TCOBaG – kNow ThiNkIng AllOwEd

It’s that time of year again. That time you admit to being another year older.

For me it’s the time I have to make my own birthday cake ;-( We have the same birthday, which has its perks such as being virtually impossible to forget, but I do sometimes feel it’s more than a little strange writing “Happy Birthday Sulseob and Me” though I went with Happy Birthday Sulseob and Allen this time for some strange reason.

Tried something a little different this time with the icing. All chocolate, cake too. You can do this with chocolate icing and use it for the writing as well though it doesn’t stand out the way colored icing does. It still makes a nice looking cake.

Tasted pretty good too

So, it snowed, a lot, here in Nagoya.

Came home Sunday night to piles of it.

The boys of course were thrilled.

Me? Not so much, but still, I can have some fun now and again.

We ended up in a monster snowball fight that drew a couple of neighbors out of their houses. (uh, sorry about that! )

The snow would have been great for skiing, but made murderous snowballs because they packed so tightly.

I know, I’ve got a bruise on the back of my leg from Bynn’s first salvo hehheh.

Still, good fun.

Ended that with trying to make a snowman.

Got one pretty good one, though not so tall. Since it was dark already I didn’t get a photo, so I went out to take one early Monday morning.

It had snowed a fair amount more during the night. This is the resulting effect on our little guy.

Seems a little sad, doesn't he?

So, in more of my ‘small world’ vein of postings, here’s an interesting story.

Through Facebook I reconnected with an old friend. He’s a guy I used to work with when we were both in college. He was a young, naive, but great guy who I hoped would do well with his life.

He was a great guy. He asked me to sing at his wedding. He even had the gall to ask me to write a special song for it.

I had the gall to have the idea for the song the moment he asked me about it.

The song went over, well, really well. I’ve since sang it and been asked to sing it at several weddings, including one here in Japan.

The first time was, oh, about 17 years ago? more? (sorry Brett, the time gets away from me)

The song’s title is “No One Else I’d Rather Be” (Maybe I’ll post it here some time…)

He graduated, went to work, I finished my MA, left the country. He eventually moved around a bit, too.

Then we reconnect on FB. I had been in the states at a conference about 45 miles away from where he’s now living in North Carolina, a pretty good stretch from Murray, KY, where this story started.

Then he tells me he visits Japan for work fairly regularly, even Nagoya where I now live.

That was a couple of months ago, I think.

Today he came to my house for dinner. Met my wife, my two sons. Ate a lot

I was so happy to see him, and see the man he’s grown into. Proud, too. For him (I certainly have no claims on that outcome, hehheh, but still, yes, proud.)

Brett, it was truly great to get to see you, and catch up a bit though too many years have passed for us to catch up entirely in one short evening. Thanks for dropping back into my life. And though FB is great, it’s nothing like meeting up in person and doing that catching up Face to face.

A far cry from the days I had hair - Allen and Brett

So I was lucky and got the chance to meet in person someone I’ve ‘known’ online for several years.

He’s in Japan (Osaka) visiting family and made a quick trip over to see me here in Nagoya. We didn’t do anything exciting, and still, I had a great time visiting with him and treating him to some top-notch Ramen done right

It was really great finally meeting in person and I’m looking forward to getting together with him again some time.

Here are a couple of pictures, just snapshots I took.

It was not really much time, but I’m glad we could get together.

Thanks, Dan, for making the trip over!

UPDATE: So, have I been found out? Did the real Dan Murray actually visit? It seems new photos have surfaced casting doubts upon the validity of my earlier photos. These photos provided by a secret agent, code name Question Lion:

HINT: click this four-shot photo in the rows above to get more on that story…

Allen Williams and a cast of stars

Wow, hard to believe my youngest is now 9 and it also marks 9 years I’ve been living and working in Japan.

Ahn asked for a ninja suit for his birthday present.

Now, you’d imagine that living in the land of ninjas it wouldn’t be too difficult to meet that request, right?

Not as easy as you’d think. I’m sure there are a number of those paper-ish, Halloween, wear-it-once-and-it’s-done sorts around, but these guys love this sort of thing.

They’ve totally worn out and outgrown their Spiderman suits we got at Universal Studios Japan in Osaka, as well as their Batman costumes they received when Mommy was away in China on sabbatical… (those little buggers have since cabbaged onto my Batman suit and are using it!)

Anyway, they’re really in to making videos and role playing (no idea where they get that ) so we were looking for something of fairly high quality material that was durable and looked great.

We ended up going online and ordering these from one of the Ninja Mura’s (ninja village). But it is located in Mie Prefecture so we had no time to travel there (plans in the works though!) and just called them up.

One great part about ordering things in Japan is that there are still a lot of COD-type deliveries. For me, I’d prefer using my credit card or Paypal, but it’s still pretty convenient to just order it and pay when it arrives.

Here are a few photos from the day: