Then today 3 girls came up and demanded my Webpage URL.... "You must give it to us!" This was also a good time to test my ability to put Pictures right here for a short time. In a few days I'll put this into the picture page. All the pages have to be Updated to Include the Video section　anyways.



ああああー　かわいいですね。　アメリカ人はわかだないです。　だじょぶです。　あとうでこれのさしんはうつすです。

You need to have the Japanese Laguage pack to see this correctly. It will be chineese if your computer dosn't have the pack. YOu probly can't read it anyways hu.....

Tonight I had to give another speech. It was at Kumamoto Castle Hotel. There was a bunch of peolpe from Rotary clubs and Lions Internation clubs there all there to talk to us. Us being the other girl, Eleen, that is in Kumamoto and 4 Univesity students from America. One of them didn't show though.

My speech was ok this time, I wrote it the day before and the had a friend check grammer and stuff. Workd out good. I stumbled on a couple things but it turned out really good i think. The girl wrote a speech in Romanji(alphabet) and i wrote mine in Japanese kana and kanji. I am very proud of my reading abilities.

There was one guy that looked like abraham lincoln in the front row. He spok really good English too. If only he had a top hat. I got a picture of him. After speaches we eat and talked for about an hour or two before leaving. I showed my host foather a good place for spicy ramen, He chikened out at the last minute though, and he got somthing else. It is the same place as in the 10 minute Ramen shop movie.(get there with the links on the right side of this page. 10 MB file)

Look at the videos! come on people. no one e-mailed me. hehe,　It was only one day old but I expected a better turn out than that. ;P

WILT (What I lernt today)
#1 I cant spell
#2 because your kinda near the equador dosn'T mean it will be hot. IT IS SO COLD in kyushu. but I am asured that Okinawa is still warm... I'm jelous.
#3 bikes don't like me. if i am desperat for somthing to do I'll post the 5 pages of things that bikes in japan have done to me.... today the handle came off.... think I almost died multiply times.

Well, here is my big surprise for you all that i have been waiting since newyears to put out. My celphone has an decent camera and movie function on it.
I can save it to an sd card and put in on the net from there. You need Quicktime to play them. *note: you just go righ tto the bottom and click download now and you don't need to give you e-mail address* if you can figure it out and get them to play good for you enjoy my crappy camera skills. The ten minute long ones are 10 minutes long each, the length my camera can take for and are around 10 megabytes. Thats about an hour for a 56k modem and 2 hours for grampa to download. They arn't incredibly exciting to me but you get to see things. My initial Idea was a weekly updated web movie thing were i'd just walk around with a camera one a week and every sunday though them up on the web. that would force me to do pictures too i think. (still go to do them agian) At some point i'll put them together to make a "nice" movie. hence the production page that is a joke realy.

the shorties page hase moveies shorter than 10 minutes that just happen to fall into my SD card. and then onto the server. there are more interesting things there I think, IMHO( In my own opinion ) they are up, but unless you readead this as i'm putting them on the server. in that case try in an hour or so.

becasue all teh picture pages are done by hand the links are old and may not work at the moment. but links of this page a fresh and green, well purple on this monitor. I really need to find a new color theem before it drives me more crazy I have a girls web page design. how did I not see it!

enjoy th movies if you can. If you have trouble, I'm always open to e-mail, spam is getting boring.

Happy B-day gramps!

you know what? my typos are disgusting........ and This page didn't look so purple on th eLCD that i used to creati it on, but now on this normal CRT it looks like girls site. I should add pink flowers and ivory trim around the boxes too while i make it look worse already. finished the small update to the page to make the test a little more readable, does it make a diferance anyone? that has my e-mail

Why o why can't I get FTP? I got to look into that i think the router is blocking it. atoude.

today i made pancakes for my hostfamily and the loved them andthen my mom trys to make so more and runes out of milk. well and extra egg and water should be the same as milk right? that was one bad idea that i never touched. so the next batch is a little ...... blah.... still edible with lots of butter and syrup though. they liked them still.

after wi went to my host fathers lumber yard and warehouse for his construction company. there we painted siding, lots of siding. i loot a few picture because it took forever to paint it all. ugly gray too, i hope that was a base coat, it looks hoarable.

bu then I got to see the Last Samurai finaly. If you havn't seen it go see it!!! its my story with war added to it. yes i do wear that samurai thing in kendo and do fight with those wooden swards. but when versing each other we use bamboo sticks and armor. that looked like it hurt pritty well if it were real in the movie. The movie really got the facts down, that new wepon in the movie was a real wepon at some point but it never realy took off if i remember right. I know somone that might know for sure. Kendo still rocks.

We were in a resteraunt for dinner and some guy starts talking in ENglish to me, he was anExchange student to canada 19 years ago or when he was 19. that was weird. and the was a guy that was in rotary with him that asked if i was with rotary. then offered me bottol of champain to finish off. then remembered about the no drinking rules from when his exchage and took back the offer.... like i would have taken it anyways..... but it was funny a whole botle of champain becase we had a slight bit in comone, Japanese people are great.

I'm working on the colors of the site to make it readable for everyone right now but weather i finish or just make things worse is yet to be know for tonight.

i have aspeech this wendsday and I'm still not ready, not cheat sheet alowed. i better write somthing up tomarow i think.

You would probly think a person from the UP of michigan could deal with a little ice and snow. It acculayy snowded a good inch today, but its mostly gone now. this morning I made it al the way to school was turning into my bike parking slots and the was a nice patch of BLACK ice. After I got up I was sondering what I slipped on. nothing but a few sparkles of glare revield themselfs. GAH! scraped my knee up pritty well, but my bike is ok. for once. I did kick it once becuase it hurt. Bled for 4 hours nice and slow. oh well, its fine now.

