We talk about this problem with sayings like "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," or with jokes about people who spend more time planning than doing. We fight it with concepts like Minimum Viable Products. I know I got a lot more productive around the house once I heard the phrase, "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly" - the idea being that, say, washing half of the dishes now is far better than washing none of them; if you can muster up the effort to do some housework, don't let the inability to muster up the effort to do all of the housework stop you.

But for all the good these ideas have done me, I think I do overuse them sometimes. Giving myself permission to do a poor job at something has definitely led to me doing work that wouldn't have gotten done at all otherwise - but it's also definitely led to me not doing a good job at something that I might have otherwise.

This is a problem, but I think as problems go it's a pretty interesting one. It's always fun to try to find more efficient approaches to problems, and that's basically what this is, just in a meta sense; it's the question of the most efficient approach to efficiency. Even better, spending too much time on solving this problem could bring things to an even more meta layer, where I'm being inefficient in my efforts to efficiently solve the problem of efficient problem solving in my life! But I think it's fun to noodle on in spare time.

For one example, we can return to the well of my efforts in studying Japanese. On days I don't feel much like studying, I'll usually just do my Anki flashcards. This is undoubtedly better than not doing my Anki flashcards, especially because when I get behind on them, they wind up becoming the only form of studying that I do even on days when I would go further - if I have like 600 cards to do, it's hard convince myself to do anything else until they're done, but it's also hard to convince myself to do more than one or two hundred in one sitting. But I haven't spent much time asking the question of if Anki is really the best use of my time anymore; if I'm only doing one thing, would it be better to read a manga, or watch an anime? But if I'm not only doing one thing, then Anki is definitely an important thing to include, and I can't do Anki without making sure to do it every day... see, it's a conundrum.

The thing that makes me think about all this is actually Duolingo. Duolingo has undergone some fascinating changes since Cassie and I started using it a couple years ago; they've added new exercise types, they've reorganized how they order lessons, they've added a bunch. In many ways, I think it's significantly better than it used to be, and one of the best apps to use if you're only going to use one. No other app that I've used - I've used several, but definitely not nearly all of them - touches on all the skills it does. It's especially noteworthy that it includes speaking practice now.

BUT.

No other app that I've used has been so gamified, and I think Duolingo gamifies itself to a detrimental degree. It is so, so possible to do Duolingo every day, have a massive streak, and to have learned absolutely nothing. It's entirely up to you to learn with it; if you hold yourself to standards that the app definitely does not, you can learn a lot; but if your primary goal is just to maintain your streaks and do your daily quests, you're only going to be learning how to game the system.

I'm trying to use it more to hit the skills that it has drills for, like speaking, but it pushes so hard for all its gamey B.S. that it's legitimately distracting. I'm not at all trying to maintain my streak, which means every time I open the app there's all these annoying "motivational" messages. I try to avoid distracting myself with my phone, but Duolingo does this thing where they change the app icon regularly in an intentional effort to draw your attention to it when you're doing something else on your phone - which I think is leading to me uninstalling it and only using Duolingo on my computer. It's just funny that all the things they're doing to push engagement I think are ultimately distracting from language learning - ostensibly the point of the app!

P.S. I would also be remiss if I didn't talk here about how Duolingo horribly misrepresents a lot of Japanese grammatical concepts, to such a degree that I do not recommend anybody use it for their primary or maybe even secondary source of Japanese instruction; I think it'll hurt more than it helps. It's great for practice drills and reinforcement as long as you already know how sentences work and what words mean, but if it's your only source of knowledge, you're going to think that "がほしい" is one word and a verb, and it is neither of those things. (Describing ほしい as a verb is at least somewhat understandable, but if you don't know, take my word for it: treating が like it's attached to ほしい is indefensible.)

Bea Wolf

By Zach Weinersmith and Boulet

Bea Wolf is a delightful childified version of the story of Beowulf, where viking warriors and castles are replaced with kids eating candy in a treehouse, and the monster Grendel is replaced with a grumpy old neighbor whose very touch turns children into boring teenagers and adults. Weinersmith puts a lot of effort into keeping the original's poetic language and meter, and the art by Boulet is splendid.

I think my favorite part of the book, though, is the coda at the end: a long essay by Weinersmith about the history and the language of the original Beowulf, both informative and accessible to young readers. Really a treat.

A Fire Upon the Deep

By Vernor Vinge

I really enjoyed this book. I like sci-fi that has really alien aliens, right? Like, I'm not complaining about Stars Trek and Wars style sci-fi where the aliens are pretty much all humanoid, but I like when stories take the opportunity to explore some really weird ideas and possibilities. A Fire Upon the Deep goes hard on the weird aliens, and makes them major enough features of the plot (even perspective characters!) that we really get to explore some of the possibilities of sound-based hive minds and sentient oysters that use computers for short-term memory.

I also like hard-ish sci-fi that, instead of trying to come up with "realistic" explanations for how interstellar travel could work, comes up with some weird reason why the rules we think apply don't actually apply, and then really digs into the consequences of that, explores what it means and how it would play out. In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge postulates that the galaxy is divided into "zones of thought," with intelligence and technology being more limited in the zones closer to the galactic core, and faster and more free in the zones further from the core. Get too close to the core and you're in the "slow zone," where FTL travel is impossible and intelligence is limited to not much more than normal humanity. If you get further out, though, computers can be practically sentient, ships can jump across vast distances, but it's all still simple enough to be conceived by a human mind. Get too far out, though, into "the beyond," and it's the realm of Powers of unfathomable intelligence and inscrutable goals. It's an interesting idea that lets him place the story in a hard-ish sci-fi setting without needing to play by some of the more traditional rules of physics.

Sorry, this came out more "summary" and less "review," but that's because I liked it so much and I want to share some of the ideas it had that I liked! So in short, if any of this sounds interesting to you, I definitely recommend it.

Fluent Forever

By Gabriel Wyner

This is an excellent book for anyone who's trying to learn a new language. Wyner is an opera singer, who thus needs to be able to sing flawless Italian, German, Russian, etc., and is sharing how he's managed to learn so many languages so completely.

I'd been using Anki before I started reading the book, but he gave me several tricks to really take Anki to the next level - especially, incorporating google image searches to find an image for all my cards. An image search will give you immediate nuance that definitions can struggle to capture; for example, the literal definition of "癒やし系" is like "healing method" or "therapy," but if you google image search it, you only get images of cute young women. Turns out, the term is most often used to talk about a type of "healing girl," like a relationship goal type of thing. It doesn't necessarily mean people wouldn't know what you meant if you started talking about wanting therapy, but it's the sort of thing that could definitely lead to an embarrassing mistake.

Wyner is also a very big advocate for beginning your language learning with pronunciation, which I've always valued but now he's given me good reasons for. His main argument is that it's a problem if you think, say, "Descartes" and "Dezz-cartezz" are two different people, and learning how to pronounce words properly to begin with means that you don't have to relearn any of your vocabulary later.

If you're learning a new language or just interested in learning a new language, this is an easy recommend.

Forgotten God

By Francis Chan

I liked this book, but I feel kinda bad; I don't have a lot to say about it. Look, it's a solid book with some solid theology about the Holy Spirit. Very little of it is revolutionary, but it's a helpful refresher/primer on the third person of the Trinity, and the fact that he is, indeed, a Person and not a Thing. This should be your starting point if you feel like you have any gaps in your understanding of the Spirit.

One Thousand Gifts

By Ann Voskamp

So this is a classic of the, like, women's Bible study circuit, but I only heard about it recently. One Thousand Gifts is less a self-help/devotional book than it is an memoir about the author's path down a self-help-ish journey, relating the lessons she learned along the way. As such, it's remarkably grounded and practical in a way that I really appreciated.

The basic thrust of the text is about having gratitude for the stuff that's obviously good, as practice for having gratitude for stuff that we only know is good because God is good. It's easy to thank God in all circumstances when the weather is nice and we're relaxing on the porch with a glass of lemonade; it's harder to thank God when your son's hand gets mangled in an industrial fan. I really appreciated how Voskamp didn't hide from the hard questions and didn't shy away from expressing her own struggles in the midst of them. Her answers won't work for everyone, but sometimes when you read memoirs like this, it feels less like the author actually found peace in a situation, and more like they figured out how to move forward without dealing with it; that is not the case in this book.

The text is uniquely florid and poetic in a way that I know is a turn-off for many people, but I didn't mind it; it felt eccentric rather than try-hard or distracting, and helped ground things even more for me.

Prayer

By Timothy Keller

So this was my first Tim Keller book, which if you're not a Presbyterian you might not know is funny, but it is very funny. But I think the funniest part for me was how reading it made it obvious that I have been reading Tim Keller books for years, indirectly. I've heard so many sermons and lesson plans that were structured off of his points, that this book was kind of... like, it's good book and I did learn some stuff from it, but very little of it was new to me, right? Even down to the fundamental structure of its arguments; I could see where he was going with things from the first sentence of each chapter.

That made it not a particularly exciting book for me to read, and it means it's hard for me to point to anything in particular that I got out of it because most of it just blends perfectly with a lot of my past learning on prayer. But that doesn't mean it was a bad book or that I don't recommend it; just the opposite.

The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

By John Mark Comer

This was a great book that I read at a great time in my life for it. Usually you read a self-help (is that the right word for this genre?) book when there's a thing that you're struggling with, but I read this one at a time when I had basically figured out how to elimate hurry from my life. What I was struggling wasn't hurry - it was the feeling of, I dunno, guilt? Laziness? That was accompanying my new lack of hurry, but this book helped show me why I had eliminated hurry from my life and why that was a good thing.

The title of the book comes from a conversation the author had with John Ortberg, where he'd asked Ortberg how to become the person he wanted to be. Ortberg thought for a moment and said (I'm paraphrasing), "You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of spirituality." So he went on a bit of a journey exploring the harmful effects of hurry in his life and the benefits of a measured pace, and the book relays the fruits of that experience.

Comer's books are all countercultural, but the other books I read were like, countercultural for American Evangelical culture, right? This one is much more countercultural for mainstream American culture; for example, he recommends practices like driving the speed limit, or deliberately choosing the longest checkout line at the grocery store. It's a lot of questions about some really fundamental stuff that's hard to realize are even questions to be asked, right? Like, "Why do we want to do things faster? Why do we want more time in the day?" You don't have to agree with all of his conclusions, I think, to benefit tremendously just from asking yourself some of the questions.

Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering

By Timothy Keller

So I liked Prayer well enough, but this Tim Keller book was phenomenal. Suffering and grief are topics that we don't typically dig into until we're, like, caught in them - or even until after we're clawing our way out. And Tim Keller understands that, and has structured the book so that people who are caught in the midst of suffering can look for support quickly. But he devotes the majority of the book to a more philosophical dissection of suffering and the Christian approach to it in a way that I think is extremely valuable to look at when you're not caught in the midst of it.

I particularly appreciated his review of alternative approaches to suffering and why Christianity has something to offer that each of them don't. It kind of supports an idea that I've been chewing on recently about how Christian outreach is often most effective when, instead of telling people why they need Jesus, you show them how Jesus is the best way to be who they want to be. Like Paul at the Aeropagus; he doesn't go in there like, "Wow, you guys have so many false gods, let me tell you why you're wrong!" He says, "Hey, I can see that you guys are all very religious and are eager to please the gods; let me tell you about this one you're not familiar with." I mean, shoot, he even quotes their scripture at them. Anyway, Tim Keller talks a lot about Stoicism and how and why Christianity flourished among stoics - notably, because early Christians handled suffering so well, which was a trait that Stoicism prized.

I think my favorite part of the book, though, were the several personal accounts of grief and suffering, one after each of the first several chapters. Some of them were people on the other side of suffering, some were from people smack in the middle of it, and all of it together worked very well to paint a portrait of how broad suffering is, how diverse it is, and how there isn't one easy answer to apply to all of it - a point that Tim Keller makes repeatedly throughout the book. This book gets a high recommend.

Oof! Okay that was kind of a lot, I should do these more frequently. We'll see what happens.

But.

There are a lot of foods that they don't even try to make, and some of them are foods that I, as an American, view as staple foods. Like bread - you'd think, yeah, of course, it's Asia, they lean on rice for their carbs, right? And that's true, except they love French patisserie. They actually have a ton of bakeries and do a ton of bread items. And all of them are sweet.

I honestly think I would've been fine without bread if it just wasn't available there, but having loaves of incredible sandwich bread in every grocery store was torture when all of them were sweet. Like, Japanese sandwich bread is to white bread is to wheat bread - it's not mind-bogglingly sweet, and you can use it for sandwiches, but it is really sweet, and it's so soft. Ugh, like, again, it's a delightful example of what it's trying to be, but what it's not trying to be is tangy or crusty or dry. And after six months in Japan, I grew to really miss savory bread.

So when I got back to the States, I decided to learn more about baking bread. It's not been, like, a dedication or a committment, but I've been on the lookout for easy recipes. Something interesting I've learned: there's like, one basic bread recipe, and it's this:

• ~1 tbsp yeast
• ~1 tsp salt
• ~3 cups warm water
• ~6 1/2 cups of flour

Mix ingredients, then knead a bit, then let rise, then bake.

There's lots of variations - longer rise, shorter rise, add a shape and a second rise, bake it with a tray of water beneath it, flatten it, roll it into a ball, whatever whatever; I've seen this recipe in a lot of different places with a lot of different nuances, but it's all basically just those proportions of ingredients and those fundamental steps. This is probably something very well-known and anyone who's done any serious baking is chuckling at me like I chuckle at new writers who've just discovered the Hero's Journey, but dang, man - the Hero's Journey is a revelation if you've never heard of it before!

If you shape the dough into flat disks, it makes a great pizza dough. If you skip the knead and refrigerate it after the rise, after a couple days it makes a good tangy crusty bread. Yesterday I wrapped meat and cheese in it, gave it an egg wash, and made calzones; I think I'm going to try pan-frying it soon and try for a naan-ish flatbread.

I don't have any good pictures because I've forgotten how to remember to take pictures, haha, but maybe sometime soon I'll post some.

There will be no spoilers; I want to encourage you to watch movies on this list that you haven't seen.

I Saw the TV Glow

First on the list because yeah, I just rewatched it not an hour ago. I Saw the TV Glow is difficult to describe; there's not a whole lot that I've seen than I can compare it to. The basic synopsis is it's about a kid and his friend who get a little too obsessed with a Buffy-esque 90s show, but that is so, like... it tells you nothing about what the movie is actually like.

But look, what I love about this movie is the shockingly powerful Christian allegories that run through it. I know it was not the author's intent, but like seriously, it is one of the most intensely Christian movies I've ever seen, and about a side of things that intentionally Christian movies never touch on - what faith in Jesus looks and feels like to someone on the outside, who's attached to their life. This isn't a movie about "Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden," this is a movie about "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

It's described as a horror, but it's not what anyone thinks of when they think of horror. It's horrifying, maybe, but there's no jump scares, no gore, nothing like that. Just horrifying ideas.

Silence

Okay, this one might be cheating a bit - Silence is definitely a Christian movie, but it is a real Hollywood movie, not a movie made by Christians for Christians, and it's not one that many Christians I've talked to have seen.

It's a hard movie to watch, I won't pretend otherwise; it's like 3 hours long and while I don't remember a lot that's particularly graphic, it is about a tortured people group - early Japanese Christians - so there's some rough scenes for sure.

But oh, the ideas that it dares to give voice to! "Christian" movies like to pay lip service to the idea that life can be hard even for Christians, but there's still this severe intellectual cowardice in most of them - this idea that there are answers to all of your questions, or that once you fully trust God then it's all easy. Silence is about looking for God in the midst of suffering - about struggling to find him when it seems like he's completely absent. It's about facing people utterly undeserving of forgiveness and wrestling with whether it's right to forgive them anyway. It's about realizing how unworthy of forgiveness we are, about being too weak to even ask God for strength, and casting yourself on his mercy anyway.

It is a hard movie to watch, and at times even a hard movie to agree with, but I think it's an important movie to consider.

Everything , Everywhere, All at Once

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is basically the book of Ecclesiastes in the form of an action-comedy. This is a harder movie to recommend to general audiences; a lot of people are going to be too turned off by watching a man fight tooth and nail to insert a buttplug into himself, or a woman beating a man to death with a pair of dildoes, to get on board with the movie's deeper themes. And that's okay! I get that. And then even if you do stick around, the theme is all about "All is vanity and striving after wind," which, while biblical, is not exactly the most popular memory verses.

But I find Ecclesiastes to be an important counterpoint to the rest of scripture, in much the same way as the book of James. James is in large part about, "Hey, if you're reading all this stuff about being saved by faith and not by works, you might get the wrong idea that works are unimportant. But bro, they're super important, because if you actually have faith then you'll be dripping with works left and right." Ecclesiastes, in turn, is about, "Hey, if you're reading all this stuff about how important you are to God, you might get the wrong idea that the things you do matter. But bro, you are literally incapable of achieving anything of any lasting value, even if you commit your entire life to it - you are what matters, not your accomplishments." (Obviously both of those are heavily simplifications, but you get the idea.)

So Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is about wrestling with the question of the vanity of life - if there's really nothing new under the sun, why are we even here?

I'm not trying to be rude or anything, I'm just saying that by this point, I know all the positions. I know some people think it will save the world and some people think it will end it, and I know why they think those things, and I know why different people think those perspectives are stupid. I know why some people think it's all plagiarism, and why some people think it's genuine creativity. I know why some people think it's gonna rock the entire economy and why some people think it's useless.

New stuff is happening in AI all the time; Google just announced their new "AI makes a 60 second video game" thing today; it's crazy and does stuff AI hasn't been able to do before now. Some guy just made a github repo that gives Claude Code access to your whole computer and lets it do basically whatever you can do. Somebody even made a "social" network for those AI assistants. This is all kinda new territory, but like really? I know what everyone thinks about it already. So do you, if you've been reading the same three or four articles that keep getting written about new AI developments.

It's okay. We don't need to read this week's opinion pieces.

I'm not saying I'm pro or anti, and I'm not one of those guys saying the truth is in the middle and AI is good at some things and in some ways and bad in others. I'm just saying that I find people's opinions on the topic increasingly uninteresting.

Aside from the color scheme, one of the changes you may have noticed is the Japanese on the home page. As my Japanese is reaching the level where I'm technically capable of writing (poorly) in Japanese, I think it'd be good practice to try to at least translate some of my existing content, and maybe even start posting occasionally entirely in Japanese. Short posts only, for now. (This is probably completely irrelevant to you, because if you're reading this you probably can't read Japanese, and I'll probably keep anything I do in Japanese segregated from the rest of the site.)

