Weekly Tao Te Ching Verse - Week #24

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hannukah, or Happy Kwanzaa. Or whatever other holiday floats your boat this time of year. Although I no longer consider myself a Christian, I do celebrate Christmas since I was raised Christian and family traditions around the Christmas Holiday.

I taught my last "community" class at 3Sisters at least on Friday nights because it will conflict with my Sober Yogi class I teach at Soul Stretch in Westlake. I also taught my weekly Fitworks class as well as subbing on Wednesday night. I am now over 50 hours of teaching since getting certified. Still have a long way to go as a Yoga instructor but so much better than when I was first certified. Still need to find my voice in terms of expressing and talking about themes. Well themes with a spiritual bent anyway.

Happy New Year from the Neohawk.org Family

I tweeted and posted very short messages at midnight. However, those were scheduled as I really didn’t want to struggle to get them through to the network as the rest of the United States did as well. I wanted to take my time for a real New Year’s greeting.

Hopefully this post will fulfill that greeting.

--

2011 was a year of transition for the Neohawk.org family. Overall a good year but what’s a good year without some stress to make sure the gray hairs arrive. Here’s the rundown.

Elly finished her freshman year at American University on the Dean’s List and now an “Honor’s Student”. She spent the summer at home working at Target but took off for AU as soon as she could. And this time she pretty much took everything with her, sort of a message to us that she ain’t coming back to Cleveland “to visit”. It’s bittersweet. I cannot help but be proud and excited for her. At the same time it’s sad to think that it’s over already and that she’s her own person now and not my little Elly.

One of the best things for us her parents was the fact that Elly has had the chance to take up dancing again. She is taking a Ballet class as part of her schedule but she also participated in two other performances as well. Arisa and I went to see the AU in Motion (Facebook page) in November. The show overall was tremendous. Given there was wide array of dancers from good to bad, from classical ballet to hip hop and Bollywood. The dancers clearly had worked hard on everything and the show was fun. To be honest though Elly stood out. That’s largely because her piece is designed that way (she was the Sugar Plum Fairy) but also because she was the by far the best ballet dancer.

Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございます

Happy New Year! 明けましておめでとうございます

Neohawk's New Homestead

Most of you know that the Northeast Ohio Hawkins Family moved to a new house at the end of June.  For the first time ever, Arisa and I have purchased a house!

Our new homestead is only 5 or 10 minutes away from our previous residence, so George will be attending the same school - Mayfield High School.  We did move to a new city though and we are now in Highland Heights, but Mayfield City School District includes both Mayfields (Heights and Village), Gates Mills and Highland Heights.  The house is about a 5-10 minute bike ride to and from the school.

The house is not that much bigger than the house we were in previously, but the layout is much, much better.  The house overall is in much better shape and incredibly higher quality of any house we've lived in so far.  We bought it with the idea that it'll be really for just Arisa and I as we'll be empty nesters soon.  George has three more years of high school, but beginning this fall both Ken and Elly will spend most of their lives away from home.  Elly, of course, is a sophomore at American University while Ken is a freshman at Villanova University.

While the house isn't that big we have close to one and a half acres (約6000平方メートル). Which for me means alot of gardening space.  As you know, in our previous residence we did some gardening.  Unfortunately, last year I was traveling too much to take much care of it and this year too much flooding to even start.  And then when it dried up some we had already decided to move so I never did plant a garden this year regardless of this post that indicates otherwise.

This summer for me was mostly be about planning and preparing for next year.  I will be planting at least two gardens and a third one eventually.  For the most part, these will be vegetable gardens, though I may throw in some flowers for variety.  In fact, we have a little "hill" that's up against the Euclid Creek where I am planting some native flowers such as the purple cone flower and some others.  Hopefully, these flowers will fill up the area instead of the weeds that were there until Elly and I ripped them out.   In addition to this area, I will be building a raised garden in front of our shed. The plan is for it to be fairly big but we are building it in halves. The first half I'll do this fall, the second half next fall. There is no reason to rush any of this since we'll be here for a while (knock on wood).

One of the big things we need to figure out is what trees to cut down and/or trim. There are three maples next to the house that need to go as they are pushing up against the foundations and will probably cause leaks. We also have two beautiful but massive oak trees in the yard. Both 50 - 70 years old. Unfortunately between the two of them they pretty much shade the whole yard making it very difficult to figure out where to put gardens. But it is more than that - we have probably 6 maples other than the first three I mentioned, 3 pines, another oak tree, an ash tree, a hickory tree and some spruce/evergreen trees and shrubs. Oh, and a dying cherry tree.

I intend to cut down some myself, others we are debating to keep them and, therefore, only trim them. Others we just aren't sure we want to pay to cut them down. So it's a problem we're trying to figure out. And in the meantime I am dreading the fall when all these trees shed their leaves.....

