So, this has been a while in coming, and it's not gonna be that long, or anything. i'm mostly doing it cuz i realized while video skyping with ro that most of the people who read this are in america, and have no idea what's going on in my day-to-day life over here. i'll write updates when something big happens, and i'll take a long time to do a good job, but 1. it takes forever to read and to write, and 2. there's more than just huge, i-just-got-engaged type of stuff that happens to me. and it's the littler things that define my days. it's like a seismometer. every once in a while, there's huge earthquakes (none here for a while, actually), and they make these huge peaks. but more often, there's little earthquakes that make smaller peaks. and i want you guys to be able to be a part of my life over here.

so, with that in mind:
spring is finally here! about a week ago, on a saturday, the temp got up to 25C (about 80), and we were all in shorts and t-shirts and sandals, and all the sakura and ume trees were blooming everywhere, and life was good! then the next day it was chilly and windy. then it got rainy. and more windy. etc. etc. the low on that magical saturday was like 13C, and the highs for the next week were all about 12 and 13. so we were all pissed off. but now it seems like spring is here to stay, which somehow makes everything better: food tastes better, the air smells cleaner. it's like we remember that everything is an adventure, and it's exciting.

on a sidenote, i also realized that it's pretty easy to make a rough estimate of fahrenheit from celcius: take the celcius, double it, and add 30. so 25C becomes 80F. if you feel like doing the actual math, ((25 x 1.9) + 32), you'll find that the real answer is 79.5F., which is a variation i think i can live with.


wedding prep is going well, as far as i know. i've never really done this before, so i have nothing to compare it to, but things are progressing, and me and nelle are still friends. we did realize last week that we are doing this whole wedding thing as difficultly as possible. for example: we're doing the invitations ourselves, and they're 2 layers, and we commissioned the art on them, so they're really cool. but it took forever just to print them, especially since the printer felt like asserting it's control over me from time to time by jamming for no reason on the really expensive paper we had in there. and we're including a photo in the invite (which you guys now get to look forward to), but rather that being sensible and either getting it done professionally (which japan doesn't really do that well, to be honest), or just having a digital photo made and slapping it in, i (for some reason) thought it would be cool to hand-print the photo. so i've already spent about a full day locked in the schools darkroom making these things, and i'm only about half way.

i think they're really cool when i look at them individually, but really, nothing destroys the beauty of something like mass-producing it.

we could have eloped. nelle was seriously suggesting it. we could have had our wedding in america. the parents and siblings could have put it together. or, we could have gotten married in japan, but somewhere local. and rather than try and do everything ourselves in our own way, we could have just looked at stuff on the internet and ordered it. (sigh) i think it was a good thing that we chose to do this the way we did, but in the moment, it's kind of a pain.

alright, i'm gonna add some photos to this bad boy, and call it done. hopefully before too long i'll be back!

ps. i'm including the link to the pictures we had taken for our invites--they're some of the best of us i've ever seen!

Ry's Pics