Tokyo Tofu

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:

Just as the title says, I finished my last post on my Japan blog. There will be no more updates to it anymore. I know, it makes me sad as well. So leave a comment or two there, and then look forward to my not-as-exciting regular blog which is coming soon…

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…