The weird thing that I've noticed, as I've been starting to write in Japanese: it's pretty doable to translate my English content into Japanese, but if I write something originally in Japanese, it's extremely difficult for me to translate it into English. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me; most of what I've been doing is moving from Japanese to English so far. That's why I'm trying to write more in Japanese, is to get practice creating in Japanese instead of just receiving from Japanese! But it's like, when I'm thinking in Japanese, the thoughts just don't fit in English.

I'm noticing this most as I text my church back in Hakodate. It's a bilingual church, so if anyone sends a message in English, someone in the chat will translate it to Japanese, and vice-versa, so everyone who's monolingual can follow along. I know enough Japanese now that when I'm messaging the group, I try to write in Japanese first, and then I write my own translation afterwards, and it is just so much harder than writing it in English first and then translating it to Japanese. It's harder than reading someone else's message in Japanese and translating that to English. I think it must be because I know what I wanted to convey, and when I'm writing in Japanese first I want to convey those things in a Japanese way of thinking? I dunno, it's weird.

I think the annoying thing about learning and growing is how it's always the hard part. Like, you can take a break whenever you want, but if you want to be progressing, it's gotta be hard. I won't grow if I just keep doing the parts of Japanese that are easy for me. But the hard parts are all hard, and I've done enough of the hard-but-fun stuff that it's starting to just be hard-and-unfun stuff left. Like one of the next things I really should do is start watching anime in Japanese, with Japanese subtitles, and pausing and rewinding until I understand everything that's being said. There's definitely a place for watching at full speed and just following as best I can - you do learn a lot that way - but like, you learn different things that way.

One new hard-but-fun thing I've found to do is learn full songs in Japanese. I make anki decks of all the vocab in the song, ask some LLM to explain the grammar, and then work on memorizing it until I can sing along and know what I'm saying the whole time. The singing along is, I think, one of the key bits - even when I understand what they're saying, getting it all to come out of my own mouth at full speed can be surprisingly tricky. Japanese doesn't have any sounds English doesn't use, but it uses them in different ways and in different patterns, and going full speed is tough.

I've learned doukashiteru by wurts, CINDER ELLA by toaka, and I'm working on NIGHT DANCER by imase and odoriko by Vaundy. I want to start doing some Japanese rap to kick the training up to the next level, so Creepy Nuts and DOTAMA are both on my list, but maybe not quite yet.

In other topics, I'm nearing the end of a complete read-through of the Bible that probably deserves its own post; I'll probably finish tonight. The summary, though, is that it was a good enough experience I think I'm just gonna start over right away in a different translation, or maybe reading it in a different order. Actually, how long has it been since I talked about what I've been reading? I should maybe do another one of those posts, too, though it doesn't feel like I've read very much since the last one. I should really keep better track of what I'm reading and when.

My sister had been due at the end of January. Her baby was pretty big, so we were all hoping/expecting it to be a little early; my mom was planning on coming up from Florida on January 10th, so she'd be here if the baby came early, or so she could help finish nesting if not. Cassie and I arrived a month before that, with the plan being that we'd use the guest room until my mom needed it, and go wherever God had planned for us when that happened.

But one week after we got here - right when we were settled, adjusted to the time change, etc. - my sister's water broke. We came here depending on God's plan and timing, so it was fun to see it play out so clearly and directly. We were able to do a lot to help during labor - like picking my mom up from the airport when she rushed straight here - and have been making dinners, doing laundry, and just a lot of mundane stuff like that while the baby's been in the NICU. (Everything is fine, he's just premature enough that he needs a little time finishing development.)

We're in a bit of a resting period again now as everything has stabilized at the NICU and my sister and her husband can spend all day there sitting with him and can actually hold him, change his diapers, stuff like that; they're pretty much only home to sleep for now. But once they all come home together, I expect things to pick up in busyness again, and I'm just so glad to be here for it, to be able to help out!

Some people have been asking us if we know where we'll be going next yet, and like, man, I don't know how I can possibly worry about that anymore. If we didn't believe that God had a plan and had control over the timing after this, I think we'd really be hopeless. I will say that my sister and husband have been very glad to have us around to help out and have expressed a desire that we stay longer than the originally planned January 10th end date; so maybe we'll be here a while yet. I expect we'll hear something from God just about exactly when we need to know it, and I'm not gonna stress it until then.

That said, Cassie and I both have felt continuing pulls towards Hakodate, so we do still believe Japan is still on the agenda, even if we don't know whether it's on the top or the bottom. We'll continue hoping that it's soon, without expecting or planning for anything at all.

We knew our time at the Armes was up in early December when their kids all came home for Christmas, and we'd been planning for that by looking for ways to stay in Los Angeles - or Pasadena. We'd been getting plugged into church and PIHOP and even had a lead on some short-term housing there, so things were looking up.

For finances, Cassie had applied at Starbucks, which seemed like the surest part of the process - she'd worked there for years, had always gotten high marks as an employee, and it's just the sort of job where they're pretty always hiring if you're a good enough hire. Because it seemed like the surest part of the process, we were using it as kind of a signal flag; God's been guiding us a lot using closed doors, and we figured if he wanted us to not stay in LA, closing the door on Starbucks seemed like a good way to do it.

(I think you can guess where this is going, but I'm going to continue anyway.)

The other day, Cassie and I were talking about things like what's coming next, and she mentioned off-handed how my sister had offered to let us stay in her guest room for a while. I'd been there when my sister had offered, but for some reason, Cassie saying it this time, I was like, "Oh, I bet that's gonna happen. You're not going to get the Starbucks job and we'll end up crashing with her next." Maybe an hour later, Cassie heard back from Starbucks that they'd done the interviews wrong, asked her the wrong questions (they'd interviewed her as if she was applying to be a barista instead of a shift lead), and actually with her availability (she doesn't work on Sundays) it doesn't look like it's going to work out.

So we messaged my sister and asked her how serious she'd been about letting us stay with her, and could she please confirm with her husband that it's cool for us to stay with them for a while. She said their guest room is free for a month, starting right when we needed it to be free! So that's where we'll be, starting in about a week.

To get ahead of some of the questions: no, we have no idea where we'll be going afterwards. God has been giving us the direction we need only and exactly when we need it, and we don't need to know where we're going next yet, so. If it's elsewhere in Virginia, I don't know that we'll know until a couple days beforehand; if it's somewhere we have to fly to, we've generally been hearing about it right around the time when we can get the cheapest airfare, 2-3 weeks in advance. Neither of those are certainties or rules, just saying how it's been working out for us so far.

Cassie and I are both in a really good place right now RE: trusting God's plan and his timing, so neither of us are too worried about what comes next anyway. We know that it will be good, and we're excited to see how it plays out!

As I mentioned in my last post, we've been staying with our friends, the Armes. Their kids have all either moved out or gone to college, so they had a spare bedroom we could use. They've been excellent hosts; oh my goodness, Debbie takes such good care of us. Every other day we wake up to some fresh-baked pastries, and we have to press her to let me handle any of the cooking. (And we certainly can not do any of the cleaning!) Alan leads a family devotional every night after dinner, and besides that it's been great to be a part of his regular Sunday School class at church.

Speaking of church, Grace Pasadena has been such a wonderful, welcoming place for us during our time here. It's been so much fun to get to know the people there, who have all been friendly and encouraging and excited to get to know us. I've particularly enjoyed their mid-week worship nights that they do once a month, as well as the intimacy of their small groups. We'd attended sporadically during little visits with the Armes in the past, but this is the first time it was a regular thing, and what a delight it has been!

We've also been blessed by several visits to PIHOP, the Pasadena International House of Prayer. Our first visit there was to an event they call The Well, where you get prayed for individually by two separate groups, who prophecy encouragement and exhortation over you. Cassie and I both were tremendously encouraged by our visit to the Well, so much so that we attended several other events there.

Which does finally get us to the point where we can start talking about what God's been teaching us. Well, I'll mostly just talk about what God's been teaching me - Cassie can speak for herself if she chooses to.

It's hard to pin down the point when it started, because it's been a thing that's been growing slowly for years, but God has been pushing me to be more aware of the Spirit and more open to his gifts. None of the churches I've attended have ever been particularly open to the more miraculous, or "sign" gifts of the Spirit - I don't know that any of them are even Continuationist, because conversations on topics like speaking in tongues or modern prophecy basically don't even come up. I've been theologically Continuationist for years after deciding I just didn't see a strong scriptural argument for Cessationism, but that decision hasn't had much of an impact on my life because I haven't, like, done anything with it. Or met anyone who does.

But we went to PIHOP after some encouragement in that direction from the Armes, and PIHOP is very Continuationist. I don't agree with all of their beliefs, but it was very encouraging to get exposure to believers who (in my opinion) go too far towards the miraculous gifts than too far away from them. Our first night there, we went to a regular event that they call "The Well," where you basically just get prophesied over for ten minutes. You don't tell the people praying over you anything about yourself, they just say whatever the Spirit leads them to say. Cassie and I were both in tears by the end of it, it was so encouraging, so specific to us and our situation. They recognized that I had a calling that was taking a long time to come to fruition, and they reassured me that I was called and that I was still being faithful to that calling.

It was so encouraging that I went to their monthly "Prophecy 101" class, and while there, the guy leading it used me as a "sample" target for prophecy and asked the class to prophesy over me. They said that God has a plan for me that may be hard to understand, but that he's behind the curtain, controlling everything, so I don't need to worry. Someone said they felt like I was being called to work with foreign cultures. After praying these things over me for a couple minutes, the class was delighted for me to share a bit of my story so far - how I was called to go to Japan two years ago, but have been waiting for God to get us visas.

The class insists that every believer has the gift of prophecy; I don't agree with that, but I am increasingly convinced that I have the gift. So I've been reading a lot about it (User-Friendly Prophecy by Larry Randolph) and praying a lot about it. 1 Corinthians says that prophecy is for edification and encouragement and comfort, and Revelation says that the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy - both of which, I think, are a little different that the popular perception of it. Old Testament prophecy may have been largely about guidance and rebukes, but New Testament prophecy seems to be more about encouragement.

I'm still praying a lot about it, I don't know what it's going to look like or how it'll fit into my life. But I'm excited to see where God takes it!

Cassie's already got an in at a coffee shop that's a five minute walk away and needs help for the next month or two, so that'll be great if that works out. I'm still writing, reading, and studying Japanese, and considering applying to nearby jobs myself, as long as I can find someone else in need of (relatively unskilled) short-term help. But I'm also considering doing online college and trying to get a bachelor's degree; that'll open up English teaching jobs to me in Japan, and then obviously more potential jobs to me here.

In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of reading, so I figured it'd be fun to go over some of the things I've read in the last couple months.

Most recently I've read the Gap Cycle, by Stephen R. Donaldson - a five-book sci-fi series from the early 90s. I really enjoyed it; it's simpler than a lot of other sci-fi from its era, softer on science and heavier on character. It starts off pretty rough and horrifying but it uses the horror deliberately and helps the characters grow from it. It's not particularly deep, borrowing most of its theming quite deliberately from Der Ring des Nibelungen, but I appreciate any stories that include the transformational power of radical forgiveness and the destructiveness of holding on to grudges.

On the nonfiction side, I'm juggling several surveys of Japanese history and culture; Modern Japan (A Very Short Introduction) by Christopher Goto-Jones was true to its name quick and easy to digest, if a bit surface-level. Japan by Boye Lafayette de Mente was... well, I kind of stopped reading it because it was contained some obvious inaccuracies. His Etiquette Guide to Japan seems better, but I'm still taking it with a grain of salt.

Speaking of books I stopped reading, though, I also couldn't get through Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird, by Henry Lien. I think it may be useful as an introduction for someone who hasn't really been exposed to Eastern storytelling structures, but halfway through it just hadn't told me anything I didn't know, or given me any perspectives that I wasn't already familiar with.

I'm also working on Modern Japan, by Mikiso Hane, which is very in-depth, very comprehensive, and very dry, so it's slow going but definitely worth the effort. (It was getting partway through her book that help show how off-base Lafeyette de Mente's book was!)

I devoured John Mark Comer's Practicing the Way and then God Has a Name, in that order. Practicing the Way is an excellent look into what the Bible seems to expect Christian lifestyles to look like, and asks why our lifestyles don't look like that and what steps we can take to change that. (As a bonus, he cites like a billion different books along the way, giving you lots of recommendations for further reading on any particular part that interests you.) God Has a Name is an in-depth look at Exodus 34:6-7, the most-quoted passage of the Bible by the Bible:

The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

It takes it line by line, examining what that means, how it was interpreted by the rest of scripture, and what it means for us today. Very good, highly recommend it.

Other than that I've been reading through the Bible itself, trying to cover-to-cover it in a period of a couple months. I'm in Chronicles now. One of the things that's standing out to me the most this time through the Old Testament is just how lenient God is towards the Israelites. Like, there's this common perception - even among many Christians - that the God of the Old Testament is more wrathful and less forgiving than the God of the New Testament, but it's hard to see that in how he treats his people. He's so quick to forgive people who even just pay lip service to him, it's crazy. Someone will openly flout his commands, he'll punish them somehow, and they're like, "Oh dang, I'm sorry!" and so often he just immediately relents, even though they go right back to rejecting him in the next sentence. The main change that gives the difference in reputation between the Old and New Testaments is that he opened up the definition of "his people" to include everyone who wants to be included - except even that was pretty clearly the case in the Old Testament, with several stories of outsiders and even enemies of Israel who recognized his authority, submitted themselves to it, and who were blessed for it.

Other than that, it's been a source of constant reassurance and, like, embarrassment, how much I can relate to the Israelites - especially in the Torah, during their time in the wilderness. Cassie and I are in our own period of wilderness, and it's so easy to forget the cool things that God did for us yesterday when we face the troubles of today. It's embarrassing how much reminding I need of his provision and the effectiveness of his plans. Cassie read through Job the other day and the final few chapters were a good reminder of how small we are and how silly it is to doubt him. I'm eternally grateful for him being merciful and gracious towards me when I complain at him, and I continue to count on his steadfast love and faithfulness.

First, a bit of, ah, recap, I guess? We've talked about it before but it's been a minute. So the fast version is this: we left Florida with our two cats, Susie and Xena, bringing them to Cassie's sister in Virginia, who very generously volunteered to watch the cats for us during our initial travels to Japan. Shortly after leaving Virginia, Susie passed from what was apparently quite a lot of cancer, leaving Xena to adapt alone. But she did! She lived in Candace's basement for about a year, and seemed quite comfortable.

But eventually it passed from Candace doing us a temporary favor to us definitely imposing on her, so we talked to some friends in California about bringing Xena with us out here. We wanted a couple backups (in case she didn't get along with their pets), and we wanted at least a general openness to keeping her indefinitely/permanently, in case the transfer to Japan wound up not working like we expect.

And we got it! The McFarlands were very generous in welcoming her into their home. We were a little concerned about how she'd adapt to their new dog, but he's so chill we were willing to give it a shot, and then bring her to some other friends if it didn't work out.

But first we had to get her here!

For the flight from LA to Florida a few years ago, we'd given the cats, like, I think the vet said it was basically just painkillers? But it was supposed to relax them too. It worked fine for Susie, but Xena spent the whole flight yelling, and we were very sorry for her. So for this flight, we wanted to try something stronger.

Luckily, she'd been kinda stressy when first adapting to Candace's house, and Candace had gotten her some gabapentin, which Xena liked. So we gave her a dose of that for the flight and she spent the whole thing pretty zonked.

Then she was here!

Xena adapted to the McFarlands' place real quick. It hasn't been quite as smooth as we'd hoped, but she's adjusting well, especially to the dog - she spent the first few days terrified of him, but by now he's no big deal. She still hides if she hears him walking down the hallway, but once she sees it's him, she chills.

Honestly, she's getting along worse with their cat Roland, but we're not too worried about that, either; it's mostly her fault for hissing at him when she sees him. The more she adapts to this place and gets less scared in general, the less she'll be provoking him. We just hope that they can get beyond a "truce" and reach a point where they get along and play together - Xena always wanted to play with Susie, and Susie was too fat and lazy to put up with that.

We leave soon to stay with some of our other friends in LA who have a bit more space, but Xena is staying here with the McFarlands until we're either heading for Japan or we find a place of our own here. We'll be sad to be apart from her again, but we're glad she's in good hands!

People on the East Coast love to joke about people saying, "Yeah, but it's a dry heat," but as someone who's lived in swamps and deserts, let me assure you: a dry heat is significantly cooler and significantly better. The one downside is that air conditioning doesn't work as well - but that matters so much less when just shade can lower the temperature by like 10-15 degrees!

Don't get me wrong; dry heat is still heat. 90° is not my preferred temperature regardless of humidity. But I'd take 90° with 10-20% humidity over 80° with 70-80% humidity any day of the week.

The rest of Los Angeles is just as wonderful as I remember. The people are nice, the movie theaters are well-maintained, the food is excellent. Now that I've been to Tokyo (which is, unfortunately, almost strictly better (which is crazy)) some of the sheen has come off, but it really is the best place I've lived in the United States.

Which is good, because unless God moves in a big way in a short timeframe, we're gonna have to get jobs and a place to live here. We're already strategizing a bit, thinking about where we'll look first, that sort of thing. It's not a fun conversation, but it's an important one, so. If it doesn't work out here I don't know what plan C is (plan A is, of course, going back to Japan); I'd rather go back to Virginia than Florida, but I'd even more rather go to, like, Korea, so who knows? Our navigation system for the last... long time has been "Make steps almost at random and let God close doors if we're going the wrong way."

I won't say I'm not worried, but the fear is like... it's kind of like hunger, in the specific way of it comes up often, multiple times a day, but it's always easily dealt with. I'm frequently anxious, but every time I start to get anxious, I read the Bible, do a quiet time, or pray, and things calm down. I've been rereading the Torah recently, Genesis-Deuteronomy, and when I start to get nervous about if God is going to provide for me, it's really helpful to look at the Israelites post-Exodus and just how stubborn and forgetful they were. They had seen God move in big, undeniable ways, over and over again, but each time they faced a new struggle - or sometimes even just the same struggle over again! - they immediately turned to panic. There are some times I read that story with a sort of lofty arrogance - "Those silly people! If I had seen God part the Red Sea, I wouldn't worry about if he could X/Y/Z." But like, dude, I've seen God do all sorts of stuff in my life and I worry that he's gonna stop providing for me all the time.

To be a little fairer to myself, part of that worry is less "God's gonna stop taking care of me" and more "I got it wrong this time and he's not gonna make things work out because I'm on the wrong path now." But even that fear ultimately boils down to one (or both) of two things: either the fear that God won't provide for me once I shift course towards whatever his plan actually is, or the fear that I'm going to look like an idiot. And both those fears are, ultimately, baseless. For the former, of course he'll provide a new course for me; for the latter, it's good for me to feel like an idiot if I'm being an idiot.

