’s new features, including: taking pictures and movies with it’s 2mgp built in phone, listening to the radio, organizing my schedule on it’s built in planner, accessing the internet, checking out all the latest news headlines that are automatically downloaded to the display screen, oh and watching TV on it. Very sweet indeed.

(^o^)v

Well, it’s Valentine’s Day over here, which means there’s a lot of homemade chocolates floating around the school and being passed out the by the girls (guys have there chance to return the favor on White Day next month). Male teachers can also get in on the action of free chocolates, unless apparently they’re me, in which case they get none… boo-hoo. With a lack of love from my students, it looks like I’ll be stopping at convenience store this year to pick up my sugar fix. Sad! Oh well, maybe I’ll have better luck next year.

A far happier event that occurred a couple weeks ago however was my mom’s birthday. She turned a solid 35 this year, and I was able to call her early that morning to wish her a happy birthday (the first one!). In honor of the happy occasion, I opted to paint her a picture detailing some of the events of the past six months. The picture is part of a series that I’ve been doing as a sort of a visual collaboration to the Why Not Me site that Tait created and is maintaining. I already gave two of those pictures to my mom for Christmas, which are now happily framed and residing above her bed, with the hope of some more ambitious ones to come. This particular one that I gave her for her birthday is a proverbial Where’s Waldo of imagery, with the image itself being rather simplified to emphasize the different elements. I was pretty happy with the results, and hope to have it to her soon.

Along this same vane is the new art class I started attending at the end of last year. This had been something that I had been looking into since last fall, but was put off for a couple months because of the difficulty in finding an evening class that offered the type of courses I was looking for. With a great amount of help from one of my JTEs who’s husband is an art teacher, I was finally able to locate a private art school in a city about forty minutes away from me. The facilities themselves are great, with a very friendly and knowledgeable staff, and the ability to adapt the class to your own interests. The class itself is quite small and intimate, with only between two and six students coming each week; which of course means a lot of time with the teacher. I’ve been mostly working with acrylic paint in class, a medium that I’ve been interested for a while now but never really had the chance to use. It’s been understandably slow going at first as I learn how to use it, but there’s also progress and I’m enjoying every minute of it. I’ll have some stuff up from my class eventually; right now it’s still mostly failures and I’m a little embarrassed to show them off quite yet. In the meantime enjoy the work above, and I should have some more posts up in the next week or so.

I hope this post will help you have many major art attacks to come! Keep blasting off with pencil (painting) power and remember the 3D’s of 3D drawing…DREAM IT! DRAW IT! DO IT! Thumbs up for cool, creative, artistic, blog reading geniuses like you! YEAH!!!!

Seasons greetings to everyone, and sorry that this first post of the New Year is a tad late in coming. I have a couple more posts that I’m working on in addition to this one, so hopefully you’ll be seeing some more content up here soon.

So the holidays found me back home in the winter wonderland of Michigan, and I had a great time seeing everyone, and stocking up on American quintessentials (i.e. pizza, steak, and more pizza) before heading back to the land of robots and Godzilla. There was a few rough spots in there, with my mom having to go into the hospital for four days due to chemo side effects, which was of course hard, but we were able to spend some good time together and still managed to make it out to Uno’s and Barnes & Nobles.

So now I’m back to school, teaching an average of four classes a day, and trying very hard to survive the very cold conditions of the schools here. (Perseverance under ridiculous circumstances builds character! Hoo-ha! ) I ended up bringing a thick blanket from home to school, which I wrap around my legs when I’m sitting at my desk. It almost helps. I try to also drink a lot of hot beverages, such as green tea, though that also seems to cool down much faster than I can drink it…

Oh, and then it decided to snow yesterday.

Having gone the entirety of last winter without seeing a single snowflake, you can imagine my surprise upon leaving my house yesterday morning for church to discover the above situation. Needless to say, I dropped everything and quickly took some pictures (such as the one at the top of the post) to document this momentous occasion. I was feeling quite exhilarated, until I realized that I still had to ride my bike through all that to make it to church, which by that point I was running late for. Rats in a barrel.

Despite all that, I still made the decision this past month to re-contract for a third and final year on the JET program. I realized that despite some of the headaches involved in teaching English in the Japanese public school system, my situation is ideal in many ways, and instead of looking at the negatives I wanted to try and take advantage of all the positives. One of those positives was to start taking a weekly evening art class in a town about forty minutes away from me. I’ve really been enjoying the class so far, and I’ll be posting more about it in the near future. I’ve been trying to pursue some other art related projects on my own, including a digital archiving of some of my favorite photos from my college photography class. I posted one of those images above, and you can see more on my flickr account here. I’ve still got piles more to go, and of course new images coming in all the time, so please drop by anytime.

So what, you may ask, does this re-contracting decision mean for me? My last contract will take affect from August of this year, ending in July of 2009, after which point I will in most likelihood return home, possibly to pursue graduate work. I will continue teaching here in Kurihashi, which is a big relief after the drama of Kuki, and will keep my same apartment and continue teaching in the same two schools. I feel happy with my decision, and feel that God was definitely leading me in this direction. My time in Japan in this current context is now already half way finished, and I’m looking with anticipation to the latter half. I’m not sure how things will unfold, but I hope that you will join me for the ride. Expect more posts and news soon!

Cheers.