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Shortly before I was
Shortly before I was assigned to review it as part of the Peer to Peer Review Project, Kaye Ellis ended For Always. What a pity; Kaye is a promising writer. Her prose is clear and expressive with a strong voice that carries emotion. She has a natural gift that many ‘blog writers lack. In the…
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pi-pi-pi-pi
>>pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi-pi
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Rich man, poor man
Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. What do I want to be when I grow up? I must be going through a career crisis at the moment. Yesterday I spent 7 hours programming and documenting 21 lines of PHP code. It was fun, but difficult. Last week, I had a…
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Family birthday clusters
Why do family birthdays seem to cluster together? Are there genetic cycles of fertility? My niece, Helen, turned ten on Wednesday; today is my sister’s birthday; mine is in three days. My in-laws have birthdays mainly in late autumn except for my husband and our nephew who share a birthday in early May. It’s odd.…
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Before/after drawings
My pre-instruction self-portrait. I did this in about 30 minutes; it was gruelling. My self-portrait drawn five days later. This one took around six hours but I hardly noticed the time passing.
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Drawing jetlag
Last Thursday, Kristin told the drawing class, “The day after the workshop ends, you’ll feel really jet lagged. Like you’ve been on a long trip.” I thought that was an exaggeration but she might be right. I feel like I’ve just stepped off a 12 hour flight. I’m tired after all this right brain drawing.…
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I just finished day
I just finished day 2 of a five day drawing class at Right Brain Research and my brain is switched over into R-mode; the logical left side is almost shut down. I see the shapes of everything–it makes it difficult to type because I notice the spaces between the keys and the pattern of letters…
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We broke the toilet
We broke the toilet seat. Maybe it was already broken and we just noticed it. Or perhaps (most likely) it was about to break and our big, gaijin butts were the straw that broke the camel’s back and cracked the plastic seat. Having just moved into this new building, I figured I’d better ask the…
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Just around the corner
Just around the corner and down the street from us is the Japan Shiatsu College. The founder of the school, Tokujiro Namikoshi, is also the the father of the shiatsu. Namikoshi is depicted in a larger than life bust in the front. He looks so happy. There’s an interesting article about him written by Shirley…
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A million yen sounds
A million yen sounds like a lot, but doesn’t go far when you’re doing taxes. My gross income was just over a million yen which makes my taxable income about 450,000. Subtracting out the deduction of 380,000, I should be taxed on only 70,000 yen of my income. (That’s about $500). I’ve already paid about…
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