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。
This last Thursday night was Japanese Night at the Lake Erie Crushers game. Since the Crushers' stadium is on Avon about 15 minutes from work, I went straight from work. Well, I took a detour to pick up a friend since his wife and kid was coming later to meet up with Arisa and another couple, also good friends. In each of our cases, the husband is American and the wife is Japanese. So it's cool to hook up with them every when we can.
And it was even better on this night since the Crushers were putting on Japanese night. Ken Hill, an American Japanese, or Japanese American, not sure which, is on a summer internship at the Crushers and this was his brainchild apparently. He did a great job getting participation from a variety of groups including JANO, the Cleveland Chapter of the Japanese American Citizen League including Mame Daiko and the Sho-jo-ji Dancers, a Japanese restaurant and a women who teaches shodou, and couple of folks from the Cleveland Japanese Meetup.com group. There were a couple of Japanese folks who are currently working at the Cleveland Clinic. I grabbed some pictures with my cell phone hence they are not that great. Arisa had the camera but she didn't arrive in time for the drumming or dance.
Arisa was going to volunteer at a ongiri contest and some other things, but unfortunately the rest of the evening got rained out. Just as they were about to start, the rain came down and reports of Tornado warnings/watches a county to the west. We waited for about 20 minutes then left for the evening. While we're disappointed that it didn't work out for a longer evening, it was certainly a lot of fun. I really wanted to wear my jimbei but its stored away somewhere and we couldn't find it in time. Next time though!
So Elly received her new Dell Inspirion 15 last Friday. She got it in preparation for going to American University. I spent my day off Friday making sure that she could dual boot into Windows7 and Ubuntu. The only problem I have so far is that the wireless doesn't work in Ubuntu. It seems like Broadcom hasn't released a driver for Linux. Or at least, none of the packaged (B43 or Linux SAT) worked. So until that driver comes out, it'll be one big MP3 player.
From the Cleveland Chapter of the Japanese American Citizen League and the Lake Erie Crushers, a Japanese Night on July 22nd.
I saw on facebook where Elly's boyfriend sent her a video. I went to check it out and loved it.
Check it out!
Thanks for the link Eric.
Arisa and I went shopping today to get some extra things for our family bbq tonight. After shopping at Giant Eagle for our stuff, we went to Micro Center at East Gate and then to Best Buy to do some comparison shopping on laptops. Elly is going to get herself a laptop to replace her Dell netbook which she doesn't feel is sufficient for when she starts college at American University in August. In particular, I was looking at laptop pricing and system specs so I could compare them to the employee purchase program prices.
Anyway, on our way out of the Best Buy parking lot my wife notices a sign for "Mayfield Fine Foods". She asks me, "What's that?". Since I have zero idea as to what it was, I said "no clue, wanna go find out?"
For work, I've been traveling quite a bit to San Diego to work on a client project. By coincidence, the client's office is located right along San Diego's "Asian" strip. Along Convoy Street there are a host of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese restaurants. Probably some others like Vietnam as well.
The first time I went I remember seeing a Japanese BBQ restaurant on the way to the client in the morning. But in the evening I could never find it again, not sure why. Well, on this last trip I was finally able to see it.
Did I mention the cherries from our tree are ready? Oh, right, this morning I posted about picking cherries. Yesterday, Elly, Ken, George and I were out for about an hour maybe less. As I mentioned in this mornings post, the cherries we harvested yesterday were way more than we could eat so we were taking them to the JANO Sakura Picnic.
We did exactly that and we came home empty handed. Those that weren't eaten at the picnic, people stuffed them in ziplock bags and took them home. Not a single cherry left. Sigh. We came home cherry-less. (Which was the idea!)
Over the last week or so, we've been watching the cherry tree in our backyard. It seems the time is finally here to pick them. It's a balance of waiting to just the right moment and saving the cherries from the birds.
So Elly, Ken, George and I headed out at about 11:30 yesterday morning to start picking what seemed to be the ripest cherries.
An hour later we had barely made a dent in the cherries on our tree. Still I think we gathered something like 500 cherries. The picture below are the cherries we gathered sitting on our stove. From this picture, you really can't get a sense of how many cherries there are, but trust me there is alot.
