So, this is my big comeback. It's been a good year, with lots of stuff happening. I went through some of my pics from the year and picked out some of my favorites. They are in a sort of apathetical chronological order--the ones that are really obvious are sort of in the right place, and the ones that nobody really can tell the time of year are wherever they decided to be. I've spent the last hour editing the HTML trying to get this to where it is, and i'm not changing it. Anyone who's tried to arrange pictures in here knows what I'm saying. Check back at some point, and hopefully I'll have the pics set up so you can have a little context when your mouse hovers over them.

But for now, I need to get to bed--tomorrow's my first day teaching real classes to real students. Except that i'm not actually teaching Bible tomorrow--that actually starts tuesday. But, on the books, I start my career as a full-time Bible and Woodworking teacher tomorrow, which doesn't explain why I've been doing this, something that has no relevance. Or, maybe it does, considering that I've spent pretty much every waking minute for the last week preparing, sorting, moving, cleaning, shopping, blah, blah, blah........(snore)

***EDIT***
I updated again, so now if you let your mouse hover over the picture, you'll get a little description of what's going on.

3 things that are official:

1. We have a car! It's an awesome little k-van, with sunroofs and windows and...space for a dog! it's a stick. We're totally going hiking/camping with it as soon as possible. The gearing is a little weird though...1st gear is pretty much meant only for going up cliffs or something, cuz 90% of the time, I just start with 2nd. Still, though. Notice the room in the thing. And the windows. And the roofs. Awesome.









2. I'm a Bible teacher! CAJ offered me a contract (which i signed!) to teach Bible to it's students (anthropomorphic?). So I'll be the Woodworking slash Bible teacher! This means that I'm leaving the church as a pastor, though, so that's sad.


3. Spring! We survived the long, cold, lame winter, and now the highs for every day are just getting higher and higher! Seriously, wintertime just makes me feel brittle. Summertime makes me feel like playing in the water. Warmer weather just makes everyone happier. I love it.

And on to the honeymoon! We 'mooned on the Isle of Bali, part of the great country of Indonesia. We were there for 10 days, and during those 10 days, we probably walked about 100 miles. We get to Bali, it's late, and all we have is a “Lonely Planet Guide to Bali” book that was written about 10 years ago. Turns out the date of publication on stuff like that is actually rather important. So, we take a taxi to an area that we'd found while thumbing through “the book”, and, eventually, find a place to stay. “The book” ended up listing prices for things (including places to stay) at roughly half of what they were in reality. That took some getting used to, and it took a few more trips to the bank that we had anticipated. We stayed the Lombok area for 2 days, which were spent mostly walking up and down the coastline. Weather-wise, it was actually a lot chillier than we had expected. We were both (unconsciously) expecting the weather to be a lot like Thailand was a few years ago—so hot that the ocean water doesn't actually feel cold enough—but Bali was overcast and slightly rainy pretty much the whole time we were there.

After 2 days there we decide to take a boat to another island, one (we hoped) would be less....how do I say....tourisy, crawling with street vendors and hawkers, and developed. I almost lost our breakfast on the boat ride to Nusa Lembongan,, which is something like 20 miles off the coast of Bali. Once the rain stopped, I got on the roof of the battered wooden boat we were riding, and felt better. I also saw a shark! Just a little one, though.

Lembongan was a lot better than where we'd been staying. It was much less crowded, more conducive to adventuring. We got totally lost on the way from the bay where the boat landed to the area with places to stay (Mushroom Bay area, in case you're curious). We were being followed by a vendor with an umbrella (we think he was hoping it would rain so he could rent it to us?), so we just kept walking, and ended up on dirt roads and paths between cow fields and stuff. We ended up at the back entrance to a deserted temple above the town. But, we got to where we wanted to go, and got a cottage with aircon. All but one of the places we stayed had outdoor bathrooms, which were so cool I want one. All the plumbing—the bathroom sink, the shower/bath, the toilet, etc., is all “outside”. There's a roof over the toilet, but the shower and sink just have high walls, and no roof. This place had that.
Lembognan is much smaller than Bali, but it's still big enough, and undeveloped enough, that we thought we should see if we could rent a scooter to get around and see stuff, so we went to a vendor who was yelling at us about renting a scooter when we'd been on our way to breakfast. We asked to see the scooters he was renting, and he just pointed over to one parked by his shop. He wasn't renting scooters, he was going to rent us his scooter for the day. Which we gladly took. No pesky paperwork, no messing with licenses or paperwork or passports or even helmets. We gave him the money, he gave us the key. Yay! So we scooted around for the day, and had a lot of fun. We would see cool looking places off in the distance, and try and get there. We ended the evening as the only patrons at a cafe set on a cliff above the sea, the sun setting over Bali over by the horizon.

