Long time between updates

And for that I can only apologize. But I'm guessing it's not that big of a deal. One big(ish) update is just as good as a lot of little ones. Probably. Anyway...that said, let's get to some kind of update.


The vacation was wonderful. It was great to get a bit of a break from work and do the things that people are jealous that we're in Japan for. Because I believe that showing vacation slides and photos are boring as hell unless the people being subjected to them were there or have been there... you won't see those photos here. I'll just link to the limited facebook galleries of our photos (I decided not to upload all of them to Picasa because well. meh. I took a lot of photos that are saved on my computer and most of them aren't good enough for people to even bother clicking through.). Anyway, on to the facebook photo albums:

Matsumoto Castle

Day Trip to Nara


Day Trip to Himeji Castle

Kyoto Sightseeing Day 1

Kyoto Sightseeing Day 2

Kyoto Sightseeing Day 3

It was a shame how things ended in Kyoto (us running out of time because CRAZY weekend sakura-viewing traffic) but it should have been expected. We still saw plenty of really cool things.

April has been a pretty decent month, but the days seem to be getting longer recently. I'm focused on a few projects for my research that need to be wrapped in two months, so there's plenty to do on that front. Maria's found the schools to be somewhat trying at times -- I'm sure she'd be willing to fill you in on that, but we'll leave it there for now.

There's vacation coming up here, 4 days off over the next week and only 3 days of school for Maria. After all that time off, we're having another trip to Nikko for the weekend with our friends, Amy and Kevin, which should be a lot of fun.

The weather in Murakami finally feels like spring, and that makes it a lot more pleasant overall. Maria's been cooking all kinds of new dishes and making a cookbook of recipes, and I'm happy to say that I've been reaping a lot of benefit from this. It's costed us more in the grocery budget, but our budget was so low as to be silly before. It's nice to get a bit more variety. I think that's about all for now, there should be another update after Nikko. (So much for that New Year's Resolution huh?)