WANISAN

It may not stay around long enough for us to have a white Christmas. Actually, I’m hoping it won’t 😉

But, we did get a good snow that came in fast last night and made a mess of things this morning here in Nagoya. This is the most snow we’ve seen in a while.

The weather forecast said it might snow last night, or early this morning, but there was no indication of how much snow were going to get. The weather has been at freezing for the last few days, and that makes it a lot easier to for the snow to stick. It was heavy, wet, and very sticky.

Trains were late, and traffic was brutal.

Here are a few shots from my balcony, and one from my home office window.

The one with the icicles is the apartment next door. We did get a few on our house, and there’s one picture of those, too.

Today was officially Thanksgiving Day. Last Sunday we celebrated our Thanksgiving with a potluck dinner at our church.

Potluck dinners are an interesting tradition where people bring their favorite dish to share. There was of course turkey and people brought several other dishes to eat along with that.

One of the things I miss about being away from home is this kind of meal. We can have turkey, we can have dressing and even cranberry sauce, but it isn’t the same as fixing it at your house, gathering your family together and then sharing that meal, that time, and hopefully some thoughts of thanks.

Here is a picture of the table, and the turkey. We’re still eating some soup made from the leftover turkey, but I think everything else is gone – except the extra weight I have gained 😉

Thursday of this week my youngest son celebrated his birthday. We always make a pretty big deal of birthdays with cake and presents and singing happy birthday.

This time was no different but I did end up making  a different cake from my usual ones for birthdays. And, yes, making the cakes is my responsibility, well, at least doing the decorating.

I spent a good part of my university days working in a bakery as some of you know and I used to do a lot of cake decorating. These days it’s not so easy with the tools I have at hand, but I try to do my best.

Ahn asked at the last minute to have his cake Oreo instead of chocolate icing.

It’s actually not too bad, or too hard, so we made it work.

This time I also did a layer cake instead of a single.

The icing is fresh cream, not butter cream, basically whipped cream or what we had most of the in the U.S., essentially Cool Whip.

Here are a couple of pictures of the cake in progress and finished and with Ahn.

I have a fairly large yard, garden as it’s called here, at least compared to most in Japan. It requires a fair amount of care, which we as a family enjoy doing – sometimes together, sometimes just me, sometimes me sitting on the deck with something cold to drink or playing my guitar, or both, while the person I’m related to by marriage piddles around there.

We had a recent update to some equipment, and this struck me, so I wanted to post these really quick photos.

Last week when I was traveling to Aichi Bunkyo University to teach my graduate courses, I was almost attacked at the train station. A swallow, for me we called these barn swallows growing up, flew right over my head. I was inside the station.

That station has a sort of Metro type center that on one end is actually like the open mouth of a very large cave. It is very tall, and open, and you can walk in from the street level. There is even a bicycle path down the middle.

Anyway, as I exited the turnstiles, the bird dipped right by my head, but came up abruptly and landed on top of one of the hanging “EXIT” signs. There was a next there, and as the bird landed, 3 little heads came out.

That sign is maybe about 9 feet off the ground and directly in the center of the underground station.

I tried to take a couple of photos quickly with my phone, but they weren’t very good:

People were looking at me a little funny, or funnier than usual, and I was rushing to get to the shuttle bus.

Anyway, this week when I returned, there was actually a small barricade set up under the sign, and the baby birds were already much bigger. I tried to get a few more and better photos this time.