Okay, there is also the fear that we're not just wrong on the short term, that we've been wrong all along and we're never going to get to stay in Japan. Man, that fear is infrequent, but when it hits, it hits hard. But even that one just boils down to the other two fears, or else the fear that what God wants for us is different than what we want for ourselves, but that's a dumb fear too - God is smarter than me, knows what I like better than I do, and likes me more than I like myself; I think it's safe to trust his calls for my life.

(I was going to include an full update on our cat Xena here, but realized this post was long enough, so for the moment I'll just say that she's doing really well! She still doesn't love the McFarlands' cats and dog, but she's getting along with them better and better as time passes, so we're not worried at all.)

We're going to be staying with friends for a while, though depending on how long we're there for, we may end up renting a place. We're probably going to get jobs or at least start gigging while we're out there.

A lot of people have been asking "Why LA? Why not stay in Virginia or go back to Florida where you can stay with family?" Which is a very fair question! There's not really one answer; it's an accumulation of a lot of things:

• Finances. I know it's crazy, but we saved more money paying rent in Los Angeles than we did living rent-free in Florida. Rent is outrageous, but then it's getting outrageous everywhere, and like everything else is cheaper there.
• Related to that, LA is a better place for short-term work and gigs and stuff. We're not trying to start careers, just stay in the black until we can leave. I'd feel bad getting a job in Florida and then jumping ship if we get our visas after only working for a month.
• We have more options there for our cat. We're still planning on bringing her with us when we go to Japan, but in LA, we have a lot of friends who could potentially take her if that doesn't work out.
• I just like it better. LA is a great place and I like being there.
• The silliest reason, but it's geographically closer to Japan and I like that.

In a less... measurable way, there's also just the fact that the way God has been guiding us through this process has been via closed doors. We just keep making choices, and if those choices won't bring us where he wants us to go, he makes it very clear very quickly. We decided to go to Los Angeles months ago and everything has worked out for that, so it seems like it's either where we're supposed to be, or at least a fine place for us to be. (And I suspect the former.)

We're excited to see all our LA friends, but sad to say goodbye to our friends and family here in Virginia. We've had a great time and we'll miss you all!

Video Games

I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy games on my Vita - specifically, Final Fantasy X and now Final Fantasy X-2. I started with FFX because I've played it many times in the past, so I'm familiar enough with the plot and the characters that I can follow it pretty well without understanding what they're saying.

"But wait," you might be saying, "Isn't the point of this to understand what they're saying? How will you be learning Japanese if you can understand what's happening without understanding the language?" The answer to that is that it's because I can understand what's happening that I can understand the language.

The human brain is designed to acquire language in context. Flash cards and the like are great for rote memorization, but if your brain has to do a full recall for every word in a sentence, you're never going to be able to understand speech in real-time, and any speech you create will be awkward and halting. By experiencing content that I'm already familiar with, I get to do two things: 1) I can more the vocabulary and the grammar I already know into a more useful place in my brain, and 2) I can encounter new vocabulary and grammar in contexts where I might be able to parse out their meaning without needing to look them up.

So it's worth noting that this would be much less valuable to me if I wasn't already familiar with the language. But because I've spent a lot of time learning grammar and memorizing vocabulary, I'm at a point where this kind of immersion is getting some work done.

How much work? I was down on it a little bit; it felt like I was just having fun playing video games and pretending it was productive time. But then I started noticing situations outside the game that I was only able to understand because of my time playing the game. I'll give two different examples.

First, Cassie and I were both reading the same katakana, and she was really struggling, while I could breeze right through it.

Um, oops, okay, very very quick overview time. Japanese has three writing systems: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Kanji are the Chinese characters, the complex ones. Hiragana and katakana are both simple pronunciation-only characters, like alphabets except they're mostly consonant-vowel pairs. It's far from an ironclad rule, but hiragana is mostly used for writing Japanese words, while katakana is used for writing foreign loanwords.

The upshot being that video games - which use a lot of loan words both by necessity and as a stylistic choice - tend to have a lot of katakana, which again, are being used to spell out foreign words phonetically. For a specific example, FFX and FFX-2 both make liberal use of the word スフィヤ, pronounced "sufiya," meaning "sphere." Even a lot of places where there exists a Japanese word, games will use katakana - for example, in battle a character might use a 特殊, but in the menu screen, you'll look for their アビリティ - "abiriti," AKA "abilities."

So yeah, all that to say that playing through Final Fantasy X and encountering the vast amount of loan words - some easy, like "faiya" being "fire," and some crazy, like "maruchi" being "multi" - has given me a much better sense of how to parse katakana and loanwords in Japanese.

The second event that showed how much it was helping came from reading our Japanese church's text thread. I was thrilled the other day to realize that I could actually parse most of it. I was showing Cassie how much of it we could read, and then realized that she had a much harder time, because seriously every single sentence had at least one kanji, sometimes even whole words, that I'd learned from Final Fantasy.

Some of it was a reasonable enough connection - there's holy figures in Final Fantasy X called 祈り子, very roughly translated "praying children." It's not a big shock that 祈, the kanji for prayer, gets used a lot in church contexts. But funnier (to me) was the connection to 連続魔法, roughly "chain magic" (the game localized it as "Doublecast"), which lets you cast two spells in a row on your turn. Turns out, 連続 just means something like "continuously," and gets used in lots of contexts, like when our pastor mentioned something happening for the next three days - ３日連続.

Anyway, I've beaten FFX and moved on to the sequel, X-2, which I'm less familiar with so it's a bit more challenging, but I'm still having fun with it.

Anki

Anki is, on many days, the bulk of my Japanese. I'm getting to a point where I need to transition away from Anki as the spine of my learning and start using it as a support, but I'm not quite there yet.

I have three primary Anki decks right now: Final Fantasy, Wanikani, and Refold.

Final Fantasy

This is my bread and butter right now. I took the translation pages from the Final Fantasy wiki (FFX, FFX-2) and turned them into Anki decks. The main Final Fantasy deck has three subdecks - Kanji, Final Fantasy X, and Final Fantasy X-2. You can guess about the latter; the Kanji deck is for when I get a vocabulary word for one of the games that uses kanji I'm not familiar with.

Wanikani

So Wanikani is actually its own thing that probably deserves its own writeup; basically it's a flashcard collection and webapp in one, that is designed to take you from zero kanji knowledge to knowing like 2,000 kanji. It's a bit unique in that it prioritize kanji that are simple to write, rather than common or important kanji; you learn words like "one-track mind" months or even years before words like "bathroom." This really isn't a big deal, though, because it gives you such a quick leg up on how many kanji you know that it makes it easy to acquire the common words through other means, like books or TV.

It's really a solid system and I do recommend it to new learners, as long as they understand that finishing the program won't let them read Japanese - it's not teaching any grammar, for example - and so it's only one column of their instruction. It's particularly good for teaching kanji - most of the other resources I've found prioritize vocabulary, but learning words is way easier when you know the kanji making them up.

That said, I like to have more control over the scheduling, so I used the API to download all their cards and turn them into an Anki deck. (I've paid them several hundred dollars over the course of my subscription by now, so I don't feel bad about it.) (I don't regret paying that much; again, it's a great system.)

Refold

This is just a paid Anki deck that we found online. I changed it around a bit, but mostly just the formatting, I'm pretty much using the deck as-is. It's a solid Japanese vocab deck focusing on the most common Japanese words. Each word has a sample sentence read by a native speaker, which I extracted and turned into a separate "sentences" subdeck, because that's more useful than lone words for learning grammar and actual use. I also added a "kanji" subdeck, just like the kanji subdeck in my Final Fantasy deck, where I add in the kanji of any vocabulary that I'm struggling with.

All Together

I think these three prongs together give me a really solid approach to the language. Refold gives me a good foundation of important Japanese, Wanikani fills in some odd gaps and gives me great kanji support, and Final Fantasy gives me the specific vocabulary that I'm reinforcing on a daily basis through actual use.

Soon - maybe after FFX-2, probably a bit before - I intend to start reading through some of our manga again, adding a new deck for the manga with each word as I come across it, and a kanji subdeck for any kanji I'm struggling with. When that happens, I'll probably rename the "Final Fantasy" deck to something like "Organic Vocab" and keep it all under that umbrella.

Cure Dolly

Cure Dolly was (she has, sadly, passed) a vtuber Japanese teacher. Her style is... unusual, and I was aware of her videos for months before I actually started watching them, mostly because of how put-off I was by the presentation.

But oh man, do not sleep on this channel.

Cure Dolly, by my understanding, was a bit of a Japanophile who learned a smidgen of Japanese, then went to Japan, bought of a bunch of Japanese language textbooks - as in, ones written in Japanese for Japanese schoolkids - and used those to teach herself Japanese. This gave her a uniquely Japanese approach to the language, which let her make sense of things that a lot of the English textbooks mishandle.

Her big thing is on approaching Japanese as Japanese, not as a European language. For example, rather than thinking about verbs as having conjugations, she views them as having a few simple stems that you attach different helpers to. Most English language Japanese instruction would say, for example, that 話せる is the potential form of 話す - "To be able to speak" instead of "to speak." But Cure Dolly says no, we're attaching the potential helper verb, here just る, to the e-stem of 話す, 話せ. It's a subtle distinction with massive ramifications for ease of parsing. Whereas the standard English approache requires you to memorize dozens of different forms of verbs, Cure Dolly turns the whole language into Lego blocks that you can easily rearrange.

She's a little too "my way is the best way" for some people - despite paying lip service to the idea of her approach as just one of many, she sure talks about her way as correct and other models as incorrect, even crazy - but dang, man, I think her way really is the best way, so it's hard to hold it against her. I'd tried Tae Kim for a while, but was having a hard time remembering his lists of rules; Cure Dolly turns all those lists into one simple system and single-handedly turned Japanese from a complicated mess to simpler than any other language I've studied. It's like magic.

You gotta do it all

No one of these systems alone will get you to the point of understanding Japanese; honestly, not even just these three will do it. Sooner than later, I'll need to start reading Japanese books and comics and watching Japanese shows and movies, and then not long after that I need to start practicing generation - easy if I'm in Japan and can have regular conversations in Japanese, but if I'm still in the USA I'll need to start writing short stories or something.

I think a lot of the people who start Japanese, get discouraged, and fail do so because they're leaning too heavily on only one column. Wanikani is awesome and will make it possible for you to learn to read, but even finishing Wanikani will not teach you to read. Honestly, it won't even get you close, because Japanese is a very grammar-heavy language. Cure Dolly makes that grammar easy to learn, but there's still a lot of it to learn, and if you're just focusing on the vocabulary you're not going to understand what any of the words in a sentence are doing.

For example, take the sentence 「彼女が言ったことがウソであることと分かった。」 If you know all the vocabulary but none of the grammar, you're reading something like "Girl say thing lie is have thing understand." Maybe, maybe you can get from there to "The thing she said turned out to be a lie," but even if you do it's only going to be with a lot of mental exertion that makes reading anything a serious chore. And that's not even using very complex grammar - there are much more complicated sentences. It's all easy to parse if you've learned it, and very difficult to intuit if you haven't.

But the payoff of all this work is so worth it. Man, even if I didn't want to live there, learning Japanese is so fun. You feel like some sort of wizard, looking at all these crazy runes and sigils that you know are meaningless to most of your friends, but to you they're a complete sentence. It's awesome.

So we just arrived back in Virginia from Florida. We're going to hang out here for a couple weeks until my aunt's (belated) celebration of life, and then we'll take our cat with us up to Los Angeles, where we'll crash with some friends until we know how we're getting to Japan.

Oh yeah, about that - our friend in Japan who said he was going to get us visas hasn't seemed to pan out? We haven't heard from him in months, so at this point we're assuming that ship has sailed. If we do end up hearing from him again, great! But until then, we're assuming God has some other plan in store for us.

By this point, our savings are starting to thin out, so unless we get a surprising lead very quickly, we're going to have to get jobs - and once we have jobs, we'll probably have to find somewhere to rent. It's not impossible we find friends in LA we can rent a room from or something, but otherwise we'll just look for somewhere cheap and crappy in LA, and if we can't find that, we'll look at going back to Virginia or Florida.

Some of you are reading this and laughing - "Somewhere cheap in LA? Fat chance of that!" But man, Los Angeles was so much cheaper for us to live in than Florida was. We were better off paying rent in Los Angeles than we were living in Bradenton rent-free. The rent is worse (and the places you get are smaller), but literally everything else is cheaper. I spent easily twice as much at the grocery stores in Florida, and for worse food.

Like, yeah, it's worse now than it was when we left, but so is Florida. There's nowhere cheap to live in the US anymore, that's part of why we're leaving. The only way things are easier for us in Virginia and Florida is that we have more family there that we can lean harder on.

But whatever, the moral of the story is God's gonna find a way to make it work - and if he tells us to do it ourselves until we hear otherwise, we'll find a way to manage. But God keeps reassuring me that we're on a path that he's set for us, so I'm not too worried about the future.

For those who don't know, Anki is a powerful, flexible flashcard app. It's very easy to make simple flashcards, but if you know a bit of HTML and CSS, it's easy to make pretty flashcards, and my understanding is it's pretty easy to add in Javascript to make some crazy ones, too - some people add video files or animations to theirs, some people even add minigames.

I haven't gone that far; I'm just using them for Japanese. I started off by buying a paid Japanese deck; you can find a lot of free ones online, but paid ones tend to be higher-quality. The one I got had very slick formatting and native speaker audio and sample sentences.

The more I used it, though, the more changes I wanted. Luckily, Anki made that easy. So now I have three different types of card - one for Radicals, one for Kanji, one for Vocabulary, and one for full Sentences. (Radicals are the different building blocks that make up kanji, kanji are the Japanese characters that are borrowed from China - aka the complicated ones, and vocabulary is just words made out of kanji, kana, or any combination of them.) I used free software to add machine-generated readings to any cards or sentences that didn't have them, and some simple HTML to collapse explanations and mnemonics behind answers so I can expand them if I'm having trouble with a card.

But more important than all that is how easy it is to organize and manipulate your own decks. We had been using Wanikani, which is really great and I do recommend it if you're getting started. But with Wanikani, you're using their (web-based) software and you're going at their pace. With Anki, I can decide, "I got this card right, but I hemmed and hawed over it a lot; I'm going to mark it as 'hard' instead of 'good' so it shows up again sooner." Or you can say, "I'm struggling with this card a lot and it's kind of niche; I'm just going to get rid of it/move it to a later deck/whatever and forget about it for now."

But most importantly, you can be reading a book or playing a game or watching a show, see some words or phrases that keep coming up - and you can just add them to your deck. Been hearing "仕方がない" a lot? Add it to your deck! Playing a game and you keep seeing "英雄"? Add it to your deck! Struggling to remember 英雄's meaning because you don't know the kanji? Add 英 and 雄 to your deck!

Lately, I've been playing a lot of Final Fantasy X in Japanese, just trying to get more immersion. But it's a little bit of a baptism by fire; a lot of stuff I just can't parse. So I went to the Final Fantasy X Translations page on the Final Fantasy wiki, easily turned all the tables into cards organized by type, and have been drilling those, now, too! It's super easy.

It's also easy to set up syncing between your phone and your computer, so I can modify cards with a keyboard and then run it all on my phone - or vice-versa. It's a great app, it's crazy that it's free.

One of the concepts that stuck out for me was where he described one of his common approaches to helping patients properly assess their priorities. He told them to imagine they were actually 80 years old, but had inexplicably woken up today in the past as their present age. What are they going to do differently "this time around?" Or, as an alternative approach that got at the same idea: imagine they're lying on their deathbed, looking back on their life. What do they think about how they spent the day they're about to spend? Do they regret their choices, or think they made the right ones?

It's not a particularly mind-blowing idea - I know I've heard the same concept in different ways and places before - but something about the way he presented it resonated with me. I've been thinking more about how I spend my days, and especially my free time. I don't think about "will I regret this specific day?" or anything, but I kind of think about how I'll look back on that activity category.

For example, I've never regretted time spent playing games with stories, but I do sometimes spend an evening playing something endlessly repeatable - Slay the Spire, maybe, or Bloons Tower Defense - and at the end of the day feel like I didn't really accomplish anything, like I just distracted the monkey part of my brain that likes flashing lights and bright colors. It's not that I think games without stories are bad, and it's not that I always regret them; I just sometimes use them to waste time rather than to entertain myself, and I usually regret wasting time.

It's complicated by the fact that some of those same games have been genuinely helpful to me, in unpredictable ways. The Dragonslayers, one of my favorite screenplays (which I'm currently adapting into a novel) came out of playing Stellaris; Dwarf Fortress has provided a shocking number of... I don't know what to call them. Personal metaphors? It's given me the framework and the examples to understand lots of abstract structural concepts, like how and why it's so hard to rebuild a system while leaving it functional.

Basically, as a writer, it's hard for anything I do to be a complete waste of time - which is why I think Frankl's way of "looking back" is so helpful. For some reason, looking at things in that framework gives me the perspective I need to judge if I'm doing something that's likely to be helpful to me, or if it's just killing time.

I've been putting some effort - not, like, a lot of effort - into trying to complain less, but with Florida, that takes the form of "This is not a good place for me," instead of "This is a perfectly fine place."

When we moved to Los Angeles from Virginia, Cassie didn't love it, but I did. It was immediate. I hadn't loved it quite so much when I'd visited it on vacation, but as soon as it was a home and I was making a life for myself instead of trying to see all the tourist stuff, it was great. But the weird thing was when we went back to Virginia, and it just... wasn't home. A lot had changed, yeah, but even the stuff that was the same wasn't the same.

On the other hand, when we first moved to Florida, I hated it, and I kept trying to talk myself into liking it. I would remind myself that the grass is always greener on the other side, and try to convince myself to enjoy it. And then when I went back to Los Angeles for the first time... oh dang, it was still perfect. It was everything I remembered it was! If anything, I'd forgotten some of how great it was! The grass was even greener than I remembered it, and Florida did actually suck!

Surprisingly, that made living in Florida way easier and better. Before, I'd been trying to force myself to like it as much as I'd liked LA, basically lying to myself. Once I knew it was as bad as it seemed, though, I was able to stop lying to myself and start finding things that I could enjoy. I couldn't make it as good as Los Angeles, but once I stopped trying to do things I couldn't do, I could start doing other things, effective things.