I'll try tomarow on the FTP; The computer was still yelling at me for somthing, I think they have FTP blocked because its not everyday normal people use FPT programs. small hurdel.

Even though im really far south it is still cold. Around 0 degrees F, -5 celcius. that is my geuss, i don't know the formula for convertion, all I know is that is involves a 5 and a -32.

"There is a ton of snow here, and I still can't get them to call a "snow day". Maybe on your blog you will have photos of green grass and flowers for me to look at! " end qoute from Mrs Belavander at the high school. that was last night i got that.　I wake up and what do I see? snow... lots of snow...

look later today or tomarow for pic updates. I was trying to put them up now but i can't get into my FTP for the picture site.

I don't want to go to shoccl right now, its too cold!!!! b.b.b.b.b....bye bye.

I love kendo. If you don't know what it is let me TRY to explain it with out typos. Its like sward fighting with sticks. the sticks are usualy made of four pieces of bamboo held together with leather are the ends. Your right hand goes on top and your left on top. When pulling back the stick It goes over your head and touches your back, then the person launches forward brings the stick over his head at high speed hitting the opponent on the head with great force making a victory. At the same time at you hit the person's head your foot smashes on the floor making as loud and painful as possable tud that shakes the floor. If it dosn't hurt, you did it wrong. The students in my club are very fast and can hit each other 3 times faster than I can say wow. No joke there.

The uniform's pants look like a dress at first glance, but I assure yuo they are pants. The top is matching color, blue, and is held shut by two strings, oneinside, one out. Armor that Kumako has is plastic, it covers the chest and stumic and another set of pads go below it that are blue as well. On the front of the pads is the name of the school and the fighter's name. the mask is metal anis held in place by strings that magicly work. There is no pain when you put on the armor, but your arms and legs dont have protection.

There are 4 ways to win. mei:head,kotei:wrist,dou:stumic, and tsuki:neck.

next picture update will have a couple pictures of Kendo club at Kumakou. From the move to the new host family I seam to have lost the CD i saved my program to... probly the same disk that had my speech I lost on it.

today was cold and tonight will be really cold. -5 degrees celcilus. I don't know what that is ferinhieght but it is cold.

looks like I got som sort of regularity back in the blogage now, so see you all later. got to find that CD, know its around here somewhere.

ouch, 2 weeks without Internet....... It hurt me much more than It hurt you trust me. But I survived and you will too. way to much happend, now I'm in a net host family house, the reason for no net, and its 2004. I counted my "pocket change" and had over 90$ in my littl box then all the cash from new years. my allowance from rotary came in last week too, so I'm god on cash too for once.

Today we had a district conferance in Oita and kouchi came with us. I had to give a 5 minute speach and I found that I didn't save my typed out one on a CD like I though. I did save teh outline in english of my speech though, that wasn't a lot of help though. I typed out a new one, and had 2 hours later finished.... It was horable wihtout my teachers to correct it. while reading it, people looked unhappy that it wasn't going well and I took seppkatsu. (I ended up cutting it short).

Had a surprise test today too, that was great, I think i got a 50% this time, i got a 10 of 70 on the test in november i found out today. not the lowest score of the group.

We didn't read the rules a million times today for once, and that was a good hting, got right to the point and It was back o home, nothing exciting really, got to speak a little english. They really take the fun out of seeing onther exchange students here. tests then the yell at you for not speaking Japanese. and blah blah blah your In Japan speak Japanese..... I'm working on it..

we were going to see monkeys today while in Oita but there somhow wasn't enought time. I wanted to see monkeys! there is a monkey park where monkeys are just all over the place, no cages or anything. just monkeys... Ben whent and sent me a picture on my cell phone. cute little monkeys they are.

Get well soon mom in America.. and to all thouse that can't read this I'm changine the text color In a little while as soon as I get this computer set up to do work stuff and not just e-mail...

I just got back form a trip to my host familys grndmothers. We all went and stayed there for 4 nights. she lives 2 and a half hours away. It was near a really small town, 100 houses max and that was close to anouther small city, half of SSM probly.the was lots of mountians and i took a video while waling the dog. He is so cool,　 and well trained... kinda. The hous was old style ond only the kitchen and living room had heat. all the floors were tatami and weavy..... in otherwords it was a realy realy old house. There wasn't even any paved roads untill 1995 out that way. they had a picture of there house taken from a helicopter.

newyears day Parents and aparently relitives give money to there kids(relitives). I was shocked that i got money, i Knew my host parents would give me money, but then there grandparents and my host mother's brother gave me 50$ each! I have 250$ from that trip. It was a schook really, I'm watching Obachan give out the little envolopes and i get one too.... Complete surprise. takashi ended up with only 200 Iyaka 180 and masashi 140..... WOW...

there wasn't much to do out there so the cellphone batterys got a good couple chargings everyday. We were playing any game we could find, mostly the defalt included games.

no time to type, gonna forget things..... OH NO!!!!!!

did some things with friends from Tamana on chistmas and whent to a party at some americans apartment with danial sensei and his um... girlfriend.... It's a secret... ;P

I change host familys tomarow, really bissy right now. I got everything packed i think already though.... I got there for 3 months, not 3 weeks.... ok that is a little differant.. no kids still.. I thought they had a daughter for a while here, but nope, it was a neacie or somthing...

GOT TO GO GOT TO GO GA TO GO RIGHT NOW!

Boy do i got a surprise planed for you maybe, If my next host family has broadband it will be good... Sorry gramps, you need to go to nans house or my house to see it if i decide to put it up... (Kinda a hint but not a good one.)

Ja mata ne!