Tokyo Tofu

Cuteness.

Just got an email from U of M informing me that Econ 454 aka ‘Economics of Japan’ is being cancelled due to the professor taking a year off for medical leave. That leaves me trying to find something to replace to at the last minute. I was using this class as part of the ‘cognate’ requirements, meaning my classes about Asia/Japan that aren’t from the Asian Studies department. Now I get to ponder if I want to replace that with a 4 credit class on Japanese Minorities, filling it with the stupid English comp class that U of M is MAKING me take despite the fact that I got to skip them back at GRCC because I got credit from an AP English test, or take the substitute econ class, Econ 340, which is International Economics. Boo. -_-

Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday greetings, whether online or in real life. I had a fun, leisurely day of a birthday, working on my Japan scrapbook and doing some clothes shopping. My mom treated me to dinner at Logan’s Roadhouse (we had to drive to Canton because there aren’t any in Ann Arbor), and then came home and had some cake that my sister made for me. Now I’m writing this and am about to go to sleep, where I’ll wake up a year older but won’t really feel like it….

I suppose its time for an update. I’ve been somewhat of a busy bee lately, despite it still being the summer break between classes. Yesterday, I received two job offers for positions that start in the fall on campus. One is with the School of Education and the other is with the UMHS Cardiovascular Center. So yeah, neither one have anything to do with Asian Studies, but money is money. I’ve already accepted the UMHS job, which will be 10 hours a week, and I’m going in for an interview today for a job that the School of Ed guy told me I should also interview for, as it pays like $4/hr more than the job he is offering me pays. The only bad thing now is I’m not sure how I’ll squeeze it into my schedule to be able to work more than 7 or 8 hours a week at it, since it wont be weekends or after 5:30pm-ish. Well, we’ll see….

THe pondered birthday trip has been nixed. Mostly because I’m broke, and $3.15/gal gas scares me. This fall I will be taking the bus to and from campus as much as possible, since it would be insane to not take advantage of the fact that I can ride the buses anywhere FOR FREE. A neighbor also came over when we were having a garage sale a couple of weeks ago and said they could drop me off next to the MLB everyday at 8am since they both work on campus, so I will probably be meeting with them soon as well…..

The car stereo that I bought thinking I’d be going on a 5+ hour drive to Niagara Falls has been installed, by moi. I must have saved at least $50 doing it. I ordered it from http://www.crutchfield.com and not only did they have the cheapest price on the stereo (Circuit City wanted $10 more), they also sent me free instructions with pictures, a free wiring harness (Circuit City wanted $25 for that), and a free pocket to go under the new stereo to cover up the space left by the larger old stereo. Took me about 2 hours to get it in, but overall it was really very simple. So if your car stereo dies, save yourself some dough and try installing the new one yourself, you can probably do it.

Friday I will be driving down to Cassidy’s house for a day of scrapbooking! We will be working on our Japan scrapbooks together. She tells me there are some nice scrapbooking stores near her house, so we may or may not go to them (since I just spent a crapload of $$ at Pages In Time back in GR about a week ago). She just better be ready for the amount of stuff I’ll be bringing over hehe…..

Saturday I’ll be heading towards Detroit again to go to Brigeth’s graduation/going away party since she will be going to France next month! I’m not sure where she will be staying (maybe Paris), but I hope she knows now that I have an excellent excuse to visit France sometime in the next year…….maybe spring break? (I bet there is at least one HRC in France too.)

And here are a couple of pictures I took the other day off my back deck.

Theres a new Snakes on a Plane contest out there, and if I can get 2000 people to go to this link and vote, I can get a free SoaP poster. And in the incredibly unlikely chance I can get like way more than that, I might win a SoaP viewing party, which I will of course invite all those people that voted for me to go to. So, GO VOTE!

Before leaving for Japan almost one year ago now, my car stereo was on its last legs. The CD player would get so hot that after about 30 minutes of playing, any teeny tiny bump in the road that I would go over would cause it to emit a high pitched noise for a split second, which would eventually turn into horrible screeching staticy skipping as time went on. Well, now back from Japan it was one of the things that I would be buying right off the bat, but it seemed to behave properly…at least for two months. Now with a possible road trip coming up, and with my mom giving me a home-made gift certificate redeemable only for part of a car stereo, I finally got off my butt and did a bit of research and decided on this: Pioneer DEH-P6800MP. Why this one? Well, Pioneer seems to be a good brand name for car stereo systems, so hopefully it will last me the rest of the life of my car (now 6 years old). It has the capability of playing an mp3 CD (which I’ve wanted for years), has a 2-line text display and even lets you sort through folders on a disc of mp3’s. The ipod compatability I couldn’t care less about (ipods are evil and I’ll never buy one), the animations it can play will probably be turned off, and the fact that the face has to open to put in a CD is a bit annoying but that’s how they all are these days. Despite the local Circuit City advertising ‘Free Installation!’ I was told it would be “best case scenario of $20-$25, and worst case of $40″ when I went in to check it out, and while I have faith that I could probably install the thing myself (might take me a while, but I bet I could do it), if I fubar myself it would be like $60 to take it someplace and get it installed after the fact. So hopefully Wednesday will be the day…..