We learned the hard way that, in Bali, not only do they not make food until you order it, they usually don't buy the food to make until you order it. So it was in this case; the cook/owner sent his wife off down the path on a scooter to buy the ingredients for our supper. This means fresh food, yes, but we had the bad habit of waiting until we were hungry to find a restaurant, which means by the time our food came, an hour later, we were so hungry we couldn't even carry on conversation anymore, we'd just stare off at stuff. We also typically only ate 2 meals a day, which probably didn't help.

2 days there on Lembognan, then back to the main island, mostly because there was no ATM anywhere near, and we were running out of cash. That whole Lonely Planet thing again. We ended up staying in a very nice area, with lots to see within walking distance, but we managed to find a “guest home”, rather than a cottage. A guest home is more like a youth hostel. Like a complex with small apartments. A cottage is your own little house. We didn't really mind, though, cuz there's no way there was anything better in the area that didn't cost an arm and a leg. Really nice resorts just across the street. We'd cross the street, and walk through, and end up on the boardwalk and beach on the other side. It was while we were at this place that we bought a comb and scissors and I cut Nelle's dreds sitting out on a pier. People stared. In spite of the fact that our room had a leak, and there were never new towels or sheets or anything, and there was only one, blazingly bright florescent light in the place, we stayed there for 3 days, one day longer than we'd stayed at any of our past places. It really was a nice area, and the room was pretty cheap, so we figured we'd do the last 3 days at a nicer, more expensive place, and justify it by staying in a cheaper place first. Good idea.

The last place we ended up was right near Nusa Dua, which is the most poshest area of Bali, with the biggest, most over-the-top, expensive resorts on the island. They're all in a row, and the resort we stayed in the last 3 days was the first one after the row of Club-Med-style resorts. And it was totally great! The room was huge, there were fresh bottles of water in the fridge, the aircon was great, the people came in while we were gone and replaced stuff, and (gasp) there was cable TV! We watched a lot of TV for the first while we were there. We were so tired of walking for miles and miles, and bartering and deciding where to go and eat and everything. The place had a few lounge chairs out on their little stretch of beach, breakfast was included in the price of the room (it's nice to get up and not have to figure out where to walk to for food. And it was buffet-style!), and there was a nice grocery store a little bit down the road. We ended up buying bread and jam and oreo's and some other essential food items, and we'd eat breakfast, eat a late lunch/early dinner, and eat snacks in front of the TV. Actually, there wasn't that much on TV worth watching (as usual).

Our flight out left in the evening, and we had to be out of our room by noon, so we ended up watching Die Hard 4 and Transformers at a mall to pass the time. Both were quality entertainment, for the record, although I'd be more likely to rent and re-watch Die Hard. Personal preference. The flights to and from Tokyo and Bali are both listed as “direct flights”, but on the way back they always (apparently) “stop off” in Jakarta, which is definitely not in a direct line between Tokyo and Bali. I suspect it has to do with Bail being a fairly small island and not wanting to top off every 747 that flies out. So we had to sit around in the middle of the night in Jakarta for 2 hours. Boring.

not a honeymoon blog, but a humorous realization.

these 2 are still too sexy for their....whatevers.

I am reading a book right now, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the author, John Irving, jumps back and forth between writing about present and past... I have the bad habit of writing like whoever I've been reading recently (a la the Terry Prachett-inspired blog entry), the same way Ro does, and to me this means it ends up being fake. I don't mean to imitate the style of other people, it just happens! So I was sitting here, in my cabin at Takayama, thinking of cool ways of talking about how it snowed up here yesterday, how I found 2 of our 3 cats in a bush outside our river house, how I cut Nelle's hair on our honeymoon, and how amazing our wedding was. And I suppose I've now done that, in a way.

Just because of the kind of person I am, I like to think and write in a conversational style, as if I was in town for a few days, and you called me up and we went out to Palio's for coffee, and stayed there talking over a chessboard until they closed and all the students and philosophers and us got kicked out into a typically
rainy Portland night.

At this moment in reality, though, I'm trying to find that perfect spot where the kerosene heater hits me with the delicious blast of warm air, but doesn't dry my left eyeball out while doing so. I'm now typing with one eye closed, which somehow is making me spell badly.