And there is a lot here to like. Since coming back, Cassie and I visited our church and our church friends, Tai Chi and our Tai Chi friends, went to the beach... we've had a fine time. I wouldn't want to live here again, but there are at least a lot of people here that I like.

It's funny how we haven't even been gone that long - I guess it's been nearly a year, but not quite - but this is the first time we've been going back there, so it does feel different. But, I mean, it will be different; they got hit by two big hurricanes after we left, so there's been a lot of damage and rebuilding. (That is, you may know, a big part of why we left; we were there two years and lived through two hurricanes and decided we didn't want to see any more.)

We're gonna be staying with my parents, and we'll be staying there long enough to be around when my sister and her husband come down to visit too, so that'll be fun.

We're leaving some stuff behind here, on the assumption that we'll be coming back here after Florida. I don't know that we'd stay here very long a second (third, kinda) time; we want to stay with our cat, but it does feel like we're imposing. Plus, while Cassie would probably prefer to linger in VA, I think if we're gonna be in the USA for a while longer, I'd rather try to do it on the west coast somewhere, since flights from there to Japan will be faster and cheaper. We'll figure it out, I'm not worried, just something we're chewing on.

Luckily, I'm a pretty fast reader, so I can generally scarf something down and then move on with my life. But when I'm reading a long series, it can kind of consume me. When I was reading Wheel of Time, I would spend, like, all of my free time on it, for months - we're talking like three hours a day most days, more on weekends.

I've started rereading Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive now that I have the fifth book and both the interquel novellas, and I just feel like reading is all I'm doing now. Each book is as long as, like, two normal fantasy novels. It'd be easier if they weren't as good, but they're Sanderson's best work; I can set down most of his stuff after a couple chapters and move on with my day, but Stormlight Archive I just don't want to stop.

I'm having fun rereading them this time after having read a lot of his other books. For those of you who don't know, Brandon Sanderson has this shared universe called the "Cosmere" that like half his books take place in, with a few characters and a lot of concepts being shared between them. Generally speaking it's unimportant to most of them, but Stormlight Archive leans into it a little more than the others, so it's fun to catch more of the references this time around.

It's certainly not necessary to enjoy them, probably not even recommended. There's just so much of it and a lot of it is just okay. I think I've been reading all of his stuff as a sort of intellectual laziness - Sanderson is consistently above-average and easy to read, so I've just been going through his back catalog because that's easier than taking risks on new authors. But it is paying off now that I'm back to Stormlight, because it is a genuinely excellent series.

I started reading Sense & Sensibility, but I made the mistake of putting that one down for a solid 24 hours and boy, that one is harder than most to get back into. So many characters have the same name and similar positions and relationships that it's just hard to remember what on earth is going on. I liked the first half of the book, but I think the only way I'll ever finish it is if I start over from the beginning. Maybe in a couple years.

I'm also reading C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain, which is really good, if a little... I dunno. I think the more of Lewis's nonfiction I read, the more seriously I take his self-appraisals - which tend to be self-diminishing. He opens The Problem of Pain talking about its limitations, how it's not a scholarly work, how he's not trying to accomplish X or Y or Z, and like... he's right. It's not scholarly, it doesn't accomplish those things, and it's at its best taken very casually as food for thought rather than a solid work.

When I was younger, I thought of C.S. Lewis as, like, a religious authority, but the more of his stuff I reread now, the more I think of him as just sort of an insightful guy who often, but not always, makes good points - which is, I think, all he really thought of himself most of the time. It just feels like a big change in how I read him because I used to view his genuine humility as inaccurate self-effacement.

That said, I also recently reread Til We Have Faces, which he really praises like it's the best thing he's ever written, and I think he's right about that, too.

I dunno, I haven't read nearly the majority of his work, and it's been a while since I've read most of it. I picked up an anthology of his nonfiction so I'll see how reading that goes. Maybe I'm misremembering some things.

As for other media, Cassie and I recently watched season two of Andor, which is phenomenal, possibly the best TV show in the last ten years. (But then, we haven't watched season two of Severance yet, and all accounts are that it's also excellent.) We, of course, rewatched Rogue One after finishing it, and I do think Andor does a good job giving more weight to that movie - but at the same time, it's still the same movie. The best of the Disney Star Wars films, but not, like, a must-see.

I saw Friendship in theaters the other day; that was lovely, but I don't think it resonated as well with me as it has for some people. I liked the comedy but didn't connect with the theme; I'm a confident person and I don't have trouble making friends, and the movie is about insecurity and how destructive it is to your social life. I could recognize the characters in the movie but I didn't really relate to them, I just felt sorry for them.

We also saw Mission Impossible, and that was... horrible. Like, offensively bad. I almost walked out and went home - I might've if I'd been seeing it alone. It repeatedly followed the same cycle:

• Characters talk about how they need to do something impossible or else the entire world will end.
• Somebody says they shouldn't do the thing, it's impossible/reckless/stupid; Tom Cruise begs them to trust him, and they do.
• Tom Cruise attempts the thing; something goes wrong, making the task even more impossible, but then he just does it anyway with no explanation as to why he was able to accomplish it.
• Slow-motion shots with no sound but dramatic music as characters reunite/reminisce/whatever.

Intersperse some incoherent flashbacks/flashforwards and some references to past films, throw in a few abject plot holes, and make it last about eighteen hours.

I'm not normally one to knock "popcorn movies." I know I'm one of those Film Snob types now who likes movies general audiences hate and dislikes movies general audiences love, but I can still respect them. I think he makes bad movies, but I totally understand the appeal and the success of Michael Bay, for example.

This is not that. If all this movie included was the action setpieces, it would still be odd and boring because the setpieces have such incoherent stakes. You can't spend three whole scenes telling us that X is impossible, then have something happen that makes X even more impossible, and then just have Tom Cruise do it anyway with no explanation as to why he's able to do it. If that's the kind of movie you want to make, just have Tom Cruise do the cool setpiece without an hour and a half of boring conversation beforehand. They want to have the schlock of Transformers and the pathos of Civil War and they completely flub it, making both halves of the movie boring.

Oops, I ended the post complaining, I didn't want to do that. Okay, I've gone on too long, but let's instead talk about how spectacular the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie was. We rewatched it in Los Angeles for the 20th anniversary, and I think it aged so well, it's actually better now than it was when it came out.

It's very possible that's just because I was a 15 year old boy when it came out and I have much better appreciation for good movies now, but I think it's more than that. The movie was very modern in its sensibilities, and has a lot of trust in its audience, which feels better now than it did at the time. It felt long in 2005, but in an era where action schlock can have 3 hour runtimes, 2 hours for a dramedy feels like a great pace. Its message is timeless, its characters and conflicts are well-defined and thoroughly believable... it's just a great movie.

I slept terribly the night before; maybe a coincidence, or maybe my body could tell something terrible was on the horizon and it couldn't let me rest easy. But I was up half the night just staring at the ceiling.

I did manage to get to sleep at some point, and when I woke up, it felt like I had slept funny - too curled or too stretched or something - because my back was hurting. As I walked around a bit that pain quickly grew until I was starting to worry something was actually wrong. What did burst appendixes feel like? Some quick googling told me that pain would probably be in a different place - but you know what did feel a lot like lower back pain? Kidney stones.

Pretty soon the source was immaterial; I didn't have the spare brainspace to worry about that. I was in an incredible amount of pain. We called my brother-in-law, who's a nurse, and he said yeah, everything I was describing was consistent with kidney stones and I should probably go to the ER. It took like an hour for me to be able to get dressed so we could go, but when we did the ER was a mercifully fast experience - I was being brought back practically before Cassie had finished checking me in, and they gave me the powerful painkillers after like 10 minutes. (I think the volume of my intermittent shouts of pain did a lot to help me.)

I passed it pretty quickly; about 40 hours. Such a tiny thing to have caused so much trouble!

Cassie asked me if it was worse than when I got norovirus and she thought I was going to die; I told her I'd probably choose norovirus two or three times over going through this once. 0 out of 5 stars, Do Not Recommend.

It's not just us, either; Cassie's dad has to figure out what he's going to do with himself now. He's been one of his mom's main caretakers for years now, so now he's going to have to figure out how to spend his time without her.

Cassie and I aren't quite sure what the responsible next steps are. We know basically nothing that we've done has been "responsible" from an outsider's perspective, but whatever, you know what I mean. Should we plan on going to Florida sooner rather than later to be sure we're able to pick some of our things up, or should we assume that we'll have enough time to get down there whenever? Is it better for us to settle in and find jobs that we could leave on short notice, or would that be a waste of time? If we are doing that, is it better to do that in VA, FL, or CA? Or somewhere else? A friend has offered us a possible place to stay in Hawaii; should we go there and assume that by the time that offer dries up, we'll have other prospects?

None of this is a stressful question anymore; there was a time not that long ago when it might've been, but God has demonstrated over and over again that he's got even the minute details of this whole drawn-out migration nailed down. It's not even annoying anymore. It's just kind of... boring?

Okay, analogy time. Our friends the McFarlands have a cat, Roland. He is the epitome of a scaredy-cat, and hides every time they have company. But eventually, if the company stays long enough, he gets bored hiding, so he just comes out and starts being a normal cat, despite the apparent danger.

That's how I feel about worrying about the future. It's gotten boring. Maybe I should be doing a little more of it - maybe some of the danger is real? - but dang, at this point, even if it is, I just don't care. I'd rather be broke and homeless and made a fool of than spend more time worrying about if I become broke or homeless or made a fool of.

So we're just kind of killing time, playing each day by ear. I'm aware that we don't know what to do next, but I just can't be bothered to worry. Presumably, God will let me know if that attitude is or becomes a problem, but I feel like it's part of what he's been working towards all this time.

We did mention that somewhere, right? I'm not going to go back and check if we did, but yeah, Cassie's grandma just died. It's sad, but we're doing fine - it was not unexpected, so we had time to prepare for it. We're just glad that the timing worked out so that we could be here for the funeral.

The awkward thing though is our outfits. We only brought half our stuff with us to Japan, and then we left like two thirds of what we brought there. So I've been living on like five shirts and three pairs of pants, none of which are black or even particularly dark. Cassie has no nice dresses or anything with her. We had to raid family's closets to have anything to wear. But we could, and we did, so it worked out fine. I just hope nobody cares that I'll be wearing the same shirt to the viewing, the funeral, and the interment.

In happier news, we're staying with Candace again, which means staying with our cat again! Xena was thrilled to see me again, and was quick to rub my legs and loud with her purrs. She was more hesitant towards Cassie, which broke her heart... until we realized that I showered right after getting here. Candace uses the same body wash we always used, which meant that because I showered, I smelled like Xena remembered. So Cassie took a shower, and sure enough, right after that Xena was all over her. Very funny cat!

The next few days will be the funeral and other funeral-adjacent events. After that, who knows? We're still just waiting on visa stuff and don't really get to know when that's gonna come through. Which is obviously awkward, but we're making our peace with it a day at a time.

So going forward, I'm going to try to post at least once a week, whether I feel like I have anything interesting to say or not. I kind of suspect I'll find something to talk about each time, but even if it's just "Things are normal here; I went out to eat on Tuesday," at least you'll know I'm still boring.

Our time in Los Angeles has been great. We've stayed basically the whole time with our friends Micah and Lizzy, who are unreasonably generous and I think would let us move in with them if we didn't ask and just never bought plane tickets out of here. We spent a little bit of time in North Hollywood with our friends Alan and Debbie, who are also wonderful, and who I think would let us actually and fully move in with them if we asked.

But visiting Los Angeles is also a little... I don't know the right word. Melancholy is definitely too strong, but whatever the word is for like a third of the way there. We lived here for six years, but I feel like at the end of that time we had only just gotten our feet underneath ourselves socially. We have a lot of people here that we would be friends with, probably pretty tight with, if we still lived here, but that we barely knew before we left. Micah and Lizzy play softball now and we've gone to every game they've had while we were here, and we would both probably be playing if we still lived here. There's a nice church walking distance from Micah and Lizzy's home that we would probably be attending if we still lived here.

It's not that I regret leaving or even that I would like to live here again. (I would, if we were staying in the USA, but we aren't.) I just have a little window into some of the ways my life would be different, and even if I'd still choose the path I'm on, it does make me aware of the opportunity cost.

And I do miss seeing movies in good theaters.

Which is why we're soaking up Los Angeles while we're here! We leave next week for Virginia; who knows how long we'll be there? We still have no news or updates on our visas, but we're not worried, we just wish we could plan our return to Japan better.

We weren't there for very long so we didn't do much other than hang out with some friends. But we did hang out with friends! We went out to dinner, did some karaoke, and went to visit the church that had come to Hakodate a few weeks ago! The pastor even did his sermon half in English for us!

We did do a little bit of sightseeing, which was fun. This old neighborhood is actually a normal neighborhood - as in currently populated. Like half the houses here have signs on the door saying "This is a home! People live here! Please don't crowd the step for pictures!" I don't think I'd want to live there, but there are parts of that that would be fun.

It's a bit funny being back in Los Angeles after having been in Japan. It's obviously the same as we remember it, but it's also... like, worse? It doesn't quite hit the same after being in Japan.

We first noticed it actually in Korea, at the airport, waiting to board the plane. In Japan and Korea, people wait politely and planes board from back to front, very efficient and neat. But when you're flying United with a bunch of Americans, they're all crowding the gate immediately, and loading the plane from front to back, and it just immediately felt worse.

That continued when we got to the airport in San Francisco, where the food was all mediocre and overpriced - $5 for a drip coffee, $15 for a tuna salad sandwich! It just feels worse, man.

Which is not to say it's all bad. I do love LA and, while I know it's an odd thing to say, I love the way it smells. There's just so many different plants around, walking past a dozen yards gives you a glimpse at like five different landscapes. All the plants smell different and they all blend together into a fun panoply of scents.

We also love being back with the McFarlands! We've stayed at their place so much, sleeping on their sofa bed feels like being home and sleeping in our own bed. We also love their pets almost as much as we love our own, so it's great to see them again. We want to get back to Japan ASAP, but staying here in the meantime won't exactly be a chore.

To answer the question we know everybody has: no, we still don't have a timeline, and until we have a timeline, we don't have any idea what our plans for the US are. The McFarlands have very kindly offered to let us crash with them basically indefinitely, so we'll hang out here until we know how long we'll be in the States for - if it's a short time, we'll probably just stay in LA and then go right from here back to Japan, but in the more likely scenario that it's a month or more, we'll probably plan a trip back to Virginia, Florida, or more likely both.

We'll share more info when we know more, but we're having a good time in the meantime!

But now let me rewind and recap a bit.

So as I mentioned recently, our tourist visas were running out and we had no real grasp on anything that would let us stay longer. So we were going to to have to leave. We figured we'd go to Vietnam since it would be so cheap to stay there for a while, but figured out pretty quickly that we wouldn't be able to get tourist visas quickly enough, so we pivoted to South Korea. (Amusingly, that turned out to be incorrect; we got our Vietnam visas approved about 18 hours before our flight.)

We weren't sure how long to plan to stay in South Korea, but without any hint of how we would get Japanese visas, we thought it best to assume longer than shorter. We reserved an Airbnb for a month. But most Airbnbs in South Korea require manual approval; the host had 24 hours to approve our place, and they never got back to us, so we had to find somewhere else.

But there really weren't a lot of good places that were available for that long, so we shortened the timeframe to two weeks. There still weren't a lot of good options, but there was one, so we applied. We got approved very quickly (yay!) but then the host immediately backtracked and cancelled - turned out they'd accidentally double-booked on another platform. (Boo!)

So, okay, I limited it to a week and looked for more places. We found another one and this time it got approved and we were good. Cassie and I half-joked, asking if this was God's way of getting us to stay in this specific part of the city, or if it was his way of getting us to stay for a week instead of a month.

Turned out to at least be the latter!

As we were packing and cleaning up our place in Japan, not even 24 hours before we would be leaving, a guy showed up at our door. We'd met him once a month or so ago; he'd said he was going to try to get us visas, then he had to go to Tokyo and he was going to be there until the middle of April. We hadn't forgotten about him or written him off, but we figured that if God was going to use him, it was going to be at least after the middle of April.

But he said he's opening a cafe in Hakodate, and he wanted us to manage it! And that if we did, he could sponsor our visas!

This was not just a dream come true because of the visas, by the way. Cassie and I have had multiple conversations during our time in Japan where she bemoaned needing to do something like teach English to get a visa. Many times, she'd said that if she was honest with herself, she really loved working and Starbucks, and if she could do that here, that'd be the dream. We'd said maybe, if I got a more traditional visa (like by teaching English) and she got a dependent visa, she could eventually get a work exemption and be able to work at a Starbucks. We'd never even considered the possibility that she could get a visa by working at a coffee shop.

We need to be in the USA to apply for the visas properly, so we booked tickets from Korea to Los Angeles; we'll start the process officially once we're there. We don't know how long to expect things to take; if it goes as fast, we might only stay in Los Angeles, but if we have time, we'll probably visit Florida to pick up some things and maybe Virginia to pick up our cat - and to see people in both places along the way. We'll keep you updated!

One of those friendships is with the owner of our favorite restaurant, Ohana. She just goes by Ohana Mama - we're sure she has a real name, but we've literally never heard anyone call her anything other than Mama!

Ohana is a Hawaiian place, with some of the best food we've had in Japan - and that's saying a lot! Cassie loves the chicken curry; I think my favorite dish is probably the garlic shrimp. (I don't even like shrimp that much!)

But the food is honestly only a small part of the draw. Each time we've gone, we've ended up sitting and chatting with Ohana Mama for at least an hour; we tend to go earlier in the evening, during her slow period, so once we're finishing eating she'll come sit and talk with us. Ohana Mama was one of our first extended conversations in Japanese with nobody to translate, and it's been a lot of fun practicing Japanese with her, and getting to see ourselves grow. Our first conversation a few months ago, we were using Google Translate for every third sentence, but now it's more like every thirtieth!

(Which is not to say the conversation is exactly fluid, just that we can all make ourselves understood with a bit of lateral thinking and the occasional pantomime.)

When Ohana Mama heard we were leaving soon, she invited us out to dinner at a different restaurant that she likes. Can you imagine such a thing happening in the USA? We'd eaten there, like, four times, and by then we were already close enough that she treated us to dinner at a wonderful Okinawan restaurant nearby! She brought a friend of hers, too, and we were there for hours, enjoying the food and chatting and having a great time. It was wonderful.

Then on Monday, she invited us to a calligraphy class; we had a fantastic time, and the teacher gave us some calligraphy of kanji she'd picked for our names!

Mine is 弟称 - Younger Brother, and Title. We're... not actually sure what Cassie's is.

