WANISAN

The weather has been so hot and humid these days, but I am still going out for my daytime walks twice a week. When I walk alone and in the daytime, I usually take a route through the forests around Heiwa Park. I often see wildlife there, even a raccoon and a squirrel. I usually see lizards and the like, but they dart away so quickly I don’t usually have a chance to get a photo.

Today I saw a blue tailed lizard who stopped to try to hide from me, so I was able to get a couple of pictures before he realized his ruse was not working and he darted off into the woods.

Here are a couple of the better pics (sorry, they’re just taken with my iPhone, so not that high quality)

My friends and I who make up the band Meito Junction are very excited to announce we will be playing the first of what should be a string of benefit concerts to raise money to bring clean water to an orphanage in Uganda.

Here’s an old photo of the band

Here’s the poster for the first event:

And here is an audio sample of the music we play:

It’s a bit cold for the season here right now, but the growing continues. We are adding more plants to the garden, but in the meantime our blueberry bush (tree!!) is already heavily laden with green berries.

We still had a package left in the freezer from last year, so there’s this…

I’m torn between which cake I like the best now: the one made with the pineapple guava jelly or the one made with blueberries. I guess we’ll have to make both at the same time and do a side by side taste test. That’s not likely to go well on a Saturday morning weigh-in, but sacrifices have to be made.

Here’s the blueberry bush getting after it already: (we usually get several pints of berries from this one set of two bushes. Bake with some, eat some, toss some in cereal, or in a homemade shake.

The warm weather means we are spending a lot more time in our garden (actually our backyard, but here in Japan it’s just called a garden).

We have a lot of different plants there though not many that make fruit or food. We did recently add some more olive trees in hopes they would make olives. I would love to have those olives like the ones we ate in Spain…

Mostly though we had to take a large percentage of the water flowers out of the fish pond. They were getting too thick and not leaving much room for the fish to swim.

I worried we had taken out too many and left the fish a little overexposed to the birds, but so far they’re all still swimming about and enjoying their newly reestablished roominess.

Here are a couple of pictures of what it looks like now.

The weather is definitely getting warmer and we’re seeing more and more of the critters and creatures are out and about. We’ve seen several sets of Coypu in the river behind our house. (Have photos and some video but the quality is not so good. I’ll try to clean that up and post it later if possible.)

I’ve seen a number interesting creatures on my walks as well.

It’s not great video, but here’s a few seconds of two butterflies I met today.