The wedding. It was amazing. Mostly how everything worked out, and everyone seemed to have a blast. Nelle and me think that it has something to do with the fact that everyone had a job to do, everyone was involved somehow. I think usually at weddings, all the work is done, so all the guests can just sit back in the pews and judge everything. But when everyone is helping out somehow, everyone ends up with a personal interest in how everything's going, and the feeling, the atmosphere is somehow different. A lot like church, actually. Of course, the flip side is that we really did ask for a lot from a lot of people, who, to their credit, were all servants about doing everything. Just yesterday at our thanksgiving dinner, Alanna Foxwell told me the story of How My Pants Got Hemmed. Nelle and I had pinned them, albeit to two different lengths, in anticipation of getting them hemmed by someone, but, with all the details, we had forgotten to follow through. The night before the wedding, one of Nelle's aunts somehow figured this out, (maybe she'd been asked to iron them?) and hemmed them for me. This much I knew, but “The rest of the story”, is that they actually had no thread that matched the color of my pants (they were tannish colored linen), so they cut lengths of white thread into tea and coffee to stain them, and the next morning used the thread that most closely matched the color of my pants.

Stuff like that. I mean, everyone was helping out, everyone was involved. Parents and high school students ended up in the back, going through the trash that had not been thrown into the proper bins, re-sorting it, up to their elbows in gunk. When the 50cc monkey that we made our getaway on ran out of gas, one of the vans driving back stopped for us, and the passengers (laughingly) got out so we could get a ride back to our waiting taxi. Earlier today, Nelle and I wondered out loud who had put the stage back in the chapel, as we certainly didn't, and it took about 4 able-bodied strapping gentlemen to move it out of the chapel. But someone had taken care of it. It was just one detail among thousands that we had overlooked, but some unnamed person (hopefully persons, that thing was heavy! I heard...) fixed it for us. And who put the internet cable back? Who made sure all the high schoolers got spots in the 4-hour car ride back home? Where did the people who were flying back to America stay in Tokyo? I have some idea for some of these, but the point is, it felt like a little bit of heaven to have everyone finding joy in being given responsibility. It's a little sad that all that effort went into our wedding; can you imagine what would be possible in a church filled with so many people sharing both the common vision and the desire to be involved in making that vision a reality?

Of course, I'm romanticizing things a little bit. I'm sure there were people who got a little frustrated by the level of work we were asking them for; I know a huge amount of work fell to the wedding party and our families, and they, as anyone! would rather have spent the time getting reacquainted or surfing or playing scrabble. But the wedding was a huge success! All the way from the bachelor parties (mine will forever be impossible to top: totally deserted beach 30 minutes hiking from the end of a tiny road, a roaring bonfire, a Japanese approach to nudity, a phosphorescent ocean, a seemingly endless supply of bottlerockets, an invented sport of throwing live coals at eachother's naked bodies, live Jonny-Cash-themed music, and the usual debaucherous vices), to the rehearsal dinner (which everyone coming to the wedding was invited to, much to the initial panic of my mother, and involved not only collecting wood for and lighting 4 huge bonfires for cooking and sitting around, but also collecting and lighting an untold number of barbeques, not all of which made it back in one piece. Sorry about that.), to the wedding pictures (which not only was everyone very patient about, but goofy as well! It was a little tiring, as these things seem to be, but, as is evidenced by the pictures, everyone seemed to be having a genuinely good time.), to the weather (the likelyhood of rain was a full 100% for the day of the wedding; our local Japanese friends were coming to offer their condolences a day in advance, while on the actual day of the wedding, they reported to us that the rain, which was pouring in sheets for hundreds of kilometers to the south of us, was mysteriously stopping literally at the horizon from where we were. I have obtained satellite photos of this weather pattern as evidence for those who believe I am exaggerating.) to the ceremony (only the programs were forgotten, and they were retrieved before anyone even missed them, and the only mistake in the ceremony was when I announced to everyone that I both want Nelle and love to be with her, rather thansaying that I love Nelle and want to be with her), to the ceremony pranks (Brent made plans to “accidentally” throw the ring out the window when asked for it; unfortunately he missed the window, which was 2 feet away, and about 3 feet by 6 feet, and had to scramble around on the floor for it; Lydia simply handed Nelle the wrong ring. Nelle didn't even notice), to the ceremony webcast (hi to everyone that was watching from all over the world!), to the reception (outside on a warm night, live music from the stage, and couples dancing in the water), everything was simply wonderful. One of the high school girls in attendance is quoted as sighing, “My quota for romance has been filled for at least the next 3 years”.

