3rd of July!

Well today is the 4th but I’ve gotta go to work.  In fact, I’ve got about an hour till I need to start getting ready.  I’ll talk about what we did yesterday but first I realized I forgot to mention my experience at the 耳鼻科 last week.  On Monday I was in class when suddenly my left ear went kinda deaf.  I could hear OK, just some strange metallic humming and is sounded like people were speaking into a tin can or something.  Anyway, didn’t subside all day so went to the doctor Tuesday morning and the doctor pulled out a HUGE chunk of wax.  Literally it looked like an 梅干し.　Gross. I could hear better but still not perfect but gradually it seems like my ear’s all better.  It’s weird, my right ear was all beautiful and I try and keep my shit looking good so I don’t know how this coulda happened.  Doc said there was no infection… Weird.

So yesterday, in honor of today’s holiday it’s been my tradition to go out for Yakiniku (BBQ) and/or have a BBQ.  We’d originally planned on the BBQ but because we ended up getting tickets to the soccer game so we just went for the Yakiniku route.  It was pretty decent:

After lunch we went home, MJ took a nap and then we headed off to Omiya and the game, here’s the view from 北朝霞 station looking out over the town:

We got lucky. I was checking the train times and came upon a lucky find.  There’s a special train occasionally run by JR on holidays and weekends that let us go right from Kita-Asaka to Omiya without transferring or stopping.  Pretty sweet!  We got to Omiya and started walking to the stadium.  It’s about a 20-minute walk and the way leading up to the stadium is pretty cool.  There’s a long path bookended by two 鳥居, here’s the 2nd one just before entering the shrine:

And a couple from inside:

In that last picture the giant stone in the middle reminds me of a hash brown.  We didn’t really take too much time walking through the shrine, I was pretty impatient to get to the stadium itself which was just beyond the giant hash brown. This picture doesn’t do it justice, click on the link and check out the biggest version (which is still only 20% of the original). Great stadium.  As you can see, there’s also a baseball stadium just beyond the north stands.  The Lions play there sometimes, I’d love to see a game there some time.

The stadium was pretty awesome, so much better than Kawasaki’s stadium because there’s no track around the field, it was pretty sweet. Also the shrine/park next door is pretty good too.  The one problem was the cheers frightened the boy a bit so his mom had to cover his ears a couple of times

So that was it, we lost 0-1 (and more importantly, Kawasaki lost 1-2) and we headed home… Happy 4th everyone!

Sunday-Monday and other days.

Well looky there.  Still no voice. Well, more voice than yesterday. Much more than Friday or Saturday but even what little I have today I imagine wouldn’t last long if I’d gone to work so I’m home sick again today.  Hope I’ll be near full strength tomorrow so I can go in to work Tuesday and Wednesday. The wife and I might head to an Ear Nose and Throat doctor this afternoon to get me checked out and maybe speed up my recovery.  Being an English conversation teacher and not being able to talk is quite a conundrum.

Hey, it snowed like crazy again this morning! Sweet!So Sunday, well, I felt fine, the weather was amazing and incredibly Spring-like (weird how these snow flurries seem to come the day after Spring-like weather…) so we went for a walk and had lunch outside the house.  We went to Jolly Pasta and my favorite picture from the restaurant was this awesome backhand I received from the boy when I got too close, gotta keep your pimp hand strong: After lunch it was off to Baskin Robbins for some ice cream: And after that, we spent some time at the park. MJ played with some other kids (a girl with exceptional eyebrows especially took a keen interest in him) and we rode the slide a bunch:

And that was about it for Sunday.  I got Killzone 3 two weeks ago and played a little bit of it but have to get a bit more into it.  Also got Fight Night Champion last week and played a bit.  Both of them are pretty good but I’ll hold off absolute judgement a little while longer.  This week I’m hoping MLB 2K11 will be on its way to the place and then next week I think I’m in for Homefront (probably place my order later today) so a lot of gaming to do this month.  Need to get back and healthy, been going to bed too early lately to get in many games. Also have Back To The Future The Game Pt. 2 to get into… Can’t wait for this Sunday most of all though, SOCCER!!! It will be the first game since we got the new camera so I’m really excited to bust out the zoom lens and hopefully get some cool pictures of the stadium, the game, and the action!

Finally, the boy sleeping, I took this under really bad lighting conditions so I tried to bump things up in Photoshop, not sure how I feel it turned out but here it is anyway, later:

down goes MJ!

So it seems like MJ might be battling his first real cold.  He’s got a seriously stuffed up nose and seems to have come up with a cough this evening.  Not cool man, not cool.  He seems to have gotten it from his cousin when he went over to her place on Saturday for her first b-day party.  I didn’t go because I had to work so I’d requested the wife to take some pictures in my absence.  I appreciate her doing that for me but I also realized that I shouldn’t be absent from any more family outings as this was the only picture that I really liked from the lot: I mostly like the humor in it.  There were some other pictures that gave me the idea of what went on but not really anything stunning.  I’ll be there next time. Anyway, happy birthday K-chan!

In other news, we took a little outing today to a local “home center” and I picked up a nice little tool box to put my miscellaneous tools and such in.  Nice.

We finally got tickets on Saturday to our first game in about a year and a half and I couldn’t be more excited!!!!  We’re gonna go see Omiya Ardija at their home stadium just up the road on March 13th.  We’ve decided to become Ardija fans because we’re close, Urawa is too popular and Ardija are pretty bad so they probably won’t compete with our true love (Frontale). I’m really excited to see the stadium (Nack 5) because the one thing I never really liked about Frontale was Todoroki stadium.  It’s pretty big, usually close to capacity and the fans are great but because it’s multi-purpose they have a track around the field so even when we sat in the first row we were still 20-30 feet from the field.  Maybe more. Nack 5 is soccer only so I’m hoping it’ll be nice, doubt it’ll be as packed as Todoroki though but I’m hoping the fans have some passion.

Last news for now is I put in some orders on play-asia.  This Tuesday (Wed. in Japan) Killzone 3 should ship out (if all goes well) and should be here by the weekend.  That game looks real good!  The following week Fight Night Champion should be headed my way and then the week after MLB 2K11 is on its way.  I haven’t put an order in for Homefront yet just because I want to see a bit more before I pledge to that one but I did see a little gameplay footage on GT.TV yesterday and it looks pretty cool.  Still, I’ll wait a bit till I hear some hands-on reviews and such.

That’s it, a shout-out to Casey and his fam who are leaving for the US on Tuesday, be safe ya’ll!