And also, someone tell me why all new car stereos today come with wireless remotes? Last thing I want is to hear that the person who just rear-ended me was having trouble changing songs with their car stereo remote…

Well, its taken me several weeks, but I finally managed to sort through the 3600+ pictures that I took in Japan, and got it down to a measly 612 pictures that I will be printing out for scrapbooking purposes. That doesn’t mean all 612 will make it into the book, but hopefully there won’t be too many that I’ll decide at the last minute not to use. I had a first batch of 122 printed up at Meijer, and got them back tonight only to find out that each and every picture had been cropped slightly on all sides (some much worse than others). This makes me very unhappy, so I pondered other places to have them printed out, and found that Walmart allows you to upload them from their website and even gave me 10 free pictures to start off. So I’ll be picking them up tomorrow morning to see if they are cropped at all. Despite disliking Walmart, pictures there are 15 cents each versus 17 cents and being cropped at Meijers, which would mean $73.50 versus $83.30. I was hoping a friend who worked in a photo lab in Meijer back in GR could give me a discount, but I’ll pay full price to not have things cropped out of my pictures. :/ And based on the amount of time it took me to complete my scrapbook of my first (9 day) trip to Japan, I project I will be finished with this one sometime in 2009.

In other news, a few days ago I was outside and noticed a rabbit standing very still in the little strip of grass between my house and the house to the left of us. It stayed that way for some time, so when I went to go investigate and it invariably ran off, I saw two little moving lumps among a mess of dried grass and dryer lint and found it to be 2 cute little baby rabbits, probably not more than a week old. By the time I was able to run into the house and grab my camera, the little bunnies had retreated somewhat into their nest and so it was kind of hard to get pics of them, but here’s what I caught:

Sadly, as of yesterday we came home to find a cat standing near the nest, with all of the bunnies (we found 4 upon further investigation) to be missing. But! We were unable to locate any little bunny bodies so we figure the mom probably moved them somewhere since we had been watching the nest closely since discovering it, because I was worried that I had scared off the mom permanently. So hopefully they will grow up to be big, cute bunnies who will live under the deck and eat all the nice plants in the yard.

And as for the ‘other things’ in the title well….I kinda got distracted while writing this and I forgot what else I was going to write. XD

Well, its about 2.5 months since I returned from Japan. Two weeks after getting back I picked up and moved once more from my home of 21 years to the home my mom bought while I was in Japan. For the next month I got to live by myself (with no roommates or siblings, yea!) while my sister graduated from high school and my mom finished up things in our old house and prepared for the move. At the beginning of June we drove a 27′ truck filled with (almost) all of our remaining posessions from the old house, and were then officially moved out. I thought that I would upset about leaving the only home I’ve ever lived in, but on that 90 degree day where the three of us, two neighbors and three unexpected helpers spent more than 4 hours loading furniture, kitchenware, books, pictures, beds, plants, and a crapload of other things, I was just glad to be inside of an air conditioned vehicle for the 2 hour drive to Ann Arbor. Since then I haven’t really been sad about it, even when I heard that the new buyer (who is somewhat of a psychopath) ripped out every piece of carpet in the house 2 days after she moved in. Two weeks after handing over the keys we came back to our neighbor’s house across the street to pick up some items that couldn’t fit into the truck and saw the buyer and her partner in the yard, where they thankfully hadn’t ripped out any of my mom’s plants (yet).

So what do I think of the new house so far? Its pretty nice. While its larger in total square feet than the old house, it feels a little bit smaller to me. The kitchen, however, is GINORMOUS compared to our old “step-saver” (apparently this is what people in the real estate business politely call a kitchen so small that you can reach each side by just turning around). Our basement is big and dry, and we have a fireplace now! The yard is larger and more square and the previous homeowners did absolutely nothing with the yard so its a completely blank slate for my mom to work on it. My room is only about 1/2 the size of my old room, which posed a challenge at first (cause, well….I have a lot of stuff) but I think I’ve been pretty creative with my storage options. I put up some floating shelves on 2 sides of the room, with the shelves at the same height on each wall. I left two of the walls blank for artwork and other things, which I finally finished putting up today (check out my awesome ‘Skyscrapers In Japan’ poster that I bought from the Landmark Towers in Yokohama).

On the job front, well…thats not going so well. Had an interview last week for a job with the U that doesn’t start until September, but it seemed sort of promising. But I have been quite succesful on the eBay/Half.com front. Two volumes worth of Newtype USA magazines went for over $200 (a shock to me, I expected $20), a 4-year old 250mb (yes, megabyte) zip drive went for $12, and I’ve sold a couple dozen books and dvd’s of mine and my mom’s on Half.com (which I’ve been doing for years now, and if you’ve got a ton of old books (including textbooks) or movies, you should check out Half.com).

So thats pretty much all I’ve got for this long overdue update. Each time something interesting happens and I tell myself I should write it in my blog, I then put it off since I knew I needed to write about the new house first. Well, now I have so I have no more excuses! I decided to be a little different with the thumnail pictures that I use for the blog, so now you’ll be forced to actually click them to see the entire picture!

Pics of the house:

Pics of my room:

In the next week my sister will be graduating from high school, she’ll be having her open house, we’ll be permanently moving out of our old house, and moving all the things into our new house in one last trip. My aunt and uncle from Denver who I hardly ever see will be coming up to visit as well. As such, I won’t be online for at least a week until we are moved into our new house in Ann Arbor. Stay tuned…