(Quick lesson on Japanese names: their pronunciation isn't always tied to the kanji that make them up. So they are, to a certain extent, arbitrary. To pick these names, she chose Kanji with similar pronunciations to our names and vaguely pleasant/complimentary meanings.)

She also gifted us the calligraphy brushes we used! They probably cost more than the amount we paid for the class! Everyone here is so nice!

We're not always, like, broadcasting it, but we've made no secret of the fact that we're in Japan because we feel like God has called us here. It's not a missionary thing - neither of us feel called to missions as a distinct thing - and in fact, we're still not really sure why. We just know that Hakodate is where we're supposed to be. It might not even be about us serving God, it might be about God giving us a gift; we certainly love it here, and we already have a lot of friends. If all he did was tell us a place like this existed, that alone would be lovely.

But we know that's not the end of it, because he's also made it very clear that there is a plan - we just don't know what it is. And he's similarly made it clear that it's not really our job to get us visas or a place to live - so we've just kinda been chilling.

But now we're reaching the end of our tourist visas, and while he's made it clear that he has options for us, they're also not happening yet, so in the meantime, we have to leave for a while. We hope it's not for long, but we're ready to follow his plan wherever it takes us. So we're going to Vietnam, at least at first; it's cheap to get there, cheap to stay there, and some of our friends here highly recommended it. We'll spend a couple weeks there, maybe as much as a month, and then if we still don't know what's happening with our Japanese visas, we'll make our way up to Cambodia - Cassie has some family there, so it could be fun to see them. Past that, we'll just see what happens.

So you can expect some more updates and some fun pictures soon!

Teddy's birthday was January 15! Happy birthday Teddy! We celebrated a couple of times with friends and with just us. Teddy already posted the best pictures in his photo dump the other day, but I still want to do a post about it to give you my razzle dazzle.

We finally went to the monkey hot springs!

Ok, not THE monkey hot springs. If you Google "Monkey Hot Springs Japan" which I just did, the one we went to does not come up. But, there is a place in our little town of Hakodate that has hot springs that monkeys go in. And, honestly, how had we not gone yet. Monkeys are Teddy's favorite. Relaxed animals are everybody's favorite. What's not to love?

These hot springs were at a botanical garden park, so of course we went inside and checked that out too.

So. Many. Florida plants. Hilarious. But that bougainvillea1 was gorgeous and so massive.

And this was on the ocean. There is the beach. You can see me, the botanical garden, and the ocean all in one picture.

Look what Google Photos made for me! It stylized this photo and made my hubby stand out even more.

We stopped to get ice cream because it is Teddy's birthday and we do what we want!

When we sent Teddy's mom this picture she showed it to her mom to proclaim how crazy we are for eating ice cream in the cold. Her mom responded with "Why shouldn't they have ice cream? It's good!"

And we finished the day off with Teddy's new favorite food: soup curry.

We even took our friends back to this restaurant a few days later. So good.

At a get together with friends they even made a cake to celebrate all the January birthday babies!

Why yes, I did decorate that cake hahahahaha. I may have let some children "help me." It still might look better than it would have had I been left to do it alone.

Did you enjoy just how many pictures of Teddy I threw into this post? I had to keep the focus on the birthday boy!

Now to explain the title of the post and get to the heart of today's story. For those of you that have known Teddy and I a long time, you will know that Teddy and I gallivanted (my preferred word) around Central and South America a year after getting married (so 2015). So, we should know Spanish. I took Spanish in college, we both buckled down with Duolingo before our trip, and then spent 3 months in Guatemala taking classes (and teaching English) at a language exchange school before continuing our trip. But, like, we never got good.

As we are consistently being reminded here in Japan, language learning is difficult, even when you are in an immersive environment (see being in Japan, THE country that speaks Japanese and almost exclusively speaks Japanese) because you will naturally surround yourself with other English speakers. You become overjoyed that there is someone you can easily communicate with! And then you only communicate with them... never speak the language you are in the country to learn... and learn an embarrassingly small amount of that language...

Or is that just me?

It isn't. But the truth is even if we had gotten fluent in Spanish during that time, it was 10 years ago. And we have never spoken it since. I got some listening practice in at Starbucks, but there was always someone who natively spoke Spanish that could take orders for customers who needed it so I never, ever, ever spoke it. I haven't spoken it for almost ten years.

Until Wednesday.

On Wednesday we met up with a potential English student (we have kind of become English tutors? That's another story) for the first time. We were told beforehand that she only speaks Japanese and Spanish, and we might have a hard time communicating. Well, you gotta try.

Teddy and I sat at the table and then just stared at each other and eventually spoke the question we were both asking: What language do we even try? So I decided to not overthink it and just be willing to embarrass myself (which never happens and is the primary cause of my difficulty learning languages hahaha) and started speaking to her in Spanish not knowing what I'd been able to get out.

And Spanish came out. Good Spanish. Intelligible Spanish. I even had a better accent than I think I've even managed before. And she happily started chatting away in Spanish with us because she doesn't get that much of an opportunity to speak Spanish in Japan. And Teddy joined in and started speaking Spanish with no troubles also. What? How?

When we told her that we hadn't spoken Spanish in almost 10 years, she was stunned. She then told us a story from way back when she started learning Japanese (she's lived here almost 3 decades). She told her instructor that she was worried she was starting to forget Spanish because she never had an opportunity to speak it anymore. Her instructor told her to never worry about that because it all sticks. And I guess he was right. Because here we are, 10 years after our last attempt at learning Spanish using it to communicate in Japan.

Life is crazy.

I honestly found that event so encouraging for learning Japanese too. Because I never thought my Spanish was good enough to communicate, but it was. I don't feel even remotely close be being able to communicate in Japanese most days. But maybe I am closer than I thought. Maybe I am already there but I'm just too scared. We'll find out more one day. But for now I can be confident that even if I don't use the Japanese I know today, it might come in handy in a decade. And I really did not expect that to bring so much joy.

Hope you enjoyed story time with Cassie. Hopefully I'll enthrall you with another soon. Toodles!

Like, okay, yes, learning all the kanji is a pain. But that really just boils down to "the vocabulary is a little harder to memorize," and vocabulary just isn't the hard part of learning a language. The slow part, maybe, but not the hard part.

The hard part is the grammar, and Japanese grammar just makes so much sense. I'm not at the point where I feel comfortable summarizing it - I'd definitely summarize parts of it wrong - but the whole language is like LEGO. Everything fits together in whatever combination you want to put it in. That makes it sound like it should be difficult - and it is definitely daunting at times - but in practice, it means that the language makes sense in a way that English doesn't.

Even when I encounter a construction that I can't parse out myself, once I have it explained to me, the whole thing makes sense, and adds a new tool to my toolbelt. The grammar is easy to remember because I don't have to remember complex systems of standards and exceptions, I just need to know where the studs are and where the holes are and then I can guess at about 95% of it.

Which means learning it very quickly becomes just... work. When I was studying German and Spanish, I spent the entire period of study learning new grammatical concepts - new conjugations, new rules. With Japanese, though, I'm already nearing a point where I know enough of the grammar to read, like, YA books, I just don't have anything like the vocabulary for it. But of course, the only way to learn vocab is by slogging through it - flash cards are a very useful tool, but just grabbing a book and struggling through it is also an important step.

It's kinda boring, like for real. But "It's so simple that it's boring to learn" is a pretty great problem to have. I certainly don't envy Japanese speakers who are studying English!

We're in a nice big Airbnb until early March, so like two months. We've got friends nearby, groceries and books and stuff all within walking distance, and so on. We're comfortable and happy. There's just not a lot to talk about.

Okay, so that's not entirely true - but there aren't a lot of, like, events to talk about. Few enough that even when we do do things, we're out of the habit of posting about them, so we forget to tell you. We're also way out of the habit of taking pictures, and we feel bad talking about cool things we saw without being able to show them to you!

The main thing occupying our thoughts now is how to stay. Our visas are good for the next two months, but we know that time is going to fly by, and as of yet we still have no real plan for how to stay past that point. Cassie's currently pursuing jobs as an ALT (Assistant Language Teacher), but neither of the ALT companies that operate in Hakodate are willing to sponsor a visa for someone without a BA, so it's not really an option for me. (They'll still employ me if and when I can get a different visa that allows me to work here.) The problem there is that those jobs might not start soon enough to actually let us stay - one of the companies, Interac, won't have positions until August, which is way past ideal.

We don't have any other leads at the moment, but we're also not super worried about it. If God's got a plan for us to be here, he'll have a plan for us to stay here - and knowing the way his plans have gone so far, it probably won't kick into gear until the last minute. So we're keeping a loose grip on things.

In the meantime, please feel free to pester us if you haven't heard from us in a while; we really do want to stay in touch, we just don't want to do a bunch of boring "We didn't do anything this week!" posts, hah.

We got back just in time for our church's little Christmas lunch party - after the service on Sunday there was a massive potluck and we played some games. The food was intimidatingly good - if this is the standard that potlucks here are held to, I'm nervous about living up to it, even once I have a full kitchen to prepare something!

Then, over the next couple days, we spent time exploring the city now that it's completely covered in snow. Like I said, Hakodate goes big on Christmas - it's a tourist city, and Christmas is one of their big draws. In particular, the massive Christmas tree they put up in the docks shopping district!

They also have fireworks over the tree, almost every night!

On Christmas day itself, we didn't do too much - we video chatted with our families and hung out around the airbnb, mostly. Until we went out to dinner with our friends David, Fridah, and Apa.1 It wasn't a very traditional meal - Indian curry - but it was, like everything else in Japan, absolutely delicious.

We have one last Christmas party tomorrow, and then Japan shifts into New Year mode - another major event here. We're very excited to see what it's like!

I won't go into too much detail about the delays, but the short version is that the morning that we were supposed to leave Korea, I almost blacked out sitting on the toilet. Then I spent several hours tossing and turning in bed before my fever finally weakened enough for me to take in anything more than sips of water, by which point the plane that we were supposed to have been on was halfway to Japan.

Luckily, things were far less stressful than they could've been; our Airbnb in Korea approved two extra days almost immediately after we requested them, and then our host rang the doorbell with some medicine and a sports drink for hydration! That may have been the only thing standing between us and me having to go to a Korean hospital, which would've been a whole extra hassle.

We booked another flight two days later,1 and luckily I was feeling totally fine by yesterday. We were worried Cassie was going to catch it, but we feel like now the danger has passed, so praise God for that!

Our very first night we got in touch with my friend here and his wife; we hadn't really been planning to do anything, but they were about to go out to dinner right when we were getting settled, so they called us a taxi and we all got some Korean barbecue together.

For a little bit of context, part of why this was so fun was that I've known Cameron for almost 20 years now, but this was the first time we'd met in person! We met online when we were both teenagers, but lived on opposite sides of the States. It was so crazy to finally meet in South Korea of all places!

We hung out with them all night, then slept in late the next day and just checked out the neighborhood.

One of the most popular local beers is Cass! We're not *sure* it's named after Cassie, but how could it not be?

After that, we spent a day going into Seoul, seeing crowded markets and eating some delicious tteok-bokki and bulgogi rice.

In Seoul right now there's a little art installation along the river. Very cute!

The next day, we were right back to the same place for my friend's concert! He was performing with some other local artists. It was really fun getting to hear some of the really indie sounds in the area, and they were all really good.

Then yesterday we hung out playing board games all day. There's an English board game cafe a 10 minute walk from our airbnb, and it turns out our friends are really tight with the owner. So much so that after playing there for a couple hours, the owner actually invited us all back to his house so we could play board games there while he kept an eye on his baby!

We didn't get back home until like 10; I think we played like six different board games. One of the guys there is actually boardgame influencer, and gave us recommendations on what games to look out for in Japan.

This was only one wall of the board game cafe. Only one part of one wall, really.

Then today we're just relaxing, doing laundry, and prepping to go back to Japan. We had brunch at a cute little place nearby, we got some gifts for friends back in Japan (souvenirs, called omiyage, are serious business in Japanese culture), and now here I am writing this!

Our brunch today! Not pictured is the peanut butter and egg salad sandwich that was... the flavors didn't complement each other, and yet somehow they didn't clash at all, either. Not bad at all.

We get in late enough tomorrow that we may spend the night in Sapporo before heading to Hakodate the next morning; we'll see how long customs takes. But we had a great time in Korea, and I'm sure we'll be back to visit before too long!

But we do have a few more photos and stories to share about Sapporo!

We haven't been doing too much too crazy; mostly just enjoying the incredible food and the snow. We did go to church on Sunday, which was good - but in a very different way than the churches before now. It was really interesting how, while it was a very friendly church with very welcoming people, we were just, like, there.

The churches before now have each felt like, I dunno, a sigh of relief. Meeting up with old friends and family. We'd go out to lunch with complete strangers and be chatting like we'd known them for years. But now that we've found our new church home in Hakodate, we don't need that anymore or something, and so visiting other churches is back to just being visitors. That's not a bad thing, and it's not a knock against the church we visited; I think it's actually a really nice confirmation that we did indeed find our new family in Hakodate.

As far as food goes, we've actually been hitting up some of the favorites again rather than branching out; we got soup curry again tonight, and we went back to the same burger place we'd been to already last night (but we of course got different burgers). It really was fascinating to see American food done simultaneously so well and so differently; I got a spicy salsa cheeseburger, and Cassie got a mozzarella burger with this creamy vinegar sauce that I still don't know what it was, but it was fantastic.

And then during the day today, it was finally clear, so we got to do an observation tower. Except, why just go up a tower, when you could instead go up a Ferris wheel?!

It was a fun way to get really high - we were higher than one of the observation towers in the area. We were also both surprised to see all the mountains so close; deep in the city, you can't see any of them!

We did a little bit of last shopping for the flight - some snacks, and Cassie got me a PS Vita as an early Christmas present - and that's about it!

Next time you hear from us, we'll be in South Korea! Here's hoping there's no massive political upheavals while we're there!

The biggest thing to happen here already is all the snow!

It has been snowing basically nonstop since we got here; we just went out to dinner (I'll get to that at the end of the post!) and it was full on slipping around, footprints-in-the-snow level white everywhere; only the roads were clear.

As both of us grew up getting snow but have lived the last decade of our lives without it, it's been really fun... and also really cold. Definitely more fun than cold, though.

(It is worth noting that the weather here isn't terribly separated from Hakodate; I'm expecting to return there to it all being white, too. Pretty excited about that, actually.)

There has been a lot of fun stuff here other than just the snow! But most of it was all at one place.

Sapporo's sister cities with Munich, apparently, so they have a Munich themed Christmas village all December; a lot of the shops are even staffed with Deutsche. They had a lot of German food - sausages, pretzels, candied almonds - and also a lot of churros, haha. Cassie and I had some mulled wine and hot beer which was lovely in the cold.

It was a really fun atmosphere, too, with everyone there having fun; a lot of laughter and smiling faces.

We've also done some shopping in town; there's a massive outdoor shopping street that we had fun walking down.

I got a copy of the first tankōbon1 of Dandadan, which Cassie and I have started watching and really like. It's, uh, definitely above my reading level, but I am actually reaching the point where, with a dictionary in my other hand, I can piece together a lot of it. I'm away from my other books for the moment, but once we're back in Hakodate, I'm looking forward to tackling some of my books with furigana2.

Oh, and the food! Sapporo is known for this dish, soup curry, which is fantastic for cold weather. It's exactly what it sounds like - curry that's been watered down to the point where it's more like a stew than a sauce - so long as you understand that Japanese curry is nothing like Indian or Thai curries. (Fun fact: Japan actually considers curry to be a Western dish, since they got it by way of England.)

The other night, when were killing time waiting for one of the other events at the winter village, we went to a nearby mall (to visit Sapporo's Pokemon Center, haha), and at the mall we got some omurice3 that was outrageously, unfairly good. I got a beef stew one where the beef was beyond melting in your mouth; it was practically melting into a puddle on my plate. Absolutely incredible.

And then tonight we went to an American themed place - not because we were missing American food, but because Sapporo is also known for its beef and its burgers, so we went to a burger joint. But once we were there, we didn't actually get beef; I got a chicken chili cheeseburger that was incredible, and Cassie got a quesadilla that was great, but was served with salsa that was very possibly the greatest salsa I've ever had in my life. (In Japan. At a burger joint. The food here is outrageous.)

We still haven't even had miso ramen, which is another thing Sapporo is known for doing really well. But man, I'm already planning on going back to that burger place; they had a salsa burger that I think I would kill a man just to try.

Sapporo is pretty much a must-see if you're in Hokkaido, and we're excited for that. No specific plans other than making sure to get some more delicious food, but there should be plenty to do there.

Seoul is actually the part I'm most excited for. It's of course going to be fun to visit a new country, but I'm also going to be meeting up with a friend of mine there that I've never actually met in person! We met on the forums back in the time before Facebook, and happened to reconnect recently. It's pretty crazy - our airbnb is gonna be, like, a twenty minute walk from him. So he's gonna show us around, we're gonna meet his wife, it's gonna be great.

Things have been pretty quiet other than making these plans. We did have a wonderful time at a friend's house baking bread and making a bunch of new friends, but other than that, we've mostly been hanging out, prepping, or relaxing. You can expect some more frequent updates in Sapporo and Seoul as we're in vacation mode again, followed by another slowdown (though not a stoppage!) once we're back in Hakodate.

Looking Back

We've been all over Japan, and we've seen and done a lot of really cool stuff. We've been to Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Hakodate, and more; we've visited about a thousand Book Offs; we've seen castles, observation towers, mountains, and rivers; we've stayed at a traditional ryokan, we've gotten sushi from conveyor belts, and we've eaten a shocking amount of convenience store food.

One thing I've really enjoyed is experiencing the different cultures of all of the different areas of Japan. Each place that we've stayed has had its own vibe, its own preferred ways of getting around, its own styles of architecture. Tokyo had lots of winding backstreets, bright lights, and trains that could get you from anywhere in the city to anywhere else in under an hour, and usually with only one transfer. Takayama was a chill mountain town with basically no public transit, but you could walk from one side to the other in an hour, so it didn't need it. And Hakodate uses streetcars and busses to get around, with a vibe that's somewhere between urban and sleepy town center, and an eclectic mix of Japanese and western houses.

Everywhere we've been, the food has been a highlight. I'll be totally honest and say I haven't noticed any major differences across regions; sure, there are a few distinctions, but the dishes available are all pretty much the same everywhere. But that's not a bad thing when all of the dishes are so delicious! Japan puts a level of care into their food that elevates even simple things like soup broth or plain white rice. The most "disappointing" meals we've had here were the ones we would've been thrilled to find back in Bradenton - they were still great, just not up to the standards that the rest of the country had prepared us for.