This is way more cherries than we can eat before they spoil. Plus, the tree is still full of 'em. We'll bring most of those we gathered to the JANO Picnic today for people to snack on. The rest we'll probably make some preserves, or jam. We might try a cherry pie.
So I have just about finished planting my garden for this year. This Memorial Day weekend, I took Friday off so I could have a four day weekend. I'm glad I did as we expanded the size of this years garden in the back yard. It' probably 25' by 15' or there abouts.
Friday I spend pretty much all day tilling. I rented a roto tiller from Home Depot and started in at about 9:45. I didn't finish until about 6PM. I only rented it for 24 hours so I had to return it by 9:15 on Saturday. I wouldn't have minded going through one last time of turning the garden. But it was sufficient. It was a long day made better by my daughter's boyfriend and my youngest son chipping in to help with the tilling.
On June 6, 2010, JANO will be holding it's annual Sakura Picnic. This potluck picnic is to celebrate the nearly 140 Cherry Trees JANO has donated to the Brookside Reservation (map) of the Cleveland Metroparks. I am posting information here in English on the Picnic. The picnic is open to anyone as long as you bring food for 5-6 people.
The picnic starts at 11:30 with a quick talk by the Japanese Consulate General from the Detroit Consulate. Yume Daiko will be performing for us as well. Afterwards we'll have pick up soccer games, volleyball, tug-a-war, and other small games. And of course will have our Janken Taikai (Rock, Paper, Scissors competition) which Arisa walked off as winner last year.
The picnic will last until 3pm.
Please feel free to attend as long as you bring food for 5-6 people. Hope to see you there!
If you've got a few minutes, check this video out of my niece presenting on what she learned during her gap year.
As much as I find facebook useful for keeping in touch with folks and friends of yesteryear, I've decided I'm going to stop using facebook. It's too difficult to manage the ever changing security and privacy settings. And reading that it's fairly simple for people to figure out my IP address via facebook, just made me realize that I don't really trust this company.
So enjoy my posts and stuff while you can, I'l be dumping it at the end of this month, and severely reducing my current footprint on it starting immediately.
If you are really that desperate to follow me, I'm still on twitter, friend feed, buzz, orkut, linkedin, mixi, amongst others. And you can subscribe to this blogs feed too.
I signed up to become a Google Trusted Tester after seeing this post on Buzz. Much to my surprise, I was actually chosen as a tester.
Today, Arisa and I went to see the Mayfield City School's Artfest at Hillcrest Hospital in Mayfield Heights. As you would expect with student artists, there are some that are pretty darn good, and others not so much. Couple of the artists were kids we know from soccer or something else.
Most importantly, though, Elly's boyfriend had a painting on display.
Didn't realize he was into self-portraits! Of course I'm kidding.
Today, the Cavs posted an advertisement to follow them on Twitter for a prize pack to be given away during the Cavs - Bulls game. They tweeted it first, but it also made it to facebook. On the facebook version, a Toyota add was posted along with it.
And sure enough, some of the ignorance that is killing Cleveland rears its ugly head.
I posted a tweet today that suggest that Social Wok had problems. Social Wok replied to my tweet asking for more information. Now that's the way to follow up! Take note of that folks. Responding to complaints is a good thing as I went the extra mile to grab some screenshots(see below) and am creating this post. If they hadn't responded I probably would have removed Social Wok and just moved on.
update: And they wouldn't have fixed it already making their product better, this user happy with them, and all that before I could even finish this post (granted there's a lot of fluff in this post).
A month or so back, I was in Orange County, CA on business. On a previous visit, our waitress at the California Pizza Kitchen was kind enough to give us a list of restaurants to try out in the area, mostly Asian, though one was Cuban.
We found a Korean BBQ she recommended and it was really, really good.
I won't lie, I like the Japanized version of Korean BBQ but it was still really, really good. I want to order the beef tongue, but my colleague wasn't interested and it would have been too much to eat by myself. As it was, we barely finished everything.
See the reviews of the place we went on Yelp. I think the reviews on it are lower than I would have given as I thought it was good, service was friendly etc. Next time around, I think I'll try some of the other ones in the area too.
Just noticed that my seed catalog arrived today. I believe that I asked them to send me on via the web. Considering the fact that the weather is clearly getting warmer - it was gorgeous today here in Cleveland - it's time to start planning for the garden.