That's enough for now for this post as it has already taken me close to two months to write it. Time to get it out of the way and move on.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas all. I know that not everyone who reads this blog(all two of you) are actually Christians, however, take my Merry Christmas in the spirit it is given regardless of what you believe. As you will see on another post I am preparing I'm not particularly "christian" either. But I've always believed in Christmas as a celebration of family, love and giving. If you can't believe in that regardless of your actual religion, or even lack thereof, then we probably aren't friends. Merry Christmas anyway.

The following is this year's Christmas card that due to technical and time problems we didn't get out this year.

The following is the note that my wife added to the email we sent out in lieu of regular cards this year.

Happy Holidays!

To this email, I attached a picture of the Cleveland Hawkins Family. Included is a picture of Grandpa. We all miss him very much. Here are some quick facts from this past year.

Robert : Robert traveled a lot this year. He currently has 7 projects that he's working on for Hyland. He took Ken on a College tour during the summer and he is very happy that Ken's favorite was Wesleyan.

Arisa(me) : I started a part-time job this year to help support our family. I miss Elly, who is studying hard in American. With only boys(Robert is included) in the house, I constantly worry about the state of our house, and often tell them to clean their rooms because Santa is coming.

Elly : Elly is a Freshman at American University at D.C. She tells us that she enjoys her new freedoms, and life in general. Her major is "International Business". You cannot tell in the pictures, but Elly cut 12 inches off her hair for a new look.

Ken: Ken is a Senior at Mayfield High School. His soccer team made district champions for the 3rd year in a row, and now they have a spot in the school hall of fame. As with Mayfield tradition, Ken bleached then dyed his hair. Ken even cut his hair into a mo-hawk. The soccer shirt he is wearing in the picture is from Grandpa and Grandma Ishii(japan).

George: George joined the soccer team this year. He also got his temporary license, adding some new grey hairs to Rob's head. Although in the picture you cannot tell, He has grown, and is nearly as tall as Ken. The picture is of him tutoring a Japanese boy, which he does every week.

We all hope to see you soon.

The Cleveland Hawkins Family (Rob and Arisa)

As you can tell, Arisa's English isn't perfect. I still think you get a sense of what our year was like. The year started off on a grim note, with us taking a trip down to Charlottesville VA to say good by to my Dad on New Year's day. 10 days later he had passed on, and we made a trip out to Boston for his funeral. The funeral, while a sad event, obviously, was also a really fun time. It has been quite a while since the extended family had gotten together, or at least a long time since my family and I had a chance to participate.

Life goes on though, and Elly was accepted and matriculated to American University. With the exception of one "b", she got all A's and did well enough in Calculus that she didn't need to take the final exam! Ken was on a team representing the State of Ohio at the SkillsUSA contest in Kansas and came home with a gold medal. He played varsity soccer, is in all honors or AP classes at school with the exception of "Chefery", which is what I think they used to call home economics. Several years ago George was labelled "gifted" by the State of Ohio and while I'm still unclear as to what that means, he is also in all honors classes, and getting straight A's. What really surprised me was his joining the soccer team. I certainly didn't expect it. While still not the best player - he had never played before - you could see improvement in foot skills over the season and just as importantly an understanding of how the game is supposed to be played.

Arisa continues to be the rock of this household. This year she is transitioning from focusing on her online business to finding a job. She currently works at Target for a minimum wage job to help the family finances. This job is just a step for her. As she looks for a job one of the things that really hit home is that she needs to improve her English. So she has drastically reduced her efforts in her online business to focus on studying English. I could tell that she's improving, probably not where she needs to be yet, but improving. But more importantly she is really trying, and she will get there. I really appreciated her efforts last night at dinner where she was very talkative and it was clear she was trying to use her English.

The other thing we found was that companies don't really take her online business seriously. Regardless of the fact that the amount of work across the spectrum of the business, from market research to marketing communications, to sales, to customer support(to some of the pickiest customers in the world) and P/L tracking, she is not working for a "company" and therefore it is discounted. So the job at Target is part of the plan. It helps the family finances but gets her working for a "company". The other major part of the plan is already in the works as well. We have gotten her transcript from Japan and it "officially" evaluated to be the equivalent of a B.A. here in the U.S. The next step is for her to take the Social Worker licensing test for the State of Ohio.

While I continue to be a cog in the machine at Hyland, both Arisa and I are active with the Japanese Association of Northeast Ohio. I am, not surprisingly, involved with the web team which is probably the most active part of JANO other than our two main events, the Shinnenkai and the Sakura Picnic. We have three other volunteers that make up the web team and they are truly spectacular. One of their more important roles, other than posting to our website, is the "welcome" they give to Japanese nationals that are moving to the area. I am currently tracking an email thread from an individual who will be attending a graduate program beginning next year. Over the last 3 or 4 days, 20 or so emails have gone back and forth over such things as health insurance, places to live, what to bring from Japan, what not to bring from Japan, etc., etc.

For JANO, this support of Japanese coming to Northeast Ohio prior to arrival is a relatively new thing and it has been hugely successful in my mind. Almost every single person we've helped has turned around and become a JANO member. But more importantly, I think they are arriving with substantially increased ease-of-mind. For many of these individuals, moving to Northeast Ohio will be there first time outside of Japan - and moving to another country for anybody can be a worrisome thing just because of the unknowns of a new country and culture. I think it is telling that the vast majority of people these ladies have helped in 2010 became members of JANO.

Thank you ladies!

Obviously, there's a lot more that happened in 2010, but in the end I think it was a good year with the huge exception of losing my Dad. And most of all, looking back on it, I realize how lucky I am to be surrounded by some of the best people in the world - my kids and my wonderful wife. Merry Christmas guys, I love you!

2010年感謝祭 - Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

今年の感謝祭は自宅でした。母はボストンに行っていますので、5人家族だけでした。特にエリーがワシントンDCのアメリカン大学にいってから始めて帰って来ていますので5人だけで楽しく過ごせました。

Welcome Back Home Elly

Elly arrived back home to Cleveland early on Wednesday morning having taken Amtrak from Union Station in Washington D.C. She was more than cheerful after a 13 hour train ride and still being awake at 4 in the morning.

Google Priority Inbox, Google Apps, and Random Thoughts

So I can't really talk about Buzz. But I can talk about other items of interest about Google products and services.

As most GMail users and Gapp (Google Apps) users are aware, Google recently deployed Priority Inbox. Nifty little filter and I like the idea that it gets smarter, much like the spam filters get smarter with more data. So I think its a great feature. Just a tad bit late.

JACL&CJAF 奨学金ランチ

久しぶりに日本語で投稿させていただきます。日本語あんまり使っていないんで忘れています。　これからもう少し日本語でブログに記事を投稿しようと思っています。日本語が間違ってもやはり使わないとドンドンと忘れてしまいます。ということで、今日はJACLとCJAFの賞学金奨学金ランチについて日本語で述べさせていただきます。

ご存知のようにエリーがアメリカン大学に来月に入学する予定です。５つの大学に申し込んで、４校に受かったんですが、提示されたファイナンシャルエイド額及びその内訳構成よりアメリカン大学を入学すると決めました。金銭的な観点だけでなく、やはりエリーがクリーブランドから離れたいという気持ちも強かったわけで親としてやはり大事な娘の希望に答えたくています。エリーがやはりボストンかワシントンDCに行きたい希望でした。

トリプルAに入ってよかった

一週間前ぐらいにトリプルA（AAA=American　Automobile　Association)に入会しました。　我が家の愛車２台とも中古車であり、いつ壊れるのが不安です。　僕は結構出張があるのでいないときにありさやエリーが何かあった時にトリプルAに電話するだけでバッテリチャージとか無料で牽引してもらえると思って入会したわけです。

ケンとジョージが予定がある場合に、向かいに行ったり、送ってあげたりしてもらう代わりにエリーは割と自由に車を使わせています。　昨夜はそうでした。ケン君が友達と映画を見に行く予定だったのでエリーが車で送ってあげていて、その後出かける予定でした。　そうしたら、映画館の駐車場で車を止めていたら、再度エンジンがかからなくなったことになりました。　エリーはバッテリーの問題かと思って、友達に電話してチャージしてまらったのですが、やはりエンジンがスタートしませんでした。

そうすると、仕方がなく僕を電話しました。　すぐにとまったところで行って状況確認しました。　そして、AAAを電話しました。 会員番号や住所を教えて、４５分以内に牽引車が来て、ガレージまで牽引してもらいました。　今はガレージからの連絡を待っていますが、昨夜はAAAを電話できると知っていたのでだいぶ安心しました。

トリプルAに入ってよかった

Elly and Ken Inducted into National Honor Society

Today, Arisa, Grandma Barbara, and I attended the Mayfield High School's National Honor Society Induction Ceremony. Both Elly and Ken were inducted. The pictures aren't great, but here they are.

One of Ken's friends asked me how Ken got in. I answered truthfullly....we had to pay.

A Teenager's Favorite Weekend Activity

Ah, to return to the days of being a teenager....

Yes, sleeping late on the weekends. That was always nice. The funny part about this though was that it was in the middle of the afternoon. So after getting up at 10 or 11, who has the gall to fall asleep on the couch?

Yup, Elly. Great role model she turned out to be for Ken and George....sigh

Prom 2009

昨夜はメイフィルド高校のプロムでした。　プロムは3年生と4年生用で今年エリーの初体験でした。　他のフォーマル服用のイベントがあったが、親としてプロム初体験しました。