***the full blog has already been written, but in order for good
digestion, i'll be posting the next section, titled "the honeymoon!" in a few days. enjoy!***

ALERT!


the link that you all should follow if you want to watch the live feed of me and nelle's wedding is as follows:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ryans

we'll start running the live feed this evening, then we'll just leave it running all day long tomorrow, which, in case you missed the memo, is the day that i'm getting married. the wedding itself starts here at 4:00pm, so you'll have to do your own sleuthing work to figure out what time that is for you, since there's just too many people in too many countries that read this thing. tune in, and be entertained!

geez. i write about being all good about blogging, then don't forever. but seriously! it wasn't my fault! no, actually, i should say that it wasn't totally my fault. there's some fault there that belongs to me. but some that doesn't:

a few days after my last entry, the power cord on this here lappy-toppy went to absolute crap. which, actually, i am responsible for. i use this thing for powerpoint with the JAM kids, and i tell the leaders over and over that that they have to be careful with the technology. and, of course, i was the one that pulled the bench out from under the laptop while i was moving it. it landed pretty hard, right on the power cord, right where it comes into the computer. the compy was mostly ok (nothing a good take apart/put together didn't fix pretty quick), and the power cord still worked, but the end was bent at a 45-degree angle. which i could live with. then, like weeks later, as i was using it for non-arobic activities, the tip of the cord just couldn't handle it anymore, and broke off. and, of course, hewlett-packard computers are not the most popular over here in japan-land, so it was somewhere between almost impossible and completely impossible to get a new cord from over here. and then it was golden week, so the HP japan headquarters closed down for that whole week. in the end, in what i fear has become typical ryan-fashion, i went to hard-off ( i can't even write that without feeling weird), found an old HP power cord that had the right size adaptor on the end, but ran the wrong amount of power, and cut the end off it and soldered it to the broken end of mine. and it works fine now.

so there was that.

also, i lost many, if not all, of my most important cards. i don't really like to always carry around a freakin' huge wallet with me, so when i can, i pull my drivers license, my bank card, and my alien registration out, wrap a hairband around it, and carry it around in my pocket.

sidenote: it's really hard to blog while listening to weird al's "albuquerque". i have now rectified the situation.

so, at about the same time as i was taking trains all over japan, trying to find a store that sold HP parts, my cards went missing. truly in denial, i refused to talk to the police, or the city, or the bank, or the licensing center, positive that i had simply misplaced them in my apartment somewhere. for those of you familiar with my rooms, and my history of short-term memory problems, this will seem perfectly reasonable. as time wore on, however, it seemed less and less likely that these cards were in my possession. it's also a little scary to be without the alien registration, as i have been stopped and asked for it before by a bored policeman, who needs no reason to do so. so, finally, i decided that it was not impossible that i had actually lost them downtown, and i went in and started the process for getting some new cards. as was inevitable, shortly thereafter, i received a post card from the police department--not koban--saying that they had some of my belongings if i would be kind enough to come and get them. so, being part-way through the process of renewing cards, i had to go back and fill out still more paperwork, the purpose of which was apparently to anull the previous paperwork.

much stamping of the hanko ensued.

the wedding is a month from tomorrow, which is awesome. there's still stuff to get worked out, of course, but the most difficult stuff is all taken care of. at least, the stuff we know about. if we did no other work until the week of the wedding itself, we realized, we'd still be pretty ok. which is a good feeling. we are, however, rediculously overfull in the chapel. it's seriously gonna be standing room only. people just keep walking by us in the halls and being like "hey, good news! i rearranged my entire life, so now i can come to your wedding!" and we're like "...and your name is......?" ok, so it's not that bad, but there's been a few people--or worse, families--that have given us the "good news" that they are coming to our wedding, when they weren't really invited in the first place, and there's really no room for them. but they're coming anyways! moral of the story--sometimes having your wedding a thousand miles away from anything convenient means that the people that you really do want to come (all you saps in the states) really can't, while people you don't really even consider friends get to come. lesson learned.

in general, though, we've just really let go of this thing. as the college kids are starting to come back, and life's getting crazy with hanging out with siblings, cousins, and friends, we realized that these couple of kids is really just the tip of the iceberg--there's what, about 40 family members flying over from the states? and it already feels crazy, and fun, and sleep-deprived? we can't really imagine what it'll be like when everyone's here. it will be madness. there will be laughing, crying, punching, and chocolate cake. and it really will be an epic wedding. and it's actually gonna happen. weird.

i was gonna post some pictures to spice this up a little....but i looked through the photos and realized that i don't really have any new pics. well, any new ones that haven't been posted on facebook. although, not all of you have facebook. i'd hate to be discriminatory, so i'll make a google photo album again and put it into the bottom of this again. this time, it's pics of how me, nelle, her sister lydia, and lydia's hubby john spent a 3 day weekend a few weeks ago. yay for sunburn!

Hiking Nojiri