Archive for June, 2017

How do you eat an elephant?

Thursday, June 15th, 2017

And why?!!! 😉

This week we are really digging in to preparing for a final exam essay and I thought it was a good time to remind students that it is too big of a task to sit down and try to finish all at once.

So, I put this drawing (yes, I call it a drawing!) on the board.

 

I of course told them that you grab the elephant by the trunk and try to suck it down like noodles. They laughed. I think that was either from my pantomiming the action or well, look at that drawing…I eventually told them that you should do it one bite at a time.

 

(I do this sometimes, often, too often, where I just think, “Oh, I’ll draw a/an somethingerother” without having done it either ever before or at the least in a long, long time. That’s how I ended up with this drawing a week or so ago:

To the left were bad ovals, supposed to be eggs… it did the trick though.

I need to practice drawing more!

 

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Last year’s blueberries and this year’s blueberries

Friday, June 2nd, 2017

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.

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A garden update of sorts to the fish pond

Thursday, June 1st, 2017

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.

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