We love the way everyone pays attention to everyone around them, and how they try to avoid inconveniencing anyone. Aisles in stores are never blocked, because even if they are, people start getting out of the way as soon as they see you coming. Even crowded environments can be quiet enough for easy conversation, because nobody around is shouting. Speaking of crowds, it's never hard to get through them - even if you're stuck in the middle of one of Japan's infamously overstuffed train rides, everyone dutifully clears a path for anyone who's trying to get off.

We've had nothing but wonderful experiences at each of the churches we've visited along the journey. Every single one has welcomed us like family - we've gone out to lunch, we've hung out for hours after services chatting, and now here in Hakodate we've already been over to someone's house for dinner! When we started this trip, God had assured us that we'd be as welcome here as we were at home, and that has repeatedly proven true.

Looking Forward

But now as we're approaching the end of our visa, what's next? What would we like to see happen, and how are we going to get there?

The what we want is pretty easy to answer - to stay in Japan, and in Hakodate in particular. It felt like home from the moment the plane's wheels touched down; Cassie and I both feel strongly that this is the place that God has been bringing us to all along. We've been wrong before, but usually at different times and about different things, so unless and until we hear otherwise, we're going to move forward on the assumption that this is the place.

As for how to stay... we don't really have any idea! From the moment we first felt called to Japan, we've been wondering how that was going to play out. We don't have jobs here and while we're here on tourist visas, we legally can't look for them. Cassie's looking at the possibility of teaching English here via agencies that hire from America, but she can't talk to any schools here in-person, and without a bachelor's degree, I can't talk to any at all. There are other visa options, too, like cultural studies - but to get those, we need a sponsor, and it's only since getting comfortable in Hakodate that we're in a position to start looking for one.

We've known all along that God wants us here, and that He's got a very specific plan in mind for us. It's funny, because while lots of Christians want specific callings and drive themselves bonkers waiting for a word from God, I've always been very big on the idea that God made us with the talents and interests that we have, and so we don't need specific callings to specific jobs or places - just do what interests you and keep an ear open in case He's calling you to do something else.

And yet here, it's been repeatedly made clear to us that we are not in charge of our path right now; God is steering, and we're just along for the ride. We could conceivably try to jump off the train, but by and large, there's nothing we can do to either help or hurt the process right now.

So while we are looking into some visa options, we're not really stressing it too hard; we know God has a very specific path in mind for us right now, and that He'll make it clear when we find it. The nice thing is how that takes the stress out of even trying to help; we know we can't screw things up, so there's no reason for us not to apply for visas, because we know if it's not the way He wants us to stay, it'll fall through or something - or we'll at least catch a vibe before it's too late to stop the process.

So what's actually next? Probably just another tourist visa. We're still looking into the specifics, but it looks like as long as we leave the country for a short period, we can get another automatic 90 day visitor's visa - that's just the last one we can get for 12 months (measured from the start of our first visa). So we'll take a short hop to South Korea or somewhere cheap to fly to, then come right back to Hakodate and await further instructions.

It'll be awkward in a lot of ways; for example, without long-term visas, we won't be able to rent (I don't think?), and might not even be able to stay in one Airbnb for more than a month at a time, so there'll be some bouncing around. We also won't be able to look for jobs, so we'll be eating through our savings and also just kinda sitting around twiddling our thumbs for a while, looking for ways to stay occupied. We'll try to find classes (Japanese lessons at the bare minimum), which may ultimately be our path to longer-term visas, but that can only fill so much of our time before it becomes an irresponsible level of drain on our bank accounts.

So if you're the praying sort, we could use some prayer, for all of the above. But we're also not worried - like I said, God's clearly got a plan here, and we're just along for the ride. There've been some ups and downs, but we've enjoyed the ride so far, and we're looking forward to seeing what comes next!

First of all: It snowed! Alllll day on Monday. So we did stay in that day.

Now what should have been first if I cared about chronology: we went to a wonderful church on Sunday. Like, this is our church. The sermon was specifically for us, again. And we maybe found our Japanese family??? Two women from church made plans with us TWICE for within the week! Unheard of. So Tuesday was our first adventure with them! We went to Onuma Park. There was a lake. There were mountains. Fall colors. SNOW! Here you go.

Yesterday we finally went up the mountain that we are staying at the base of. Mount Hakodate himself.

I was mesmerized by this view. I don't know what about it, but it got me.

We'll see what we get up to next week! Maybe another post from Teddy is in our future?

Teddy says...

Lately, every time I say I'm thinking about another blog post, Cassie's like, "No, I'll do it!" And now she says this...

When my brother Drew was here in Japan with us he got Teddy hooked on a chain of secondhand stores called Book Off, so that was our little plan for today. Once we were on the bus (No trains here! Just buses and street cars!) we realized we would be passing Goryokaku Tower which is apparently The Thing to do here. So we went!

You only go about 90 meters up (I'm not converting for you) but it was quite the view. The elevator doors opened and everyone was immediately saying how beautiful and impressive the view was. Fall was showing off a little and the first thing you could see were red mountains. So here are some pictures!

And yes, we did get there right in time for sunset. And yes, we did forget to take a picture of the tower exterior when we were closer.

Then we did go to Book Off! and had some cheap conveyor belt sushi and then... walked. Forever. Because the buses were not running as regularly, or we just timed it poorly or... I don't know. But we got our steps in for the day.

Teddy got a new free jacket in Osaka! Someone left it behind at our AirBnB for him.

These are all in the same park. We have walked through it every day so far because we just can't get enough.

But we really love it here. We aren't even sure how we picked to come here. We wanted to see Hokkaido (the Northernmost island, where it actually gets cold) but why Hakodate? No idea! But we landed and our spirits sighed with relief that we had finally made it to where we are supposed to be. What does that mean? How will we stay in Japan? Tune in next time and maybe we'll know the answer.

There are so many stray cats here. Almost all of them are black. We are in love. Look at this cutie!!!

Also we are right by the water still! So beautiful! So cold! We saw surfers here, believe it or not.

Have we shown love for the sewer covers of Japan before? We should have. Look at these beauties. All of Japan's sewer covers are art.

Dope community center. Yes I do mean the glamourous building that looks like it should be something much more important.

Did I mention that we love the park next to us? Yes, I did. Did I neglect to mention that that park is half zoo??? Yes, I did.

It is not a very big zoo. There are not that many animals. But it is entirely free and there isn't even a gate with an attendant or anything. You just walk in. You can even walk around at night. The animals go inside after 4 pm, so it isn't very fun, but that is how unguarded it is. It blows my mind.

Okay, it wasn't literally nothing. We went to church on Sunday and had a lovely time chatting with another couple who was also just there visiting as they roamed around Japan. The part that really impressed us at this church, though, was that everyone - Japanese and gaikokujin alike - seemed to speak both English and Japanese, at least enough to converse awkwardly in.

We also went for a walk in a lovely but frankly kind of strange park near our airbnb. I took pictures, but they don't really capture what made it odd, so I'm not bothering to post them; it was like... the whole place felt half pleasant, half "keep out!" There was a lot of construction around it, but not within it, which contributed to the vibe.

The weirdest part was that there were several paths and even some stairways that just went nowhere. Some of them were clearly supposed to go somewhere but were currently blocked by construction, some were probably just overgrown from lack of care, but others it felt abrupt and deliberate. Very odd.

We also found a couple used game shops, and some good deals on some games. I found one (Hyrule Warriors Definitive Edition) that I'd been looking for since getting here, and it actually a good price! ...Unfortunately, while I'd assumed it would have English options since it was a Zelda game, I forgot it was a third-party Zelda game, and it turns out it's only in Japanese. Alas! But one of the used game stores also had a secondhand clothing shop inside, and I found a pair of sneakers that fit me! Nice!

And that's pretty much it! We're setting off for Hakodate early-ish tomorrow morning. I'm just not looking forward to sitting around in the cold with our bag until check-in!

I'm gonna break this up roughly by area, and provide a little commentary for each group of pictures.

The Nintendo Museum

Like I warned you before, they ask you not to take pictures in a lot of it, so I don't have a ton of pictures to share. But I do have a few!

Tea Ceremony

In Kyoto, we watched and pretended to participate in a traditional tea ceremony, in traditional garb! I don't have any pictures from the ceremony itself because I was occupied, you know, being in a tea ceremony, but they encouraged us to take pictures before and after.

Fushimi Inari Taisha

Only a couple pictures here, but I felt like I should share the ones I did take.

Hiroshima Castle

These are from the castle in Hiroshima. We actually learned a lot inside it; Hiroshima city itself arguably only exists to build this castle!

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Hard to find words to talk about this one; it was beautiful and haunting and kind of intense.

Izakaya

Only one picture and you've seen it before, but I needed to talk a little more about the Izakaya near our place in Hiroshima!

It was run by this guy Takezo, who was super friendly and talkative and very excited to have gaikokujin (foreigners) visiting his place! He spoke about as much English as we spoke Japanese (not much!), but we were able to talk a little bit - he's a big anime geek, so we mostly just shouted the names of anime we liked and then either thumbs-upped or shook our heads if we approved or disapproved.

The guy in the back of the photo is Jeff, and we had fun talking to him, too - Micah especially, since he was sitting next to him. Jeff is an expat from Ohio who teaches English now; he's been here for like 20 years!

Fukuoka, Especially Fukuoka Zoo

And finally, the place we spent the last week! It was a little more relaxing than we'd intended; we wanted to spend a day or two catching our breath from all the traveling with the McFarlands, but uh, turns out Fukuoka is a driving city, not a public transit city, so there wasn't a lot that we had easy access to. (We could've done a lot more than we did, but we were feeling lazy, haha.)

The main exciting things were the Christmas festival at the train station/mall (actually like three malls all right next to each other?!), and the zoo!

Kansai International Airport

And that brings us to today! All we really did today was get here from Fukuoka, but we did that by plane - which means we flew into Kansai International Airport, located on a man-made island in the middle of the bay! We had to take a bridge to get out of the airport! It was crazy!

But that's also all we've got for you now; we're in Osaka for a couple days with no real plans but a lot of options, and then we're off to Hakodate, which we've been looking forward to since we left Florida! Stay posted!

So the Inari shrine was fun, but for me mostly more of the same. We went there kind of late hoping to go down after dark, but Cassie wasn't feeling well, so she and I left early after only going part way up.

The next day, we were off to Hiroshima!

The city was gorgeous; even the A-bomb memorials were hauntingly beautiful. Unfortunately, it was raining pretty heavily our first night there, so other than visiting a Book Off, we didn't do much.

And then in the morning, it was raining worse. Much worse.

We woke up around 9am to our phones buzzing with landslide warnings! Luckily none of them were for the area we were in, but by 11am, literally the entire city other than our one small island was under landslide evacuation orders. It was crazy.

But then by 1pm, it had cleared up entirely, and we walked around like nothing had ever been wrong! We went to a castle, walked around outside a soccer stadium, it was great!

In the evening we went to a nearby izakaya that was fantastic - delicious food and a very friendly a talkative mastaa running the place. The guy at the end of our bar was from Cincinnati originally, so we had a good time chatting with him, too. It was great!

But not before we got to see some of a festival they were putting on in Hiroshima!

It was a big party! They had paddleboarders and hulu dancers from Hawaii, they had Brazilian sandwich vendors, they had live music and festival games... it was a great sendoff!

I'm writing this from Fukuoka now, so I'll have more to share soon. Until then!

I unfortunately don't have a ton of photos, because they ask you not to take pictures in a lot of it, and also because the McFarlands had the good cameras, lol. But I'll get some of the pictures they took later, and hopefully remember to upload them.

But it really was a ton of fun. We made our own hanafuda cards, we played games with gigantic controllers, we walked through a massive archive of old hardware (our favorite part was all the prototypes!)... it was great.

And then we went right from there to the official Nintendo store, an hour away! They had so many fun things there that you either can't buy anywhere else, or that are hard to find - the amiibo shelves in the USA are always so empty, but the official store had, I think literally every amiibo ever made for sale there.

Then today we did a traditional tea ceremony in rented kimono. Kimono are actually really comfortable, and the tea ceremony was really pleasant. We got back and watched the Dodgers win the World Series, which is actually a very big deal here because the Dodgers have a Japanese star on their team.

Right now, Cassie and I are packing up most of our bags to ship ahead of us to Fukuoka - I'm writing this because I'm realizing I want to pack the laptop, and I don't like writing posts on my phone. So expect light updates for the next couple days!

Later today we're planning on hiking the Inari shrine, and then tomorrow we're off to Hiroshima! I'll try to take lots of pictures so I have plenty to share once I'm back with my laptop!

First, the bad news: no pictures of Mt. Fuji. The weather just wasn't clear enough - that's actually pretty common.

But the good news: the ryokan was great. A ryokan is a traditional Japanese hotel, and while I'm not sure if it's the norm or not, ours also had an onsen - a hot spring bath.

The ryokan gave us all traditional robes to hang out in - when we weren't naked with strangers in the baths! (Okay, it actually wasn't very busy, so none of us were ever naked with strangers. But we could've been!)

Dinner was also traditional, and, uh, kind of intense - we ate abalone that was cooked live in front of us - like, it was was trying to crawl off the hotplate live.

There was a lot more - miso soup, rice, a variety of vegetables, whole shrimp (head and legs and all!)... but the living shellfish was definitely the most, uh, intimidating part of the meal.

Breakfast was still a lot, but much less alive, and then we were off for Nagoya! Nagoya was more fun than we were expecting - it was kind of just supposed to be a holdover point, but we really enjoyed it. Especially the egg sandwiches at the hostel we stayed at! (I forgot to take pictures of those, sorry.)

We also went to the castle in Nagoya, which was gorgeous. We didn't get to go inside the main keep (in the picture) because it was under refurbishment, but the parts we did get to see were incredible.

We went from there to Takayama, a mountain town that's great, if a little swamped with tourists. The views and the hiking are incredible, but the town, while also gorgeous, is kind of... it's just distracting how many other tourists there are.

The region is known for its beef, though, and we've had some great meals!

We're headed from here to Kyoto tomorrow! It's gonna be kind of a long train ride - at least three and a half hours, probably longer - so that'll be a fun day, but I'm looking forward to going back!

As I mentioned last time, we moved to a smaller hotel, which was a bit cramped, but it was fun to stay in a completely different part of Tokyo. We weren't actually very far away from our Airbnb geographically, but the Airbnb was in a residential area, and the hotel was in a business district, so we still got to see a very different side of things.

We were right along the Sumida River, which had a great riverwalk along it. People were walking, jogging, and just hanging out on the riverwalk all day and even a lot of the night. There were a few really great restaurants nearby, too - we ate at the same udon place like three times.

We found a great church not far from us - Tokyo Multicultural Church - that we visited both Sundays we were there. The people there were super friendly and welcoming - we hung out after church and had lunch there, just sitting around chatting for like two hours. It was really great. It was funny, though, how different the population was both Sundays - the first Sunday there, half the church was at some retreat, and the second Sunday, a different half was at some convention, so we hung out with two completely different crowds both weeks.

We also did a bit of exploring around Tokyo - some seeing new stuff for us, some plotting out what we'd do with the McFarlands. We saw a movie (Civil War) in theaters, which was fun and a different experience than movies in the US - the trailers in particular were different. It's hard to explain in text, but they were, like, all high-energy. Even the dramatic trailers would have exciting pop music, electric guitars, etc.

But before we knew it, the McFarlands had arrived! They were, obviously, exhausted, but we dragged them out and around town starting their very first night. We took them to Yodobashi Akiba, the fun mall we'd been to in Akihabara, and the ramen place at the top that I loved so much.

The next day we went to the Imperial Castle gardens, which were gorgeous, and then later to Sensō-ji and Skytree mall. It was kind of bad weather so we didn't actually go up Skytree, which was a bummer, but we had fun anyway just looking around the mall and eating delicious food.

Then yesterday we went to Disney Sea, and had a great (if exhausting) time. Disney was fun - I think my favorite part was just the intricate theming and the cool buildings. It was a long day, though; by the time we left, we were wiped - but we still had to do laundry and stuff to prep for our train ride the next day.

Which brings us to right now! I'm writing this on the train on the way to Hakone, where we're staying at a ryokan in the foothills of Mt. Fuji. I'll make sure to take some good pictures of Fuji to share soon!

For those that don't know, we are on this journey with God. We are Christians who have always tried to follow His will for our lives. Normally, His will has not been so specific. But here we are. God called us to move to Japan. We still don't know why. But the calling has been clear. It has been confirmed again and again. And despite this whole process being kick started by my spending weeks in prayer desperately pleading for God to show me what He wants me to do with my life I have been having none of it.

It all started with Starbucks and grad school.

I have long tried to follow God's promptings and have felt inadequately equipped to interpret them when I receive them. So I go with my instincts and hope that God made me with these instincts on purpose and that through following my own path He would reveal His path and show me when and where to turn.

So I was working at Starbucks and they paid for a bachelor's degree for me. I had no intention of getting a degree, but it was free, so why not? I got my bachelor's in Psychology. In case you didn't know, there isn't a whole lot you can do with just a bachelor's in Psychology. So I went to grad school. And I had a mental breakdown. I was unable to continue. So I suppose that wasn't God's plan.

But I still worked at Starbucks. So maybe that had been the plan all along. I went ahead and shot for management since everyone had been suggesting it to me for 6 years... But now I was in a different part of the country. With different coworkers. And none of the people who were rooting for me were actually there to recommend me for the position. So I was passed over for a time.

It turned out I had gone about it the wrong way anyway, so I was put on a development plan. I was put into a failing store and tasked with turning it around. And I rocked it. Everything improved. Every single metric. And morale improved, too, which I think is more important. After only three months, I was about to re-interview, which after that level of success would basically be a formality, and then I would be promoted.

But I did not want it.

It was so obvious and so clear that I would be miserable in that position. So instead, I quit. I didn't have to quit. But if there was no longer a future there and a path forward, why continue?

Here begins the praying. And praying. And praying. What was I actually supposed to do with my life? I was out of ideas. Every plan I had ever come up with had been shot down. So what was I supposed to do? Wait. Listen. Be ready to obey.

And then the call came. It started out as a fun thought experiment with Teddy since I had quit and he had gotten a fully remote job. We could go anywhere! Where would you want to go? Where would you want to live?

Teddy says...

For a little bit of additional context, we both have always wanted to travel internationally, but by this point it had been years since we'd even visited a new state. We decided that living internationally was a good way to make up for lost time.

I quickly set my heart on Germany. And then I really wanted to pursue it. Teddy felt like we were supposed to move, so why not there? Because God had a different plan. And He was ready to speak.

When Teddy and I had started dreaming dreams, I had a few deal-breakers - things I would veto.

1. I wanted our cats to be able to come with us;
2. I was not willing to live in Asia (I had a pretty digestionally traumatic experience in Indonesia a decade ago, and I was not interested in a repeat).

So guess where God called us to.

Asia.

Without our cats.

Here begins the real story. The reason I'm writing today. Because I have to tell you that I have been kicking and screaming as God has dragged me along this whole time. I have been, predominantly, miserable. "But how, when you finally got what you had been praying for? You are so clearly and evidently in God's will!" Fortunately no one has asked that question but me. It is possible that if they had they would have been slapped.

I was saying the right words in my prayers, sure. That He would tell me what He has for me. That it can be anything and everything and I will go. All I need is direction. This is what opened my ears up enough to finally actually hear His directions.

But what I really meant was "God, please give me the desires of my heart. You put them there, right? So why haven't you done it all yet?" Well, because He isn't actually the one that put those desires there at all. I wanted that Earthly life. I wanted a life that looked good and envious to anyone who saw. Because it is so easy. #Blessednotstressed

But I obeyed. I made the plans to go to Japan. Even when it meant leaving my cats behind. I found a way to continue. Even when my cat died. I found a way to continue. Even when Teddy lost his job and our tiny bit of security disappeared. I continued. Begrudgingly. Yelling all the way.

I hope that my family won't agree with this... But I am pretty confident I made everyone who visited Japan with us have a miserable trip. Because I was miserable. "Do you want to go see this beautiful thing?", "No, I want to stay home and cry. But sure, whatever, I'll go. Surprise, I'm still miserable here when surrounded by beauty. Who could have guessed it."

That's why I haven't been posting on this blog. There is plenty to rave about. Objectively, I know that. I don't have any praise in me. So I let Teddy do the talking.

Now I want to tell you about this week. Perhaps the hardest and most blessed week of my month, year, or life.

We got wonderful news. News which I don't think I can share publicly as it is not mine. But it is wonderful. And I could only receive it as misery. There was cause for celebration and joy and what did I see? I saw God taking something from me.

Again. AGAIN. AGAIN!!!!

I want to be a person you can depend on. I want to be there for my friends and family in every victory/celebration and in every defeat/hardship. But I will not be able to be there. Because I will be in Japan. Stupid. Fucking. Japan. But then I realized we didn't actually get a definitive no. We got an assumed no. Maybe we could go! Maybe this was my way out! With that little bit of twisted hope I turned my ears back on to try and hear what God had to say to me.

He had a lot to say. Not on that topic at first. We had some catching up to do.

On Sunday He reminded me of His promises. He reminded me of His plan for me that has hope and a good future for me in it. But I still didn't quite believe Him. There is a part of me that has been growing that really doubts that God understands the definition of good.

(Reminder here as this is quite sacrilegious that I am being honest and vulnerable about my process. God is Good. That is an unshakeable, irrefutable truth. But BOY does it not feel like it when you are caught up in your own ideas of what He should be doing. Ok? Ok.)

So I cried some more. I told God more about how miserable I am and have been and that I do not see a future without me being miserable in it. So Teddy gave me an assignment. He told me to look for joy in the world instead of misery. Actively choose positive thoughts. Actively cast aside all of your complaints.

Now we're to Tuesday. And Tuesday was, quite possibly, the most joyous day I have ever experienced. I might do a separate post about it later. But my happiness was unshakeable. Monday was a holiday and so we had not gone out to explore because we assumed everything would be closed. Turns out, no! Everything that is normally closed on a Monday was instead closed on Tuesday so that everyone could enjoy it on the holiday. Oh. So we tried to go 3 different places that were closed. And it didn't matter. Because we had a fantastic time going to and from the different destinations just enjoying the weather and each other's company.

Wednesday I was really hoping for a repeat performance because I wanted that to be my new norm. If it is just about having the right mindset and then your life can be so good? Sign me up! But that wasn't Wednesday. Wednesday, was about peace. I spent the day with contentment rather than joy. Things went wrong and went right and I didn't seem to mind either way. We did the typically stressful thing of trying to downsize our bags and repack for the next journey. And I was just along for the ride. We went and tried to sell some things to Book Off! (we had a half full backpack) and it turned out you can't sell things to them without residency. And that was fine. I took it as a sign that some of those things were things we were meant to keep. And all was well.

Until we got to talking about Sunday's news again. Did we know if we could go home and celebrate? We had been praying. We had been asking for signs. It didn't seem like we had heard anything... But we had.

I had.

He told me 3 different ways that we were not going. It was exactly the same as when He warned me that Susie would die and that Teddy would lose His job. I kind of had an idea. And then I started thinking the idea was a hunch. Then then hunch was just the truth and He had told me early to soften the blow. This blow... was not softened. With this blow came regression.

And that brings us to Thursday and Friday. Fully regressed state, yelling at God and telling Him how little He knows about goodness. Meanwhile He is whispering truths. Not because He is timid, but because that is the gentleness with which I needed to be handled. I yelled. He whispered. And He kept working.

Joy comes from obedience. Peace comes from trust. How am I expecting to receive these gifts when I refuse to acknowledge the Giver?

The work hasn't stopped there. And I am sure it won't stop while I am alive. But this season He is making heart level changes in me. Revealing deep rooted bitterness, hatred, and envy. My devotional that I did today was so well timed. As you might guess of the one who controls the universe, He has good timing. The devotional was about repotting a plant. When the author had a plant that got sick, his first thought was that it needed a new environment. So he got it a new pot. But when he went to transfer it he saw that the roots were rotting. The rot needed to be taken care of before the plant could flourish anywhere.

I am the plant. I have been letting this bitterness and judgement rot me from the inside out. How was I supposed to flourish when I took the rot with me to my new home?

So the work continues. With hope renewed. Giving thanks for the work and the One who is doing it.

First, though, it seems prudent to state here that my parents are both fine, and their house is fine. A bit of superficial damage - a tree came down, they're missing a screen panel on their lanai - but no big problems.

The weather here, though, has been great. We've been spending a lot of time outside, opening all the windows, it's been fantastic. Not to rub it in or anything, hah.

We spent our last few days in our Airbnb just enjoying the area - we went on a few more long walks, slimmed down our luggage before packing (we found a secondhand store nearby we could give some of our clothes to), ate out a bit, ate in a bit, and generally just had a great time.

Packing was both more and less work than we were thinking; we had to pack using different bags than we'd hoped (our one backpack was just too small, we had to use the luggage), but then once we did, we were swimming in space, so that was nice.

The big challenge is that we're trying to live out of only two of our six bags for the next three weeks, as we prepare for and then hang out with the McFarlands when they come to visit. We'll be traveling around a lot with them, and we'd rather not do that lugging around all six of our bags. So we're gonna use a luggage storage service that will hold our bigger bags for a couple weeks, and then deliver it to wherever we end up staying after the McFarlands leave - Hakodate, maybe.

But that means planning out what we'll need for the next couple weeks and slimming down, which is actually surprisingly annoying when you've just slimmed your entire life down to six bags in order to travel in the first place. It wasn't much more than normal travel questions - how much laundry do we assume we'll be doing? Which shoes should we bring? - but made a bit more challenging by the limited options.

But ugh, we were still taking all of our stuff to our next hotel - traveling around the subway with six bags isn't fun. The hotel is fine, nothing special - pretty small, pretty cheap - but at least it has wifi and a desk.

We're going to check out a church nearby tomorrow (finally), so we're excited about that. Expect some updates about that soon, along with a final decision about where we'll be going after the McFarlands leave!

That said, we of course still did some things - it was Drew's last few days! But, bad news: we fell back into old habits (old lack of habits?) and didn't take a ton of pictures.

Oh, but first, it's worth commenting on yesterday's post: yes, I did shave my beard off, completely. It was for two reasons.

First, because I was sick and wanted to wear a mask when I went out like a good Japanese boy. I'd long suspected that my beard (rather than my massive head) was why masks hurt my ears so much, and it obviously made masks less effective, so I figured cutting it all off was a good call if I wanted to keep going out.

(It turns out I was absolutely right; my ears were fine even after a full day of wearing a mask out and about. Plus when I took it off to eat, I didn't have a weird dent in my beard - because I didn't have a beard to dent.)

But I've been wearing masks all COVID and haven't shaved, so there's obviously a second reason. If you've known me long enough, you may have heard me mention my "glasses" theory of beards. The gist is that beards are like glasses: some people look better after getting them, and some people look worse - but absolutely everyone looks worse after getting rid of them.

I figured that since I didn't know anyone in Japan yet, now was my only real chance to go clean-shaven; once people knew me with a beard, it'd be too late to shave it off.

I don't know that I like it - bathing is definitely easier, but ugh shaving every day sucks. Plus I really do like how I look with facial hair more than without. I'll keep shaving for at least a couple weeks to give it a fair shot, but after that we'll just have to see what happens.

I was talking about something else, though - oh, what we did the last few days. I dunno, we went out and explored Tokyo. We went to the Yellow Submarine, one of the most well known (one of the only?) board game shops in Japan.

And then we went to Harajuku to look around and get possibly the best cheeseburgers we've ever had in our lives. (The Great Burger, it was called, and oh man it was. The fries were also excellent.)

Expect things to be pretty quiet from us for the next week as we finish up our time in Toyko - but we're looking at going to Hokkaido, the north island, next week, so we'll probably get more active again then. Stay tuned!

It's been a lot of fun having everyone here, and we're gonna miss them. That said, I think we're looking forward to slowing down a bit, too; I know Drew is still going to want to do a lot, but Dad and Shaz both wanted to do a *lot* to make the most of their limited time here, whereas Drew enjoys the experience of just being in Japan a bit more - and is more willing to do stuff on his own, giving us time to take naps occasionally.

We'll need our rest, though; once the McFarlands are here it's gonna be non-stop again - though I think still less so than these first two weeks, because by then we'll be more comfortable here and less stressy in general - not to mention Cassie's felt the pressure to plan a lot of stuff with her family, whereas Lizzy has all the planning for our time with them on lock, so we're mostly just along for the ride then. Whatever, it'll be fun.

Our last day wasn't too eventful; we went to a (children's) train museum, which was kinda silly, and found a great secondhand shop on the walk home - there aren't many of those in Japan, so this was great! I got a shoulder bag, a laptop bag, and a pair of hiking shoes that fit me (!) for about $30!

In the evening we went to an izakaya for dinner and had some great tofu and pasta, then Drew, Shaz, and I all went to another Bookoff - Drew loves them. I've long since gotten all the manga I can handle, but it's still fun to wander around and look at the electronics and stuff.

We don't have any big plans for today other than seeing Dad and Shaz off; we'll probably do something fun for dinner afterwards, then strategize whatever we're doing next. I'll let you know when we know!

We literally just walked in the door like twenty minutes ago, so this still isn't the full Kyoto story, but now that I can actually type I felt like I could at least give you a short rundown of how we've been.

But I guess before I get to that, it's worth noting that I lost my job a week ago, the night before we left. It wasn't unexpected; the company is in a tailspin and at this point, I kind of doubt it'll be around a year from today. It's a little annoying, but I'm not too disheartened about it.

Honestly, in a lot of ways it's nice. Already, juggling work and vacation was kind of annoying, and this last week in Kyoto, not even thinking about work, was great. I was going to have to buckle down soon - I'd worked ahead enough to take these last two weeks easy, but the next couple weeks were gonna be a lot of work as I caught back up.

Instead, though, Cassie and I are wide open! We're looking at all sorts of things - flying anywhere in the country! I'm very excited.

Back to Kyoto, though; Toyko may be comfortable, but Kyoto was gorgeous. Makes me want to explore the more mountainous regions of Japan; Toyko's definitely not flat, but Kyoto has a lot more scenic vistas. We went as far south as Nara and as far north as Hikone; it was honestly probably a little too much (my feet are covered in blisters to the point that I ordered new shoes from Amazon Japan!), but it was really great.

One last batch of teaser photos, and then I'll upload a bunch over the weekend with captions and details!

Oh, actually, first, a warning: I make no promises about the chronology. In fact, I don't think I'll even try to tell you what specific things we did on what specific days. Most of the time, I didn't even know what day it was. I'm not 100% sure today is Saturday. It's just not how my brain works.

With that our of the way...

We rode the Shinkansen (the bullet train) to Kyoto from Tokyo. It was different than I was expecting; for one thing, the station was nuts crowded and very hot; for another, the trains are coming every 10 minutes or so, so it seems like most people don't buy their tickets in advance, they just show up and get them.

The train itself is way more comfortable than a plane, and it's nice to not go through security, but the ticket is as much or more than a plane ticket (depending on how far you're going), so it's ultimately pretty comparable of an option for long-distance travel within the country.

One of the first things we did in the area was go to Nara Park - a place full of wild deer that you can feed and interact with. They sell special deer crackers everywhere that are safe for the deer to eat, and the deer can sense immediately if you have any crackers on your person - they will follow you incessantly until the crackers are gone, and then they'll move right along.

There were also a lot of cool temples and shrines in the area; we had to climb a bunch of stairs, but we got a great view of the area!

We also visited a couple castles in our time in Kyoto - Nijō Castle and Hikone Castle. Both were cool, but I think Hikone was my favorite. But unfortunately that one was like two hours from where we were staying, and we hit some train delays, and so long story short we only got like an hour to run around the museum and the castle grounds.

Possibly my favorite thing we did, though, was the Fushimi Inari shrine - basically a whole mountain that's been covered in fox shrines and torii. It's kind of an intense hike if you want to see it all - like I said, it's covering a mountain - but it's totally worth it.

Last but definitely not least was the Arashiyama Monkey Park. Basically it's a park (also on a mountain, but a small one) where they study monkeys, and for funding they let tourists come up and feed the monkeys through a screen. There's monkeys everywhere, though, just wandering around, living their lives. It was fantastic, and being on top of a mountain meant it had great views, too!

There was a lot more we did that we didn't (or couldn't) get pictures of - conveyor belt sushi, bathing in a hot spring, a bunch of different book stores, more excellent ramen - but these were the highlights.

Today is our last day with Shaz and Cassie's dad; we still don't know what we're gonna do. After that, though, we're talking with Drew about if we want to stay in Tokyo or venture north. Stay tuned!

But speaking of phones - they work again! You can now text us again, and we can call you. (Technically you can call us too, but we'll only pick up if we're on WiFi.)

It was quite a saga; we had to switch to T-Mobile, and we hit like five different snags in the process of transferring our numbers. But it's done now hoorayyy.

And last but not least, we're in Kyoto! We took the Shinkansen and everything. The train itself was great, but holy crap the station was crazy crowded and hot. I think we each sweat about a gallon per person.

Kyoto is gorgeous, but a little less pleasant to walk around in - at least the part we're in is a lot more car-focused than Tokyo.

Here's a few pictures, but we haven't done much here yet, so there aren't many.

We went to the Shibuya scramble crossing today!

I think the only advantages LA has are the movie industry (ooh, I haven't been to a theater here yet!) and, you know, the people I already know and love.

We've done several of the touristy things - we went to Tokyo Skytree, Cassie did DisneySea - but just existing here is maybe my favorite part. Just walking from place to place is so nice in a city that's oriented around pedestrians instead of cars; most of the smaller roads are shared, no sidewalks, which means pedestrians have the run of the place and cars have to drive carefully. And the places (like downtown) where the roads aren't shared, the sidewalks are all massive, and there are plenty of plazas and the like.

The view from inside Skytree. It was kind of a cloudy day so we couldn't see far, but it was still fun!

A massive Daiso we walked to - but also, look at the road. That's all primarily for pedestrians.

There's so much greenery almost everywhere you go. Even the more downtown areas have frequent parks and gardens, but the residential area we're in is just covered in plants - big bushy leafy greens.

The food is incredible. Even the cheapest, less-than-a-buck convenience store food is satisfying, and I had a bowl of ramen in a shopping mall food court that was probably one of my top ten meals of all time. And it's all so cheap! Four of us went out for lunch at a great place and paid, like, $25. I think the only food that's at all expensive is the American chains - we've done McDonalds once and looked inside a Starbucks, and the prices are pretty much the same as in the US.

Drew and I went shopping at Akihabara yesterday, and I actually found pants that fit me! Not shoes, though; I'm so so close to the cutoff, but I'm a Japanese 31, and most of the shoes only go up to 28 or 29. It does give me hope that if I find a bigger shoe store I'll be able to find some - the little mall store we were looking at had a few $200 sneakers in my size - but I may just have to order shoes online.

And this has all just been Tokyo, which several people have told us isn't even the best part of Japan! Actually, it hasn't even really been Tokyo - just a few small portions of it! We haven't even done some of the most famous bits, like Shibuya or Shinjuku!

Oh, one funny bit we've been realizing. A lot of people have been just throwing rapid-fire Japanese at us even though we're clearly tourists, and if Drew isn't around we just have to kind of smile and guess and mime. But last night, Drew and I went to an izakaya (think pub, but with seating for like 12 people tops, and run by a single family), and it clarified why that kept happening.

When we first walked in, the master was like, "Oh! Tourist? Tourist, yes?" in broken English. All Drew said in response was "Hai," (yes, in Japanese), and the guy's immediately like, "Ah! Nihongo o hanashimas! Doozo yoroshiko!" and basically turned right into assuming we were both fluent. So apparently they're not used to tourists making even the barest minimum of effort here - if you speak even a word of Japanese, they just assume you speak full Japanese. Maybe it'll be different elsewhere in Tokyo or Japan, but it was really funny to realize that had been happening here.

Today we're planning on taking things a bit easier, but we're planning on Kyoto probably over the weekend. Maybe Cassie will post later about her time at DisneySea, but just the story I got last night implied it'll be a lot of "We stood in line for two hours." So be ready for that!

I need to take more pictures of just the mundane things - it's not half as scenic as Hawaii, so we haven't been taking a ton of pics - but I've been here for like 48 hours and I already love just existing here. The roads are all designed for pedestrians first, there's so much greenery even in the city, the buildings have so much character, the food is so good and so cheap... it's fantastic. I never want to leave.

There's a cool-looking Buddhist temple right next to our Airbnb. I don't have any pictures of it, but there's a massive (and densely packed) graveyard behind it.

Cassie and Shaz in a cute little park we found. Fun fact - this park also doubles as an emergency shelter; every bench is also either a grill, toilet, or supply storage!

To give a complete recounting would be more effort than I'm willing to go to right before bed (our last night in the USA!), but I can give you the overview!

Over the last three days, we:

• Went to about a dozen scenic lookouts;
• Pro tip: if you're in Hawaii, and you're passing a scenic lookout, stop at it. It's always worth it.
• Went to several different beaches;
• Ate barbecue, garlic pizza, poke, spam musubi, and smoothies;
• Went to the USS Arizona Memorial;
• Visited the house where I was born (well, the outside at least);
• Shopped at a macadamia nut farm;
• Hiked up Diamondhead.

It was all amazing, if also a bit exhausting. We'd like to be going into Japan on a liiitle bit more sleep, but this was definitely worth it.

We've only been here for a day, but because we're only here for four full days we're trying to cram a lot in.

Just today, we:

1. Walked along the beach and watched a hula concert. (This one was just Cassie while I was working.)
2. Walked around the Honolulu Zoo and made my mom literally cry from nostalgia.
3. Ate at a locally owned burger joint that was incredible.
4. Drove around island, stopping at random parks and scenic lookouts to take in the view.
5. Hung out in the hotel pool and played mini golf. (Don't judge us too harshly - it was after dark, or else we would've gone to the beach.)

We've already got a handful of things lined up for the next few days - tomorrow we're going to the beach, going to some more scenic places, and driving to the neighborhood where my parents lived while I was born; Wednesday we're going on a hike - so I don't know that I'll have time to post a lot of in-depth updates about Hawaii.

But! For once, we're actually doing a good job taking pictures! So here are several for you to enjoy!

I love mountains. Los Angeles's mountains are okay, but these are the real deal.

Friday was when all of us were finally COVID-negative - and not a minute too soon! We already had plans that day to hang out with some friends in their pool. We're not as tight with Rusteen and Nicole as Micah and Lizzy are, but we still like them, so we would've been bummed if we hadn't gotten to see them before we left the country. We also got to meet their new(ish) puppy, who was adorable!

Saturday, though, was the really full day. We started with lunch with Phil and Nandita and had a lot of fun just sitting around the table chatting for a couple hours. Then we went to AMC Universal to see Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, so I (finally!) got to see another movie in a real movie theater. (Beetlejuice was fun, but not a must-see.)

Then that night we went out for Korean BBQ with the McFarlands and the Armes - this place Meat Love in Korea Town, very good food; if you go, don't skip the appetizers, they were great - and just hung out eating meat and chatting for hours. Lots of fun!

The next day (today) was less eventful but more cramped, just due to less time. We went shopping for some last-chance clothes - I'm worried about finding anything in my size there - and went over to our friend Billy's house for lunch. Then we came home, finished packing, and I'm now writing this in the car on the way to the airport! We have a couple more pictures I'll post soon, but the next time you hear from us, we'll be in Hawaii!

The first couple days were mostly just getting settled in - we had some food we've been missing (Dave's Hot Chicken! Real Mexican food!), played some board games, and got comfortable.

Over our first weekend, the McFarlands went out of town for a baseball game, and we housesat for them. While we had the use of the McFarlands' car, we drove up to Noho to have dinner with our friends, the Armes, and we had a great time.

Then Micah tested positive for COVID, and we couldn't go out anymore. He self-quarantined in the bedroom most of the time, but the house isn't that big, so we were mostly just hoping that if we got sick, it would be fast and we'd get over it quickly. We did go to an improv comedy night and left him at home the first day, but after that it felt too weird - what if we were positive and asymptomatic?

That thinking proved wise, as soon we did the merry-go-round thing; right around the time Micah was feeling better, Cassie got COVID, and then right when she was moving past it, I got it from her. So far Lizzy hasn't caught it at all (fingers crossed!), but the end result is that we've spent basically all our time since then hanging around the house, playing board games. Sometimes the people who are feeling better will go out and pick up something fun, but there still haven't been any big events or anything.

But as disappointing as it's been to not get to do everything we wanted to do here - by this point, with me still testing positive, there's no way we get to see everyone we wanted to see, and I may not even get to see a movie in a real movie theater! - it's kind of been great?

We love the McFarlands, and our time here has basically been nothing other than spending time with them. It's been a blast, even when we were sick. Seriously, the idea of just spending time ordering take-out and playing board games with friends is already kind of our ideal vacation; given the option, we'd rather have seen some more of our Los Angeles friends, but this hasn't been as big a bummer as it could've been.

We're getting better at taking pictures - not great, but better - but given our lack of activities, there still aren't a lot. But we'll share them all below.

Hopefully I test negative starting tomorrow, we all go see a movie and some friends, and we finish our time in Los Angeles strong - but really, as long as I'm healthy for our flight next Sunday, I'll be happy.

We dusted off our old Seafall campaign and played another game! We are... probably not going to finish it.

A picture from the improv show we went to. A ton of fun!

Our cat Susannah passed away on Monday.

On Friday, my sister Candace took the cats to the vet to finally get their titer tests redone (have we explained all of that? I can't remember) for us. No problems, but it was noted that Susannah's blood was sluggish and a little difficult to draw. Not overly concerning. Then Candace noticed that Susannah stopped eating or drinking. She did not have anything over the weekend. And then Monday morning... she found her in a pitiful state. She rushed her to an emergency vet (which I'm not sure I even knew existed) and her pulse was half of what it should be and her temperature was so low it didn't even register with the thermometer. After hours of IVs and blankets and care they got her well enough to run some tests.

Those tests revealed cancer. Everywhere.

She didn't stand a chance. We gave them permission to put her down, but asked them to wait for my sister Pam to get there so someone could be with her. She almost didn't make it that long. The vets assure us that no one could have caught the cancer; it was too aggressive, there was no chance.

It was sudden. It is awful. It is painful. We are grieving.

God has been talking to me a lot about grieving ever since we started planning this trip. I never wanted to leave my cats. I didn't want to leave my family. I didn't want to leave the familiar. And He told me to grieve. Grieve the good that I was worried about leaving, because that is one of the ways we can acknowledge that it is good. Grieve.

For months I have been grieving over Susannah specifically. Yes, we have two cats. Yes, I love Xena. Susannah is special. She was my (uncertified) emotional support cat. She was kitty cat best friend. In my darkest hour I reached for a hand and found a paw. I grieved when she failed her titer test the first time and I found out she would not be joining us in Japan right away. I grieved when I thought I was leaving her behind in FL. I rejoiced when I got to take her to VA with me and have an extra 6 weeks with my love. I grieved when I left her then. I did not know that would be the last time I would have with her. If I had known that, oh I would have driven her crazy. I would have carried her with me everywhere even though she hates to be carried. I would have never let her sleep because I would not have stopped petting her. Perhaps it is for the best I didn't know.

Now, I return to what has become all too familiar a pastime for me. I grieve. Teddy grieves. Xena grieves. Poor Candace and Tim got dragged into grieving with us. Will you join us? Will you pray that comfort finds us?

Thank you to everyone here for making our time so great, and an extra big thanks to Candace and Tim for hosting us and for taking care of our cats!

We weren't as diligent about taking pictures as we meant to be - we're working on it, we swear - but here are a few of the pictures we did take.

This picture is from when we first got there. Xena hid in the laundry room, and we had to coax her out of hiding.

We're very excited to spend time in CA and see friends and family out here - and we'll try very hard to take more pictures this time!

First off, obviously, we've been staying with Cassie's sister and brother-in-law, Candace and Tim. They've been outrageously gracious hosts - Tim's probably too generous - and it's been a lot of fun just kinda living casually with them for a while. Watching shows, playing card games, seeing impromptu movies.

We've also gone up to Cassie's mom's house a couple times now and played board games there with her other siblings, Drew and Pam. Mostly Seafall, but Drew also showed me how to play Final Girl, and Cassie went with her mom and Pam to some Harry Potter festival nearby. Once while we were there, we also went up to see Cassie's grandma and celebrated her birthday!

Speaking of grandmas, last Saturday we drove up to Maryland and saw mine, and then helped my cousin move into her new place, which was fun. Plus, while we were there, we did dinner with my friend Joey and his wife Yssa at a German place (The Rathskeller; very good!).

We've been hanging out with friends in the area; we did dinner with the Gilchrests, hung out all day Monday with the Comptons, hung out Tuesday night with the Brenons, and had a hot pot brunch with my sister Janine and her boyfriend Jeremy on Wednesday. Last night we went to Meghan Heaton's birthday party, and got to see a lot more people there, too!

It's also been a lot of fun just living live down here again - going to church at Crossway, getting lunch with people afterwards (Siam Classic in Old Town Manassas still has it!), doing community group at the Tatums', even bumping into people randomly while we're out and about.

It's honestly been kind of packed, and is getting more so as we approach the end of our time here. So if we happened to miss you, we're very sorry, and we promise it wasn't intentional! We thought five weeks in VA was going to be plenty, but it's turned out to barely be enough!

We're looking forward to Los Angeles, but we're worried that three weeks there is going to feel like nothing. There's just so many people, places, and experiences to say goodbye to! But you know what? Having a hard time saying goodbye definitely beats the alternative!

I'm gonna lead with the most exciting news: we have our cats with us! We'd been worried about what was going to happen with them for a long time; a brief summary of events:

1. Cassie thought we couldn't take our cats with us to Japan; this was a dealbreaker, so Japan wasn't gonna happen.
2. Cassie discovered that we can take our cats to Japan, they just have to get a simple titer test to make sure they have an active rabies vaccine and wait six months. As long as we got on it from the moment she learned about that, we could take them with us in September!
3. Susannah failed her titer test - which, after the delay it took for the test results to get back to us, and the fact that we'd have to get her revaccinated, wait a month, and then get another titer test, meant there was no way she could come with us to Japan in September. The best that was gonna happen was her being eligible in like November or December.
4. By this point, we're too far along in the process for anything to stop the move to Japan, but Cassie was Not Happy. We spent a lot of time praying about it, and the message she got was "Pray for someone to volunteer to take the cats."
5. We prayed that. For months. It was nerve-wracking and we felt like terrible people, because we weren't actively trying to find anyone to take the cats, which meant it was going to default to my mom coming over to our house a couple times a week to change their food and water and scoop their litter boxes. (We did eventually get some more people willing to help with that side of things - thanks Nancy!)
6. Less than 48 hours before our flights to VA, we got an entirely unprompted message from Candace saying she felt like she was meant to take our cats.

That was great for two reasons: first, because she was going to take the cats! And second, because we were already going to be staying with her in VA, so that meant we could help them get settled in!

It was a fantastic thing, with fantastic timing, and everything went about as smoothly as possible. We had just enough time to register with the airline that we were taking two cats and checking two extra bags (since they replaced our carry-ons). The cats were comfortable in their new house from like day 2, and are slowly getting more comfortable with Candace and Tim and their dog, Sirius.

Our cats and our bags before we boarded the plane. We had to cover Xena's carrier because all the sights scared her.

Once we arrived, Xena immediately hid in the laundry room. It took a while to coax her to a more comfortable hiding place!

Cassie and I are also doing well! We've already seen a lot of family and several friends, which has been great!

This is where I'm writing this! I have kind of an extreme travel setup, maybe I'll share the bag I pack it all in later.

Remember, we're here until August 13th, so if you're in VA and haven't gotten a chance to hang out with us yet, hit us up and we'll figure something out!

The moving process got a bit hectic at the end, but isn't that kind of the norm for moves? And honestly it was still one of the easiest moves we've ever done, since we're leaving the house furnished and ready for guests.

The biggest hiccup in the planning was actually a wonderful thing: Cassie's sister volunteered to foster our cats just two days ago! It meant we had to do some quick readjustments of luggage, but this was a major answer to prayer, so any inconveniences it caused were definitely categorized as "good problems."

That's all for now; I'm writing this in the midst of the moving process yesterday, so I've got to get back to work. If you're in VA, give us a shout and we'll try to find time to see you before we leave! Remember, we're here for a bit over a month, so there'll hopefully be time to see everybody!

Teddy says...

We're not going to miss Florida itself very much, but we're going to miss so many more people than I would've thought! Have we really only been here two years? I feel like we have so much family and so many friends here!

We weren't as diligent about taking pictures as we wanted to be, but we did manage some. Here are some snapshots of the people who have made Bradenton our home over the last 2 years.

Our last Tai Chi class. Sifu (the title for our Tai Chi teacher) even made sure Teddy got to test for his next belt before we left.

Our last Family Game Night at church. Dwayne was a good sport and learned a new game with us.

Our last Sunday at church. They had a breakfast for us after service! Teddy got up and said some words of gratitude to the congregation and dragged me up with him.

Thank you again to everyone who has welcomed us and loved us while we were here. You will be missed. We love you all!

• Florida: Present-July 4th
• Virginia: July 4th-August 13th
• California: August 13th-September 8th
• Hawaii: September 8th-September 13th
• Japan: September 14th1-December 10th
• Hawaii: December 10th-???

The final bit in Hawaii may get changed, though, depending on how the visa process in Japan goes. We're expecting to have to spend some time outside the country in between our visitor visas expiring and our residency visas kicking in, but if that's a short enough gap, we may stay in Asia, and just spend some time in South Korea or Vietnam or something.

So why are we doing this? A couple reasons. The most pragmatic is breaking up the travel woes. As much as Cassie and I both love traveling to other places, we hate traveling to other places. By breaking the trip up across several jaunts, we're breaking up what would be a 17 hour flight into several smaller flights - as unpleasant as going through airports can be, sitting on a plane for an entire day is worse.

We also get to adapt to the new time zone in pieces, instead of all at once; Japan is 13 hours ahead of Florida, which we expect to lead to some pretty brutal jet lag even with our stops.

But of course, neither of those are reason enough to spend months in VA and CA, so obviously the big reason is to see friends and family before we go; even if we do come back between visas, it'll be around Christmas and we won't want to do a ton of traveling then, so this will be like our goodbye tour.

So if you're anywhere near us at any part of our travels, please reach out; we'd love to see you before we go!

I have been a little bit embarrassed letting people know about this blog while there is so little on here. So, here I am contributing.

For anyone who hasn't seen us in person in a while (I say since I will be sharing this to Facebook) you probably have noooo idea what has been going on in our lives. Sorry! Social media is bad for my mental health and staying in touch seems not to be my forte. Teddy is better, but only slightly. This is our attempt to be better! Though it is admittedly one-sided.

Here is too much back story: Teddy and I have been married 10 years now! Can you believe it??!?? One of the things we have shared a passion for throughout our relationship is traveling. When we say "traveling," we don't mean a weekend trip to Miami. We mean a month in Ecuador. But we haven't done it in so long!

Before marriage we both did a little bit of international travel. Teddy did a 2 week trip to Germany at 18 and came back resolved to never travel for that short a time again. I did 3 months in New Zealand and 2 months in Indonesia on my YWAM mission trip and loved it. The only downsides were that I had a stomach ache my entire time in Indonesia, and I was confined to one part of New Zealand while I was there and I wish I had seen more.

A year after marriage as we were preparing to move across the country from VA to CA we took a 5 month detour through Central and South America. 3 months in Guatemala, 1 month in Colombia, and 1 month in Ecuador. The best adventure ever! The only downside of that trip was that we weren't making lasting relationships with people because we knew our time was limited.

Onto our new and improved idea: Let's just move internationally! This is a bit of a simplified take on our reasoning, and Teddy has a slightly different take in our FAQ, but I think you have the right idea of our intentions now. We want to really know what life is like in another country. We want to get to know people and live life with them. We want to know what it is like to be the minority and force ourselves into learning another language. We want to grow. We want adventure.

We are moving to Japan!

We still have so many things to figure out and do before we go, but we are excited to take this next step. Thanks for joining us on our journey!

Why move?

A lot of reasons! But two of the big ones are:

• We never really clicked with Florida, and have been looking at leaving since pretty much our first year here.
• We enjoy traveling and just want to get out and explore the world. Even before we decided on Japan, we knew we wanted to try moving internationally.

Why Japan?

Also a lot of reasons!

• For one thing, we both like it and have been consuming Japanese culture all our lives - anime, video games, food.
• We had a several different friends independently ask if we wanted to visit Japan with them around the same time, which put it at the front of our minds.
• Cassie's brother speaks Japanese at an N1 level, so we knew we'd have a great tutor for learning the language.
• An astonishing number of people we've talked to about it have said some variation of, "Oh, I/my relative/my best friend lived there for a while and absolutely loved it!"

When are you leaving?

Early July, but we haven't bought tickets yet.

When are you going there?

Early September, but we haven't bought tickets yet.

...What?

We're planning on doing some traveling around the US before we leave for Japan - partly to see some friends and family, and partly to ease our way into the time zone. The plan is some time in VA, some time in CA, and then probably doing like a week in HI before we finally get there. Maybe a few other stops along the way; we'll see.

Where in Japan will you be?

We don't know yet! Our first couple months we'll be bouncing around, seeing what places we like. We're definitely leaning towards Tokyo for the moment, but we're definitely not making any decisions until we've seen what it's like. But if you have any suggestions for places we should check out, please, let us know!

What will you be doing for work?

I'm taking my job with me! I'm fully remote and set my own schedule, so I won't have any problems taking my work there. Cassie isn't working right now anyway, so that's fine, but she may end up teaching English.

Isn't it going to be really expensive?

Not compared to Florida! No, seriously, Bradenton is shockingly expensive. But you're right, it is a little more nuanced than that.

Basically, while yes, some things will be more expensive there, and if we were trying to transplant our American style of living to Tokyo then it'd be way more expensive, as long as we're comfortable living like a local - 500 square foot apartments, relying on public transit instead of having a car, etc. - all the math we've been running says the total cost of living will be notably lower, even before factoring in how weak the yen is right now.

And that's if we're living in Tokyo. The further we get from the city, the cheaper things get - though if we get too far, public transit gets harder, so it eventually loses its edge. It's a balancing act, but on the whole, we're not worried.

If you have any questions we haven't answered here, please ask! You're probably not the only one who's wondering!

We're leaving Florida in the beginning of July; expect to start seeing more posts then!

こんにちは、テディです。妻のキャシーもこのサイトを使っています。

私たちについてもっと知りたい方は、こちら。

私の脚本（スクリーンプレイ）を読みたい方は、こちら。 (※リンク先は英語のみです)

私たちのブログを読みたい方は、こちら。 (※まだ日本語の記事はありません。英語のみです)

私にメールを送りたい方は、こちら。(※私はまだ日本語を勉強中です)

テディについて

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メールはこちらまで。

妻は「癒やし系」ですよ。

そして僕は、自称「素晴らしい作家」です。

執筆活動

まだ日本語では書いていませんが、今、日本語での書き方を勉強中です。

趣味

TTRPGとRPGが好きです。特に『Stellaris』と『Dwarf Fortress』は、つい遊びすぎてしまいます。

昔、テコンドーと太極拳を習っていました。

今は、パン作りを覚えたいと思っています。

キャシーについて

私はキャシーです。たまにブログを書くだけです。

テディより面白いです。

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